A group of crypto sleuths have released a map of Mr Beast’s alleged crypto wallets. The investigators claim that the YouTuber is connected to 50 cryptocurrency wallets and has made around $23 million from them using a series of shady techniques including pump-and-dump schemes.

It’s been a bad few weeks for Mr Beast, real name Jimmy Donaldson. The YouTube star is battling a series of scandals, including accusations of selling moldy cheese to children, company group chats allegedly sent to the FBI, and an ongoing lawsuit filed by contestants of his upcoming Amazon show. There’s a distinct anti-Mr Beast mood in the air in some circles of the internet and the investigation into his crypto wallets is just the latest salvo.

The team that mapped Mr Beast’s crypto wallets is Kasper Vandeloock, SomaXBT, hxnterson, angelfacepeanut, and rfparson. They published the investigation on a new website that describes itself as a “work in progress” that “prioritized pushing out the Mr Beast article.”

Vandeloock and the others are known quantities in the crypto world and the investigation appears to be a thorough deep-dive into Donaldson’s crypto finances. “Their findings suggest a long history of insider trading, misleading investors, and using his influence to promote tokens, only to later dump them on the markets,” the investigation said. “This document delves into the various tokens associated with these allegations and the insider trading claims, starting with identifying the wallets tied to MrBeast.”

The investigation is both compelling and impenetrable. For readers who aren’t already well-versed in the ins and outs of crypto, it will be hard to parse. At first blush, it appears that Vandeloock and the others have the goods here. They’ve mapped out a complex web of connections between known Mr Beast wallets and other crypto assets on the blockchain.

There are pictures of Donaldson partying with crypto entrepreneurs, big splashy public advertisements of him announcing his association with various crypto schemes, and screenshots of tweets, text messages, and DMs that show Donaldson interacting with crypto folks. The investigation is a mess of charts, graphs, and long strings of numbers. It requires a working knowledge of cryptocurrency to decipher.

According to the investigation, Mr Beast repeatedly invested large amounts of cash into cryptocurrency projects during their pre-sale period and got massive returns. Crypto is a hard business to make money in and the investigation pointed out that Donaldson wins more than he loses, especially for someone who isn’t doing it full time.

The claim is that Donaldson had relationships with the founders of various up-and-coming crypto projects. The investigation tracks those connections and shows how Donaldson-connected wallets invested big in various crypto schemes he backed.

“With Mr Beast’s track record of consistently hitting large returns whilst being a full-time content creator and owning various businesses, there is an extremely high likelihood that his success in cryptocurrency investing is not the result of sharp trading intuition but just knowing insider information, particularly related to upcoming brand deals and partnerships within his network, including figures like KSI, GaryVee, and LazarBeam,” it said.

It’s possible that this complicated nest of crypto wallets and transactions is, in fact, masking some kind of fraud. Donaldson is a man who told TIME that he doesn’t consider himself rich and that his mother handles all the money. “I don’t have access to any of my bank accounts,” he told the magazine in February. “I have a CFO and everything, but [Parisher’s] the one who has access to the master bank account.”

But if there’s a smoking gun in this crypto investigation, it’s only being seen by people with eyes for crypto. It may be that Donaldson’s “aw-shucks” attitude and presentation as a North Carolina boy done good is masking a sinister crypto empire. But it’ll require someone more skilled in crypto scam forensics (like the SEC) to decipher it.

Donaldson has other problems to contend with. In September, five contestants on his forthcoming Amazon show sued him. Beast Games, as the show is called, is a riff on Squid Games and puts contestants through a variety of grueling challenges with the promise of winning $5 million. The lawsuit alleged that Donaldson’s team subjected the contestants to chronic mistreatment and sexual harassment.

Earlier this year Donaldson teamed with Logan Paul and KSI to launch Lunchly, a Lunchable-style snack. As the food hit store shelves, people online began to post videos of them finding moldy cheese inside. YouTube baking star Rosanna Pansino, who has a long-running beef with Mr Beast, published a video earlier this month of her opening up a moldy Lunchly and it supercharged the allegations. The FDA told TMZ that it had received 10 complaints about mold in Lunchlies.

On October 27, Pansino also claimed she’d contacted the FBI regarding Mr Beast. Center to Pansino’s new claim is a Telegram channel she alleges is a Mr Beast company workchat. Pansino published a seven-minute video on X that scrolls through the chat, highlighting the off-color memes and jokes shared between the participants.

I have reported what I found and my concerns to the authorities @FBI. Hopefully they will look into these MrBeast Telegram Company Chats Logs and other concerns. @Youtube @TeamYouTube #mrbeast

— Rosanna Pansino (@RosannaPansino) October 27, 2024

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Mr Beast did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for a comment.

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Former cryptocurrency executive Nishad Singh, who once shared a $35m Bahamas penthouse with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has been spared prison time by a judge for his role in the theft by his imprisoned former boss of about $8bn in customer funds from the now-bankrupt exchange.

During a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan imposed no prison time, but ordered three years of supervised release. Kaplan credited Singh for cooperating with prosecutors and coming clean about his actions in what they have called one of the biggest financial frauds in US history.

Singh, who had pleaded guilty to six felony counts of fraud and conspiracy, testified last year as a prosecution witness in the trial that led to Bankman-Fried’s conviction on fraud and other charges. Singh, in a plea deal with prosecutors, admitted to his role in the fraud and for serving as a “straw donor” in some of Bankman-Fried’s millions of dollars in political donations.

“I am overwhelmed with remorse for the harm that I participated in and that I caused to so many innocent people,” Singh told the judge at the hearing. “I strayed so far from my values.”

Prosecutors had urged leniency for the 29-year-old Singh, FTX’s former chief engineer, in light of his cooperation. His defence lawyers recommended he serve no prison time.

Bankman-Fried, 32, is serving a 25-year prison sentence imposed by Kaplan stemming from FTX’s November 2022 collapse.

Last month, Kaplan sentenced Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and an executive at FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research, to two years in prison. The judge had also praised her cooperation, but said that such assistance was not a “get out of jail free card” in a case this serious.

The judge told Singh that his involvement “was much more limited than, certainly, Bankman-Fried and Ellison.”

During the hearing, Singh said he looked up to and supported Bankman-Fried, even after coming to see him as deceptive and self-serving.

“I still have an enormous debt to society,” Singh added.

“You did the right thing,” Kaplan told Singh. “You immediately and truthfully – as far as I can see – fully unburdened yourself to the government about wrongdoing about which you were aware and which they quite clearly were not.”

Prosecutor Nicolas Roos told the judge that Singh deserved credit for coming forward and implicating himself by describing conversations that were not otherwise documented.

“It could have been very easy for Mr Singh to have denied everything,” Roos said.

“He wanted to right a wrong or at least start to make that effort and do the right thing,” Roos added.

‘A monumental crime’

Singh’s lawyer Andrew Goldstein told the judge that nearly all of the billions of dollars in customer funds were stolen before his client learned of the scheme.

“The overwhelming majority of the conduct that made it such a monumental crime took place before Nishad ever became involved,” Goldstein said, arguing that Bankman-Fried and Ellison were responsible for the decision to steal funds from FTX customers to pay Alameda’s lenders. “That was their crime. It was not Nishad’s crime.”

Goldstein said Singh’s brother, parents and fiance, among other family members, were present in court.

A 2017 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Singh lived with Bankman-Fried and seven other employees of FTX and its sister firm Alameda Research in a waterfront penthouse in the Bahamas, where the exchange was based.

Singh said he owned an equity stake of about 6-7 percent in FTX. He said that made him a billionaire on paper during a boom in cryptocurrency prices during the COVID pandemic. By October 2021, Bankman-Fried was worth $26bn, according to Forbes magazine, and gained prominence as a prolific donor to philanthropic causes and Democratic politicians.

Singh testified during the trial that he became suicidal as FTX unravelled in November 2022 amid a flurry of customer withdrawals. He returned to the US shortly before the exchange declared bankruptcy on November 12 of that year, and had his first meeting with federal prosecutors later that month.

Singh testified that he confronted Bankman-Fried about an enormous shortfall of customer funds during an hourlong conversation held in September 2022 on the balcony of their penthouse. Singh said Bankman-Fried assured him he would raise more funds and cut costs.

Bankman-Fried is appealing his conviction and sentence.

Gary Wang, a third former FTX executive who cooperated with prosecutors, is scheduled to be sentenced on November 20.