A well-known cryptocurrency blogger, Newman Perez, was confronted in a Colombian shopping mall by a man who accused him of stealing funds. The TikTok clip of the confrontation quickly racked up views and went viral.
They cornered Newman Pérez in a restaurant and he was terrified pic.twitter.com/v0fDm2jPIm
— Whitezuelans (@whitezuelans) February 9, 2023
The victim called Pérez ‘the number one scammer in Colombia’.
‘Aren’t you the one who stole from me? What do you call that? Fraud,’ he added during the argument.
Newman Perez, whose Instagram follower count exceeds 668,000, moved to Colombia from Venezuela after authorities there issued a wanted notice. According to local media, he faces charges of ‘fraud with aggravating circumstances, threats against a public official, counterfeiting goods, and violence against a person’.
Perez is the founder of several ventures. The best known among them is the site Apreciodepana.com, which, according to the blogger, was backed by Google Ventures. There is no official confirmation of this information.
He also launched MacStore Venezuela, DivisasToGo and several courses on trading and finance. Among the blogger’s more dubious ventures was the illegal rental of Zelle accounts, which led to the blocking of his Twitter account.
Several days after the viral video, Perez, perhaps in an attempt to justify himself, described what happened as a ‘social experiment’. In the same Instagram post he linked to Forbes article about his latest project BNB Beats.
The cryptocurrency app on the BNB Chain promises users daily returns of up to 3% on any amount invested. Meanwhile, Binance’s DappBay app center recently flagged BNB Beats as a potentially fraudulent project.
‘The contract is not executed as the project owners stated, which may lead to unexpected outcomes,’ the note says.
Perez criticised such assessment, urging readers to look at the audit by HazeCrypto, a competitor of DappBay.
Researchers did not find vulnerabilities in the BNB Beats smart contract, but warned about the impossibility of withdrawing deposited funds and that dividends are paid from the deposits of new users, as in Ponzi schemes.
According to HazeCrypto, there are currently 3,673 users of BNB Beats and a little over 544 BNB (roughly $164,000) locked in smart contracts.
The white paper values the project’s return on investment at 333,233% from January 2023 to April 2025.
Earlier ForkLog reported that four unknown men attacked Russian investment blogger Yuri Boytsov, living in Bali, and forced him to transfer $284,000 in cryptocurrency.