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Smart-contract matrix · Recruitment-funded crypto positions

Forsage

A live matrix that sells nothing at all - 0.05 ETH minimum, irrevocable the moment it is sent, against a company-stated "yield per cycle" of 200% to 1020% and a marketing claim of "zero risk" - while peer-reviewed chain analysis of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses found 88.2% of them ended net negative.

Reviewed August 1, 2026 Founded Ethereum matrix contract deployed 31 January 2020 · eight relaunches of the same mechanism under new names since, per the watchdog that has tracked each one Confidence: High
FGRADE
0.1/10
Weighted composite

NO PRODUCT - 88.2% ENDED NET NEGATIVE

The contract holds a zero balance and forwards 100% of every payment inside the same transaction: there is no product, no company, no refund, no counterparty and no obligor - and independent academic measurement of 1.04 million Ethereum addresses put 88.2% of them net negative.

The question you came with

Can you actually make money with Forsage?

NO No - not on the numbers this company publishes

No, and start with what is not there. There is no company. No entity, no counterparty, no obligor, no support desk and nobody to complain to, and the operator marketed that absence as a feature. What the contract does is hold a zero balance and forward 100% of every payment to earlier participants inside the same transaction. Money is irrevocable the moment it is sent.

Nothing is sold, at any price, to anybody. The SEC complaint states the operation did not sell or purport to sell any actual, consumable product to bona fide retail customers and had no apparent source of revenue other than funds received from investors. The Montana Commissioner found there is no product sold other than positions on the pyramid. The free school on the site is training in how to recruit.

The outcomes here are measured rather than estimated, which is genuinely unusual and is why this file can be so specific. Researchers at Cornell Tech, University College London and IC3 extracted every transaction to the Ethereum contract through 14 January 2021, not a sample, and found that of 1,040,000 addresses, 88.2% ended net negative, with the top 1,000 addresses taking half of all profits between them.

The code also contains a mechanism that takes money off you for doing well. Complete a level and, unless you have already bought the next one at double the price, that level is set to blocked and the payments that would have reached you walk up the tree instead. The full Ethereum ladder is 204.75 ETH. The contract owner holds every level free and unblockable at the top of every tree.

What it costs to be in
0.05 ETH

about $94 at the 1 August 2026 ETH price, irrevocable on transfer - but the promoters’ own onboarding guidance is 0.35 ETH, seven times the headline, and the full Ethereum ladder is 204.75 ETH

What would have to change
  • A product. Anything at all, sold at a price, to somebody who is not in the matrix. Two regulators have now found in terms that nothing is, and until something is, the only money in the system is the next person's deposit.
  • A way to get money back out. The verified contract interface exposes no withdraw, refund, cancel or unwind function of any kind, and the contract holds a zero balance to refund anybody from.
  • The removal of the blocking mechanic. Forfeiting earned payments upward unless the next level is bought at double the price turns a completed level into a forced purchase, and the contract emits an event for every forfeiture.
  • An operator who stops relaunching it. The same mechanism has come back eight times under new names since 2020, counted by the watchdog that has reviewed each iteration since January of that year.

That call is computed, not chosen - the rule reads three of the nine published dimension scores and is printed on the methodology page. It describes this company's plan and the figures it publishes about the people already in it. It is not a prediction about you, and nothing on this site is advice.

88.2%
Ethereum addresses that ended net negative
of 1,040,000, measured to 14 January 2021 by Cornell Tech / UCL / IC3 - third-party academic analysis, not a company figure
$68,770
Total collected from all eleven SEC defendants in four years
from one defendant; monetary relief against the other ten remains undetermined
204.75 ETH
Cost to open every slot in both Ethereum matrices
$385,795 at the 1 August 2026 ETH price of $1,884.22
8
Relaunches of the same mechanism under new names since 2020
counted by the watchdog that has reviewed each iteration since January 2020

Legal status

CONTESTED - and, four years in, entirely unresolved. There is no contested finding of fact against anyone, anywhere. In SEC v. Okhotnikov, No. 1:22-cv-03978 (N.D. Ill.), filed 1 August 2022 against eleven individuals under the registration and antifraud provisions, seven promoter defendants settled by consent without admitting or denying the allegations, and three founders had default judgments entered because they never appeared - a consent judgment is not a litigated finding of fact and a default judgment is not a contested one. There is no judgment of any kind against the lead founder: his November 2022 motion to dismiss for want of personal jurisdiction has never been ruled on, the case has been stayed since 28 March 2023 at the Justice Department’s request, and his motion for a limited lift of that stay was denied on 6 March 2026 (Dkt 187). Separately, United States v. Okhotnikov, No. 3:23-cr-00057-IM (D. Or.), charges all four founders with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. §1349 - an indictment is an allegation, not a finding. One defendant, extradited from Thailand on 8 May 2026, pleaded not guilty, is detained pre-trial and is presumed innocent; her trial was continued from 14 July to 10 November 2026. Three co-defendants are at large. No Forsage founder has been convicted of anything in the United States. Outside the United States: the Philippines SEC issued a public advisory on 30 June 2020 and an ex parte cease-and-desist order on 17 September 2020; the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance issued a cease-and-desist demand with a proposed agency action in March 2021, in which the fines were proposed and not imposed; and the Tbilisi City Court convicted the lead founder in absentia in March 2024 and sentenced him to ten years for laundering $1.1m of Forsage proceeds - that is a criminal conviction, in Georgia, for money laundering rather than for operating the scheme, entered without the defendant present and never enforced. Total collected from all eleven SEC defendants in four years: $68,770.

Confidence: High

Primary sources fetched directly where possible. Everything we could not verify is listed at the bottom of this page by name.

What this actually is

Follow the money

A set of immutable smart contracts on Ethereum, Tron and BNB Chain that assign a paying wallet a numbered position in a matrix and then route subsequent payments to positions above it. There are five programs - x3, x4, xXx, xGold and xQore - with different geometries and different published "yield per cycle" figures of 200%, 300%, 580%, 1020% and 500% respectively. Registration on Ethereum costs exactly 0.05 ETH, enforced by the line require(msg.value == 0.05 ether), and buys level 1 of x3 and level 1 of x4. Nothing else is sold, at any price, anywhere in the system.

It is live today, and the report grades a live offer rather than a historical one. forsage.io was serving a complete, maintained marketing site on 1 August 2026 with a 2025 copyright, a "Forsage School" training program, an "AI powered" strategy feature and eight contract addresses across three chains. The Ethereum matrix contract has 3,635,519 lifetime transactions and the BNB Chain contract 2,384,782. Deployed bytecode with no self-destruct path cannot be removed by any regulator, any court or the founders themselves. Present-day daily activity could not be measured for this report and is listed as unverified - "the contract exists" and "the contract is being used" are different claims.

The genuine strengths should be stated before the numbers, because they explain why more than a million wallets took part. The compensation engine is public, verified and readable: anyone can read the Solidity source on a block explorer and see exactly what happens to a payment before sending one, which almost no operator in this category permits. The contract is genuinely non-custodial and holds nothing, so payouts are instant and cannot be withheld, frozen or gated. There is no autoship, no renewal, no minimum volume, no inventory and no stock to be loaded with. The entry price is low and fixed by code, so nobody can be upsold at the door. Nobody can terminate you and positions never expire. And leaving costs nothing: you stop transacting.

Then the mechanism. Every one of those strengths is a property of the rails rather than of the offer - Ethereum is transparent, non-custodial and immutable, and Forsage inherited those properties and marketed them as its own virtues. The verified source shows the contract owner holding every level of both matrices free from deployment, the owner’s slots incapable of ever being blocked, every failed upward payment search terminating at the owner, and every participant who joins without a referral link auto-assigned to the owner as sponsor. The academic team that reconstructed the logic also found the contract scrambles positions upward, which, in their words, "helps to make payments through Forsage (falsely!) appear more random" while benefiting older accounts. And the blocking mechanic converts success into an obligation: complete a level and you forfeit its earnings to an upline unless you immediately buy the next one at twice the price.

The outcome is the best-documented in the category, which is the true irony of the design. Because every payment is on a public ledger, a peer-reviewed team from Cornell Tech, UCL and IC3 was able to compute the profit and loss of every address that ever touched the Ethereum contract. Of 1,040,000 addresses, 88.2% ended net negative; the top 1,000 took half of all profits; the median participant bought one level. The Justice Department’s own analytics put over 50% as never having received a single payout. None of that is disputed by any better measurement, and none of it appears anywhere on the site.

How 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses ended up

Third-party academic measurement by Cornell Tech, University College London and IC3, published at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023, covering every transaction to the Ethereum matrix contract through 14 January 2021. Profit and loss computed per address, net of gas. This is not a company figure and no company figure of this kind has ever been published.

88% 12%
Ended net negative (88.2% - 919,194 addresses)Ended in profit but outside the top 1,000 (11.704%)The top 1,000 addresses, who took half of all profits between them (0.096%)
ProductPricePays
Registration (Ethereum)
About $94 at the 1 August 2026 price of $1,884.22, and about $9 at the launch-day price. Buys level 1 of x3 and level 1 of x4 and nothing else. The payment is split in two halves and each half is routed to the first unblocked upline in that matrix. No goods, no service, no license, no content.
0.05 ETH
one-time
100% to other participants
x3 level 2 (Ethereum)
The purchase most participants do not budget for. Completing level 1 sets it to blocked unless level 2 is already open, and a blocked level earns nothing - payments walk past you to the first unblocked account above. Buying level 2 unblocks level 1. Prices double at every rung after this.
0.05 ETH
one-time
100% upward
x3 or x4 level 12 (Ethereum)
The top rung, $96,472 at the 1 August 2026 price. To recover it, three separate people must each pay 51.2 ETH into that one slot of yours. The measured mean number of levels purchased across the whole population is 2.13, and the median is 1.
51.2 ETH
one-time
100% upward
The full Ethereum ladder, both matrices
102.375 ETH per matrix, every slot open. $36,900 at the launch-day ETH price; $385,795 at the 1 August 2026 price. This is the true maximum exposure, not the 0.05 ETH headline, because the blocking mechanic penalises anyone who stops climbing.
204.75 ETH
one-time
100% upward
Forsage BUSD x3 / x4 slot (BNB Chain)
The range is the SEC complaint’s, at paragraph 42. Because BUSD was dollar-pegged, none of this ladder moves with a token price - the dollar cost is the dollar cost. A watchdog’s contemporaneous transcription of the official marketing puts full participation across all four BNB Chain programs at 89,836 BUSD.
5 – 9,900 BUSD
one-time
100% upward
Forsage BUSD xXx level 1
Marketed with a stated return of 46.4 BUSD, being the 580% "yield per cycle" figure applied to the tier price. The top tier of the same program was published at 9,696 BUSD against a stated return of 56,236.80. These are the company’s own marketing tables as transcribed at the time by an independent watchdog.
8 BUSD
one-time
100%, split 30/70 by line
Forsage BUSD xGold level 15
Stated return 100,674 BUSD - the 1020% "yield per cycle" figure. xGold is also the contract the Justice Department alleges was coded to divert funds out of the participant network into founder-controlled wallets. That is an allegation in an indictment, untested at trial, and no defendant has been convicted of anything.
9,870 BUSD
one-time
100%, split 20/30/50 by line
Forsage School
Presented on the live site as "an exclusive training course designed specifically for those who want to unlock their full potential with Forsage". It is free, it is not sold, it produces no revenue and its subject is recruitment. It is listed here because it is the only thing on the site that resembles a product, and it is not one.
free
Background check

Who runs it, and what they ran before

V"
Vladimir "Lado" Okhotnikov
Lead founder; the government calls him the person who "directed, managed, and controlled Forsage’s operations"

Russian national, last known residence Tbilisi and, since 2023, Dubai. He holds Forsage Ethereum IDs 1, 4 and 5, Tron ID 1 and BUSD ID 1 - the top position in every matrix. Three facts about his record have to be stated at their exact stage and kept apart from one another. First: the Tbilisi City Court convicted him in absentia in March 2024 and sentenced him to ten years for laundering $1.1 million of Forsage proceeds through an auto-assistance business he co-owned and two Georgian banks, with deposits traced into at least 53 accounts. That is a conviction, in Georgia, for money laundering - entered without him present, of a kind that can generally be reopened on surrender or arrest, and unenforced because he lives in a jurisdiction with no US extradition treaty. Second: in the United States nothing has been found against him at all. He is charged by indictment in Oregon, which is an allegation; and in the SEC civil case there is no judgment against him of any kind, his 2022 motion to dismiss for want of personal jurisdiction remains unruled after three years and eight months, and the court denied his motion to lift the stay so it could be ruled on. Third: the track record. The ICIJ, working from his own public statements and business records, counts at least sixteen multi-level marketing ventures since the early 2000s, and an independent watchdog counts eight relaunches of this specific mechanism since January 2020. He is currently running the eighth from Dubai while co-producing a feature film that the ICIJ describes as a marketing instrument for it.

OO
Olena Oblamska, a/k/a "Lola Ferrari"
Co-founder; the indictment records her self-description as the "goddess" of Forsage. In US custody.

Ukrainian national, 42. Sued by the SEC as "Jane Doe a/k/a Lola Ferrari" because her legal identity was unknown when the complaint was filed; a default judgment was entered against her on 7 February 2023 after she never appeared, with monetary relief left undetermined. A default judgment is not a contested one. She was arrested in Phuket by Thailand’s Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau in February 2026 and extradited to the United States on 8 May 2026. At her arraignment on 11 May 2026 she pleaded not guilty. She is detained pending trial, which was continued from 14 July 2026 to 10 November 2026 before Judge Immergut in Portland. She is presumed innocent, and nothing in this report should be read as suggesting otherwise. Her identified individual receipts in the SEC complaint are at least $256,731 plus a share of the $4,803,943 attributed jointly to the four founders. After the founders split in March 2022 she co-launched a successor platform whose own site told users it "uses the same partner structure as in Forsage BUSD, so all your partners will join... automatically."

MS
Mikhail Sergeev · Sergey Maslakov
Co-founders - Development Director and self-proclaimed creator respectively, per the indictment. Both at large.

Both Russian nationals, both last known in Moscow, both named in the Oregon indictment, and neither has responded to it. In the civil case both had default judgments entered against them - Maslakov on 7 February 2023, Sergeev on 21 March 2023 - after clerk’s defaults for failing to appear. Under Rule 55 the complaint’s well-pleaded allegations are taken as admitted because of the failure to defend, not because a court weighed evidence: no trial, no discovery, no evidence tested, no defense offered. Monetary relief against both remains undetermined to this day. Sergeev is the person the government associates with the code, and the SEC attributes an additional $433,909 to him jointly with Okhotnikov, characterising it as proceeds routed outside the Forsage payout structure. Maslakov’s identified individual receipts are at least $110,741.

Gn
Governance note
There is nothing to govern and nobody to hold

Forsage has never had a distributor agreement, a policies-and-procedures manual, a code of ethics, a compliance function, an advertising pre-approval process, an income-claims policy or a dispute process, because there is no company to write them and no contract to bind anyone. Registration is a blockchain transaction, not the signing of terms. That cuts both ways and the report tries to be honest about which way. It means nobody can terminate you, void your position, reassign your downline, impose an autoship or claw back what you have earned - protections most operators in this category do not offer. It also means that the person recruiting you may say literally anything, that your own team may be poached with no rule against it, that the x4 rules expressly let a more active recruit take their own sponsor’s spot, and that when something goes wrong there is nobody to complain to. On chain, the position is starker still: the verified source shows the contract owner holds every level of both matrices free of charge from deployment, that the owner’s slots can never be blocked, that every failed upward payment search terminates at the owner, and that anyone joining without a referral link is assigned the owner as their sponsor. The academic measurement puts one owner address at 5,409.6 ETH, 2.04% of all profits in the Ethereum matrix, from a single position - against marketing that told participants everyone was on "equal footing" with "the same opportunities."

Registered address

None. There is no head office, because there is no company.
This is a finding rather than a gap, and it is established from six independent sources, four of them governmental. The federal indictment describes Forsage as "an unincorporated entity". The SEC complaint names eleven individuals and no corporate defendant. The Philippines regulator recorded that Forsage "is not registered as a corporation or partnership with the Commission". The Montana regulator recorded that Forsage had not filed with the SEC, with Montana’s own commission, or with the Montana Secretary of State. And the live forsage.io footer carries a bare "© 2025 All Rights Reserved" with no company name, no address, no registration number and no jurisdiction. The consequences run all the way through this report: there are no accounts to audit, no directors to hold, no insurance, no bond, no trust account, no receiver to petition and nobody to sue. The operators marketed that absence as the product’s central feature - the Philippines regulator recorded in 2020 that Forsage "even implied that the Government cannot shut it down because it is decentralized and thus free from any authority." One correction to the popular framing is owed here, because it matters for how a reader understands the money. The SEC identified at least $7,955,850 received by all eleven defendants against $300m–$340m raised - roughly 2.3% to 2.7% of inflow. The founders did not take the $340m. The structure moved it, from later participants to earlier ones, and the founders designed and monetised the structure.

Compensation plan

What has to be true for you to get paid

To coverYou need
Recover the 0.05 ETH entry 2 personal recruits into x3 level 1
spots 1 and 2 pay you 0.025 ETH each; spot 3 goes to your upline and recycles you
Keep what you just earned 0.05 ETH more, immediately
completing x3 level 1 blocks it; blocked levels earn nothing until you buy the next level up
Recover the promoters’ recommended 0.35 ETH ~14 payments across both matrices at levels 1-3
roughly seven personally recruited people who also buy up, or heavy spillover you do not control
Recover the full 204.75 ETH ladder 3 people paying 51.2 ETH each into your x3 level 12
$96,472 per person at the 1 August 2026 ETH price, into one slot, on top of everything below it

Read this twice

The first rung is the whole trick, and it should be described accurately rather than dismissed. Two personal recruits genuinely do return the 0.05 ETH entry: spots 1 and 2 of x3 level 1 pay 0.025 ETH each straight to your wallet, instantly, with nobody able to withhold it. That is real, it is visible, and it is why the mechanism recruited more than a million wallets. What happens next is the part the marketing does not describe. Completing that level sets it to blocked in the contract state, and a blocked level earns nothing - the payments that would have reached you walk up the tree to the first unblocked account above you, and the contract emits a dedicated event each time it happens, so the forfeitures are countable on chain. Unblocking means buying the next level at double the price. So success at 0.025 ETH creates an obligation to spend 0.05 ETH, success at 0.05 ETH creates an obligation to spend 0.1 ETH, and the ladder doubles twelve times to 51.2 ETH. The promoters understood this perfectly well and said so: their own onboarding guidance was to fund the first three levels of both matrices up front, 0.35 ETH, seven times the headline price, precisely so that "you do not lose any profits if your team members below you decide to upgrade before you do." Set that against the measurement. Two independent academic analyzes, on different datasets by different methods, put the share of participants who reach break-even at 11.8% and 12.7% - roughly seven in eight do not. The mean loss among those who lost was 0.33 ETH, six and a half times the entry price, which tells you the loss set is not made up of people who lost only their entry fee: it is dominated by people who climbed and then stalled. And one thing must be said about a present-day entry that the historical figures cannot say for themselves. The 88.2% was measured on the peak cohort, when 10,798 new wallets a day were arriving. In a structure funded entirely by inflow, your outcome depends on how many people join beneath you, so 88.2% is the loss rate under the most favorable conditions this mechanism will ever have. Current inflow could not be measured for this report. The direction, however, is not in doubt: for someone entering in 2026, 88.2% is a floor rather than an estimate.

Run your own numbers

Drag the sliders. Nothing here is stored or sent.

-
Cumulative net, after costs
Total recruits buying the first slot -
Commission that month -
Total commissions earned -
Total you paid in -
Net -

Every dollar on this slider comes directly out of the pocket of the person immediately below you, and there is no product anywhere in the transaction. Ninety-four dollars is the 0.05 ETH entry slot converted at approximately $1,884 to the ether, the rate implied by the company’s own quoted ladder price on 1 August 2026; the full twelve-slot ladder is 204.75 ETH, about $385,795. The contract holds a zero balance and forwards one hundred per cent of each payment in the same transaction, so this is not a company paying commissions out of margin - it is a routing instruction. The cost line is zero because there is no subscription, no autoship and no ongoing obligation of any kind; what you paid is simply gone, irrevocably, with no refund mechanically possible. The only honest calibration is independent and it is not the company’s: an academic chain analysis by Cornell Tech, University College London and IC3, published at Financial Cryptography 2023, found 88.2% of 1,040,000 participating Ethereum addresses ended net negative. Gas overhead ran around 30% of the amounts moved in 2020, against 0.6% at the most expensive retail exchange. Your own subscription cost of $0/mo is included.

Your money

What it costs to replace this yourself

This exercise normally prices the capability a program sells against the open market. It cannot be run that way here, because no capability is sold: a slot confers no software, no service, no license, no content, no support and no goods, and nothing on the open market competes with it because nothing on the open market is it. So the comparison is built the only honest way available - what the same capital would have done in named mainstream alternatives over the same period, 31 January 2020 to 1 August 2026, and what the transaction overhead costs against named venues. The ETH price used throughout is $1,884.22, the quoted spot on the research date. The fund expense ratios and exchange fee schedules below are list prices as generally published and are flagged in the unverified list; the load-bearing figures - the ETH quantities and the ETH price - are the ones that carry the argument, and none of it turns on a fee being exact to a basis point.

What they sell youWhat you'd use insteadYour cost
0.05 ETH sent to the Forsage contract on launch dayKeep the same 0.05 ETH in a self-custody wallet and do nothing at all$0 - the 0.05 ETH is worth $94.21
204.75 ETH for the full ladderKeep the same 204.75 ETH in a self-custody wallet and do nothing at all$0 - worth $385,795
Custody risk of holding your own keysA hardware wallet, one-off device purchase~$79 list, once
The same capital converted to cash and left aloneSell to USD on a named retail exchange and hold it0.00%–0.60% at the largest US venue; 0.25%/0.40% entry tier at another; 0.10% standard at a third
The same capital in a broad US equity indexA total-market or S&P 500 index ETF from a named mainstream fund manager0.03% a year
The same capital at zero fund costA zero-expense-ratio total market index fund from a named mainstream fund manager0.00% a year
The same capital with no market risk at allFour-week Treasury bills rolled through the government’s own portal, or a high-yield savings account at a named bank$0
The same capital doing nothing whatsoeverLeave the cash alone and forget about it$0 - 100% of principal preserved
~30% of principal in gas on a 2020 entry, per the promoters’ own onboarding guidanceHolding the identical asset in either of the two free wallets Forsage itself told recruits to install$0 to hold; network gas only to move
The transaction overhead of the most gas-hungry contract on the networkA trade at the most expensive named retail exchange in this comparison0.6%
Total as sold
0.05 ETH minimum, 0.35 ETH on the promoters’ own advice, 204.75 ETH for the full ladder - plus roughly 30% again in 2020-era gas
Total, built yourself
$0 to $79, once, for every row above

Price-to-value

The comparison is unusually blunt because the honest baseline is inaction. For the 88.2% of addresses that ended net negative, every single row of that table outperformed Forsage, including the last one, which is doing nothing at all. The cleanest version needs no market call and no fee schedule: a person who sent 0.05 ETH to the contract on launch day exchanged an asset now worth $94.21 for a position that, on the measured distribution, most probably returned nothing. One caveat is owed in the other direction and it is worth stating plainly - the rows involving a conversion to dollars crystallise a different bet, and someone who simply bought and held ETH over this period did very well in dollar terms. That is exactly why row one, holding the identical asset and taking no action, is the fairest comparison available. It has no timing call, no fee and no assumption in it, and it beats the median participant by 100% of principal.

Odds of profit

Three operators, five horizons

Probability of cumulative net profit

Hover any point for median, top decile and bottom quartile.

0% 25% 50% 75% 100%3 mo6 mo1 yr3 yr5 yr 5% 12% 22%
Registration only - pays the 0.05 ETH, buys one level, recruits nobody - the measured median behaviorFollows the promoters’ advice - funds the first three levels of both matrices up front - 0.35 ETH - and brings a handful of recruitsHeavy promoter - climbs most of the ladder, runs webinars and social groups, recruits hundreds

Registration only

pays the 0.05 ETH, buys one level, recruits nobody - the measured median behavior

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 3% −$94
6 mo 4% −$94
1 yr 5% −$94
3 yr 5% −$94
5 yr 5% −$94

Follows the promoters’ advice

funds the first three levels of both matrices up front - 0.35 ETH - and brings a handful of recruits

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 6% −$470
6 mo 9% −$530
1 yr 12% −$560
3 yr 12% −$620
5 yr 12% −$620

Heavy promoter

climbs most of the ladder, runs webinars and social groups, recruits hundreds

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 10% −$6,000
6 mo 16% −$9,000
1 yr 20% −$14,000
3 yr 22% −$20,000
5 yr 22% −$21,000

Methodology note. These are modeled outcome ranges, not claims, and not anybody’s promise. ANCHORED to figures that are not ours: the 0.05 ETH registration price and the doubling ladder to 51.2 ETH, both read from the verified contract source; the 0.35 ETH the promoters themselves recommended funding up front; the 102.375 ETH per matrix and 204.75 ETH across both; the ETH price of $1,884.22 quoted on 1 August 2026, which is what converts every ETH figure here into dollars; and the peer-reviewed measurement of the whole Ethereum population - 11.8% in profit, 88.2% net negative, mean loss among losers 0.33 ETH, mean levels purchased 2.13, median levels purchased 1, top 1,000 addresses taking half of all profits. The Justice Department’s separate analytics, offered in support of an indictment and never tested at trial, put over 50% of participants as having received nothing at all, which is what holds the first cohort’s profitable share so low. MODELED by us: the cohort definitions, because nobody segments this population; the share of each cohort in cumulative profit at each horizon; and the spread between the top and bottom deciles. Two calibration notes cut in opposite directions and both belong here. In the program’s favor: nothing recurs, so a participant who registers and stops is capped at what they already spent - which is why the first cohort’s medians are flat rather than deepening, and it is a real structural difference from a plan with an autoship. Against it: the third cohort’s top figures are not aspirational, they are arithmetic taken from the measured top of the distribution, where the five most profitable addresses made between 1,573 and 5,410 ETH - and reaching that position requires being roughly one in a thousand and requires the other 999 to lose, because that is the only place the money comes from. Finally, and most importantly for anyone reading this in 2026: all of it was measured on the peak cohort, when new wallets were arriving at 10,798 a day. Current inflow could not be measured. A present-day entrant should read every number above as the best case for the mechanism, not the expected one.

Go-to-market

Where you are actually allowed to promote this

Platform policy reads, not verifications. Check every one before you spend a dollar - enforcement changes faster than the written policy does.

Channel
Status
Notes
What you may claim when recruiting
NO POLICY EXISTS
There is no income-claims policy, no advertising standard, no prohibited-word list and no pre-approval process, because there is no company to write one and no contract to bind anyone. The person recruiting you may say literally anything, and the record shows what that produced: "zero risk", "unlimited", "you can become a millionaire", and a claim that fifty people became millionaires against an authorities’ chain analysis finding one identity over $1m that the founders controlled.
Advertising, paid search and lead buying
UNRESTRICTED - AND ENTIRELY AT YOUR COST
No rule governs it, so in a narrow sense you are freer than in almost any graded program. What that freedom buys is the right to spend your own money acquiring strangers for a structure that pays you only if they pay in and only while your levels are unblocked. There is no brand protection, no trademark rule and no territory, which also means nothing stops anyone else from bidding on the same terms against you.
Cross-recruiting and poaching your own team
PERMITTED - AND CODED IN
No anti-cross-recruiting rule exists. Worse, the x4 rules actively reward it: the academic reconstruction found that if a newer participant on a team is more active than the person whose referral code they joined under, that newer participant can switch spots and take the profits that would otherwise have flowed to the older, referring account. Your downline is not a book of business you own; it is a set of addresses the contract may re-parent away from you.
YouTube, Telegram and the official channel
THE PRIMARY INSTRUMENT - AND THE ARCHIVE IS GONE
The Forsage Official YouTube channel carried the founder videos, the promoter interviews and the training, and was later renamed for the successor brand. In May 2025, shortly after critical coverage, the entire back catalog dating to Forsage was marked private, leaving three videos visible. Years of income claims left public view in one action. It is the reason the primary-source quotations in this report come from court filings rather than from the videos themselves.
Facebook groups, webinars and Zoom onboarding
THE ACTUAL DISTRIBUTION MACHINE
The SEC identified the largest US promotional group as operating from at least five states with its own YouTube channel and Facebook group, plus a separate training Facebook group of more than 5,000 members. Forsage’s own guidance for its xXx program tells participants they must be "ready to take care of the newbies on your team and onboard them via Zoom calls and direct messaging". Promoter networks ran in-person workshops in the US, Nigeria and the Philippines.
Selling to somebody who does not join
IMPOSSIBLE - THERE IS NOTHING TO SELL THEM
There is no retail transaction available at any price. A purchase and an enrollment are the same act, so there is no customer category, no retail margin and no outside revenue. Both the SEC and the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance concluded that nothing is sold other than positions in the scheme.
Recruiting people who have never used crypto
THE DESIGNED AUDIENCE
The academic measurement found that 98.89% of Forsage participants used wallets that did not exist, or at least had never transacted, before Forsage - overwhelmingly people creating their first crypto wallet in order to join. The onboarding material walked them through installing a wallet step by step. New accounts went from at most 20 a day across 2019 to 10,798 a day in July 2020.
Complaining when something goes wrong
NO PROCESS, NO COUNTERPARTY
There is no dispute procedure, no support obligation, no ombudsman, no chargeback and nobody to serve. Forsage is unincorporated, so there is no entity, no directors, no insurance, no bond and no assets in any jurisdiction to attach. The one real route that exists is the Justice Department’s victim-notification page for the criminal case, which lets a participant be counted and submit an impact statement - worth doing, and honestly described as a route to being heard rather than to being repaid.
Your own participation record
PERMANENTLY PUBLIC
Every payment you make and receive is written to a public ledger, pseudonymously attached to your wallet address, permanently, and readable by anyone who ever learns which address is yours. It is the same property that makes this the best-measured scheme in the category. Most participants will not have understood that they were accepting it.
The evidence

Red flags and green flags

Red flags

15
1Nothing is sold, at any price, to anybody
The SEC complaint states that Forsage "did not sell or purport to sell any actual, consumable product to bona fide retail customers... and had no apparent source of revenue other than funds received from investors." The Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance found "there is no product sold other than positions on the pyramid." The one item on the live site that resembles a product, "Forsage School", is free recruiting training.
2100% of every payment is routed to earlier participants, by code
The verified Ethereum source forwards funds inside the same transaction that receives them. The contract balance is zero ETH and the BNB Chain contract holds zero BNB. There is no margin, no treasury, no cost of goods and no revenue of any kind other than the next entrant. This is not an inference from financial statements; it is the contract’s only behavior.
3The blocking mechanic turns success into a forced, doubling purchase
Complete a level and it is set to blocked unless you have already bought the next one - a blocked level earns nothing, and the payments walk up to the first unblocked account above you. The contract emits a dedicated event for each such forfeiture, so they are countable on chain. Prices double at every rung, twelve times, to 51.2 ETH.
4The contract owner holds every level free, unblockable, at the top of every tree
The constructor activates all levels of both matrices for the owner at deployment; the owner can never be blocked, so every failed upward payment search ends there; and anyone joining without a referral link is assigned the owner as sponsor. Measured take from one address: 5,409.6 ETH, 2.04% of all profits in the Ethereum matrix - against marketing that told participants everyone was on "equal footing" with "the same opportunities."
588.2% of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses ended net negative
Peer-reviewed measurement by Cornell Tech, UCL and IC3 covering every transaction to 14 January 2021, net of gas - third-party academic analysis, not a company figure. A second academic team at TU Berlin independently found 12.7% of 42,738 identities reaching break-even. Justice Department analytics, offered in support of an indictment and untested at trial, put over 50% as never having received a single payout. The top 1,000 addresses took half of all profits.
6A live claim that the code falsifies
The site states today that "the conditions of the smart contract cannot be changed by anyone, including the developers." The BNB Chain address it publishes is verified under the contract name ForsageProxy - an upgradeable proxy whose published interface carries update(address newImpl) gated on contractOwner. That claim is true of the original Ethereum contract, which is not a proxy, and is at best unproven of the BNB Chain deployment advertised on the same page. It requires no litigation to check; it is on the block explorer.
7"Zero risk" - and "you can become a millionaire"
Both are the founder’s own words on video at launch, alongside "unlimited"; the site told participants "100% of the income goes directly and transparently to the members of the project with zero risk." The Montana regulator singled out the phrase: "Every investment carries risk. A claim to the contrary is a significant red flag to walk away." The founders also claimed fifty people had become millionaires; the authorities’ chain analysis reported by the ICIJ found exactly one identity over $1m, controlled by the defendants.
8The government alleges one contract was coded to divert funds out of the participant network
The Justice Department alleges the xGold contract on Ethereum was written so as to route investor funds into accounts under the founders’ control, contrary to the "100% of the income... with zero risk" representation. This is an allegation in an indictment, untested at trial, and no defendant has been convicted of anything. It is recorded here because it is unusually testable - the government says it is provable from the code itself.
9No corporate entity anywhere, and it was marketed as a feature
No registered name, no jurisdiction, no registration number, no filed accounts, no directors, no registered office, nobody to sue and nobody to regulate. The Philippines regulator recorded in 2020 that Forsage "even implied that the Government cannot shut it down because it is decentralized and thus free from any authority."
10Refunds are impossible by construction
Funds are forwarded in the same transaction they arrive in; the contract holds nothing; the verified interface exposes exactly two state-changing functions and neither is a withdraw, refund, cancel or unwind; the recipients are strangers with no agreement with you; blockchain transfers are final; and there is no company to claim against. No receiver was appointed in the SEC case, no asset freeze appears on the docket, and no fair fund exists.
11Eight relaunches of the same mechanism by the same operator
Counted by the watchdog that has reviewed each iteration since January 2020: the original Ethereum matrix, then a Tron version, then an official Tron matrix, then xGold, then the BNB Chain version, then three successive rebrands under new names, each collapsing and each followed by another. The current one is run from a jurisdiction with no US extradition treaty.
12Promotion continued after two cease-and-desist actions
The SEC put it in its own press release: despite the Philippines order of September 2020 and the Montana order of March 2021, the defendants allegedly continued to promote the scheme while denying the claims in several videos. Eight days after the SEC sued, the lead founder published a video claiming there were "no victims" and that he had "in no way touched the jurisdiction of the United States."
13The promotional back catalog was mass-privatised in 2025
In May 2025, shortly after critical coverage, the YouTube channel spanning Forsage and its successor brands was marked private in bulk, leaving three videos visible and removing years of income claims from public view. Every founder quotation in this report is therefore taken from a court filing rather than from the source video.
14Sold overwhelmingly to people who had never used crypto
98.89% of participants used wallets that had never transacted before Forsage. The onboarding material was a step-by-step guide to creating a first wallet in order to buy in. For four months in 2020 Forsage had the highest global search traffic of any smart contract measured in the study, and at peak it consumed roughly a quarter of all gas on Ethereum.
15No income disclosure has ever existed
Established rather than merely unfound: the site footer, the support knowledge base, the SEC complaint, the indictment and six watchdog reviews are all negative on the point. What the site publishes instead is a running cumulative counter - which has appeared in three mutually inconsistent versions - and selected individual identities with dollar figures and partner counts attached, with no denominator, no median, no definition of "active", no period and no loss data. The true distribution is fully computable from the same public blockchains the site cites as proof of its transparency.

Green flags

10
1The compensation engine is public, verified and readable
The Ethereum contract is verified on the block explorer with matching source, in Solidity 0.5.16. Anyone can read exactly what happens to a payment, line by line, before sending one. Almost nothing else in this category lets you audit the payout logic at all - and the reason this report can state with certainty that 100% of inflow goes to other participants is that the source says so and can be quoted.
2Outcomes are measured, not estimated - and third parties did the measuring
Because every payment is on a public ledger, a peer-reviewed team produced what they describe as the first precise quantification of payouts and losses in any large pyramid scheme, historical or internet-based; a second academic team independently reproduced the result on a different dataset; and the Justice Department ran its own analytics. No conventional operator in this category offers anything remotely comparable. The numbers are terrible, and they are knowable, which is worth something.
3Genuinely non-custodial - payouts cannot be withheld
The contract holds a zero balance by design. There is no "withdrawals are paused pending an upgrade" failure mode, no minimum withdrawal, no KYC gate on your own money, no processing delay and no wallet an operator can freeze. The site’s claim that "funds come instantly to your wallet" is true.
4No autoship, no subscription, no renewal, no minimum volume
Nothing recurs and nothing bills you. There is no rank to maintain, no monthly qualification and no stored payment instrument - every payment requires the participant to sign a transaction personally. In a category where recurring qualification spend is the standard mechanism of participant destruction, this is a real structural difference.
5No inventory, no shipping, no returns, no garage full of stock
Nobody was ever loaded with unsellable product, because there is no product. It removes an entire class of harm that recurs throughout this sector, and it should be counted even though the reason for it is the reason for the grade.
6The entry price is low, fixed and enforced by code
Registration is exactly 0.05 ETH, enforced by require(msg.value == 0.05 ether). Nobody can be upsold at the door and nobody can be charged more than the coded price. The maximum a participant can lose at entry is knowable to the last wei before they act.
7Positions cannot be terminated and never expire
There is no operator with the power to close your account, void your position, reassign your downline or claw back your earnings. In a category built on termination-at-will clauses and forfeiture for missed renewals, that is a meaningful protection, and it is worth naming even in a report that grades F.
8Leaving is instant, free and unconditional
No exit form, no notice period, no arbitration clause, no class-action waiver, no non-disparagement obligation, no non-compete and no forfeited book of business. You simply stop transacting. What you have already paid is gone, but nothing further is asked of you and nothing follows you.
9The public warning record is abundant and trivially findable
A prospective participant in 2026 who spends five minutes searching will find an SEC press release, a federal indictment, a warning banner on the contract address on the block explorer itself, a commercial analytics platform’s "High Risk" label, a peer-reviewed academic paper and international investigative journalism. Whatever information asymmetry protects most schemes has been comprehensively demolished here.
10The Justice Department is actively soliciting victims
A victim-notification page for the criminal case is live and invites Forsage participants to identify themselves and submit victim impact statements. Stated honestly: it is a route to being counted and heard, and to a possible forfeiture distribution if there is a conviction and if assets are recovered. Neither has happened, and no participant has been repaid anything.
What would move this grade

We would like to be wrong about this

Upward

  • A real product or service sold to identifiable non-participant customers at a price a non-participant would pay, a registered entity in a named jurisdiction with filed accounts and a nameable counterparty, and an income disclosure publishing a median outcome with a stated definition of active and a stated period - trivially producible here, since the data is already on chain, which makes its absence a choice rather than a limitation.
  • Removal of the "zero risk", "millionaire" and unlabelled-earnings claims from live marketing, and correction of the "conditions cannot be changed by anyone, including the developers" statement so that it matches the BNB Chain deployment rather than only the Ethereum one - with renunciation of the proxy ownership made provable on chain.
  • The founders appearing to answer the charges rather than remaining at large, so that the allegations against them are tested adversarially - which would benefit them as much as anyone, since three of the four civil judgments were entered by default and nothing has been contested on the merits by anybody.

Downward

  • A conviction at the trial listed for 10 November 2026 would convert the strongest allegation in the file from alleged to proved and would be the first adjudicated finding of fraud anywhere in this matter. The defendant has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent; this is stated as what would change the assessment, not as a prediction.
  • Evidence that the BNB Chain proxy has been repointed at any time, which would establish a live capability to change the rules under participants and would falsify a current marketing claim outright rather than merely leaving it unproven.
  • Any measurement showing current inflow has collapsed - which would make a present-day entrant’s expected outcome worse than the already-catastrophic 88.2% baseline - or confirmation that forsage.io now functions as a lead source for the operator’s eighth relaunch.
The better trade

Grade is F at 0.1 - the lowest score published on this site. Nothing is sold, 100% of every payment is forwarded to earlier participants inside the same transaction, and peer-reviewed measurement of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses put 88.2% of them net negative.

Start with what is true and unusual, because it explains why more than a million wallets took part and because the rest of this report is worthless if it cannot be fair here. Forsage is genuinely non-custodial: the contract holds nothing, payouts are instant, and no operator can freeze, gate or delay your money. Nothing recurs - no autoship, no renewal, no minimum volume, no rank to maintain, no stored card. Nobody can terminate you, void your position or claw back what you have earned, and positions never expire. Leaving is free and instant, with no arbitration clause, no non-compete and no exit friction of any kind. The entry price is fixed in code so nobody can be upsold at the door. And the compensation engine is published and verified, so anyone can read exactly what happens to a payment before making one. Almost nothing else graded here offers any of that. The honest framing is that every one of these strengths belongs to the rails rather than to the offer: Ethereum is transparent, non-custodial and immutable, and Forsage inherited those properties and marketed them as its own virtues.

Then the mechanism, which is not a matter of opinion because the source code is public. Registration is 0.05 ETH and buys level 1 of two matrices. The payment is split in half and each half is routed to the first unblocked account above you; if nobody above is unblocked, the search terminates at the contract owner, who holds every level free from deployment and can never be blocked, and who is also the default sponsor of anyone joining without a referral link. Complete a level and it is set to blocked unless you have already bought the next one at twice the price - so earning creates an obligation to spend, and failing to spend redirects your earnings upward. The ladder doubles twelve times to 51.2 ETH a slot, 204.75 ETH to open everything across both matrices, which is $385,795 at the 1 August 2026 ETH price. Against that the company publishes a "yield per cycle" of 200% to 1020%, tells readers the entry threshold is "equal to just a couple of cups of coffee", and says the reward can be received "indefinitely" and arrives "even when you take a break". The measured result, from outside the company: 88.2% of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses net negative, over half receiving nothing at all on the government’s own analytics, and the top 1,000 addresses taking half of everything won.

The legal file is large, and it is smaller than it looks - both halves need saying, and neither should be overstated in either direction. Five governmental actions across four jurisdictions is real. But four years on there is no contested finding of fact anywhere: seven promoter defendants settled by consent without admitting or denying anything, three founders had default judgments entered because they never appeared, and neither a consent judgment nor a default judgment is a litigated finding. There is no judgment at all against the lead founder, whose motion to dismiss for want of personal jurisdiction has sat unruled since November 2022 and whose motion to lift the stay was denied on 6 March 2026. The criminal case charges conspiracy to commit wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. §1349; an indictment is an allegation. One defendant was extradited from Thailand on 8 May 2026, pleaded not guilty, is detained pre-trial, is presumed innocent, and has a trial listed for 10 November 2026 after one continuance; three co-defendants are at large. No founder has been convicted of anything in the United States. The one conviction in the file is Georgian, in absentia, for laundering $1.1m of proceeds, and it has never been enforced. Total collected from all eleven SEC defendants in four years: $68,770, from one of them. Nothing has reached a participant. The grade does not need any of it: strip the entire legal file out and the nine dimension scores are unchanged, because they rest on the code, the price and the measurement.

1

Hold the same asset and do nothing

This is the whole comparison and it needs no fee schedule, no market call and no assumption. A person who sent 0.05 ETH to the contract on launch day gave up an asset worth $94.21 today for a position that, on the measured distribution, most probably returned nothing. The strictly lazier option - leave the identical coins in a free self-custody wallet and take no action at all - preserves 100% of principal. For the 88.2% who ended net negative, every alternative in this report outperformed, including doing literally nothing.

2

Read the two lines of code before you read the marketing

The registration price and the blocking mechanic are both in the published, verified source, and they are the two facts the promotional material does not describe. require(msg.value == 0.05 ether) fixes the entry. The blocked = true line means completing a level forfeits its future earnings upward unless you buy the next one at double the price. That is why the promoters’ own onboarding advice was 0.35 ETH - seven times the headline - and the reason they gave was to avoid losing profits to the people below you.

3

Check the "unchanging conditions" claim yourself, on the explorer, in two minutes

The site says the conditions "cannot be changed by anyone, including the developers." Look up the BNB Chain address it publishes: it is verified under the name ForsageProxy and its interface carries update(address newImpl), gated on contractOwner. Whether ownership has since been renounced is a single state read this report could not perform and lists as unverified. Either way, a claim that a reader can falsify in two minutes on the operator’s own published address tells you what the rest of the copy is worth.

4

If you already participated, get counted - and understand what that is

The Justice Department maintains a victim-notification page for the criminal case and is actively inviting Forsage participants to identify themselves and file victim impact statements. Do it: it costs nothing and it is the only formal route that exists. Be clear-eyed about what it is, though. It is a route to being counted and heard, and to a possible forfeiture distribution only if there is a conviction and only if assets are recovered. Neither has happened, there is no receiver and no fair fund, and no participant has been repaid a cent in four years.

The contract holds nothing, forwards everything and sells nobody anything - and of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses that used it, 88.2% ended net negative.
Scorecard

Nine dimensions, weighted

Comp structure & KoscotDoes the plan pay for recruitment or for sales to real customers?
20%
0.0
The plan pays for recruitment and for nothing else, because there is nothing else. Two separate regulators reached that conclusion in terms: the SEC complaint states at paragraph 4 that Forsage "did not sell or purport to sell any actual, consumable product to bona fide retail customers... and had no apparent source of revenue other than funds received from investors," and the Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance found that "there is no product sold other than positions on the pyramid, and the only way to make money is to recruit more people into the pyramid." The "Forsage School" advertised on the live site is free training in how to recruit - it is not sold, it generates no revenue and it is not a product. There is no customer category, no retail rate, no outside sale and no volume rule, because a purchase and an enrollment are the same act. Worse than the absence, the code contains a positive mechanism that redistributes earnings upward: complete a level and, unless you have already bought the next one at double the price, that level is set to blocked and the payments that would have reached you walk up the tree to the first unblocked upline. The contract emits a dedicated event for it, so the forfeitures are countable on chain by anyone.
Securities exposureAny passive return on capital? Howey, staking, tokens, withdrawal friction.
15%
0.0
Take the regulators entirely out of this - the score would be identical if no authority had ever heard of Forsage. The dimension asks one question: is capital taken from the participant against a marketed return? A participant sends a minimum of 0.05 ETH to an address. Nothing is shipped, licensed, granted, unlocked or delivered; the transfer is the whole of the transaction, and as the SEC complaint puts it at paragraph 31, "as soon as payment was made to the smart contract, the investor relinquished all control over where the investment was distributed, and the transfer of funds was irrevocable." Against that, the company’s own live support documentation quantifies the return and calls it a yield: "yield per cycle" of 200% for x3, 300% for x4, 580% for xXx, 500% for xQore and 1020% for xGold. Its marketing says "100% of the income goes directly and transparently to the members of the project with zero risk," that "the cryptocurrency rate has no effect on the sustainability of the rewards," and that "the participant can receive the reward indefinitely." Its own documentation describes the return as passive - "if you manage to educate good downline partners who continue inviting, you are likely to receive passive income," and "your structure keeps bringing you profit even when you take a break." Capital in, total and irreversible; a quantified return out, described as a yield, as zero risk and as arriving while you rest; and no obligor anywhere who owes it. There is nothing to deduct from, which is why this is a zero rather than a rounding.
Ownership & track recordWho runs it, what did they run before, and what happened to it.
15%
0.0
Four founders. Three are fugitives from a US federal indictment and have never responded to it; the fourth was extradited from Thailand in May 2026, pleaded not guilty, is detained pre-trial and is presumed innocent. The lead founder’s record has to be read in three separate registers and they must not be run together. In Georgia he was convicted in absentia in March 2024 and sentenced to ten years for laundering $1.1m of this scheme’s proceeds - that is a conviction, in that jurisdiction, for money laundering rather than for running the scheme, entered without him present and unenforced. In the United States nothing has been found against him at all: the criminal charge is an allegation, and in the civil case there is no judgment against him, his motion to dismiss has sat unruled since November 2022, and the court refused on 6 March 2026 to lift the stay so it could be decided. And the commercial record, which needs no court at all: at least sixteen prior multi-level ventures per the ICIJ, eight relaunches of this specific mechanism since January 2020 under seven successive names, the current one operated from a jurisdiction with no US extradition treaty. Against that there is no entity, no filed accounts, no audited figures, no board, no registered office and no corporate history of any kind to weigh in mitigation. There is no version of this dimension that scores above zero.
Product reality & demandWould a rational buyer purchase this if no income offer existed?
12%
0.0
Nothing is sold. Not a good, not a service, not software, not a license, not content, not data, not support, not a tool. A payment buys a numbered position in a payment router and confers no rights against anybody. The one item on the live site that looks like a product - "Forsage School", presented as "an exclusive training course" - is free, and its subject is recruitment. The test the dimension applies is whether a buyer with no interest in the income opportunity would ever pay the price, and here the question does not survive contact with the facts: absent the income offer, a matrix slot is not anything at all.
Participant economicsReal cost in, realistic money out, and whether they publish the numbers.
10%
0.5
The measured distribution is the worst on this site and it comes from outside the company. A peer-reviewed study by researchers at Cornell Tech, University College London and IC3, published at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023, extracted every transaction to the Ethereum contract through 14 January 2021 - not a sample - and computed profit and loss per address net of gas. Of 1,040,000 addresses, 123,979 (11.8%) ended in profit and 919,194 (88.2%) ended net negative, with a mean loss among the losers of 0.33 ETH, a median of one level purchased, and the top 1,000 addresses taking half of all profits between them. A second academic team at TU Berlin, using a different dataset and a different method, independently found 12.7% of 42,738 identities reaching break-even. The Justice Department’s own analytics, offered in support of an indictment and untested at trial, put it starker still: over 80% received fewer ETH than they put in and over 50% never received a single payout. None of these is a company figure and none should be read as one. No income disclosure has ever existed; what the company publishes instead is a set of cherry-picked individual identities - "ID 813 — 10 partners, $142,013" - with no denominator, no median, no period and no loss data. The half point is not sentiment. Every participant’s outcome sits on a public ledger and can be recomputed by anyone, which is why the loss rate here is measured rather than estimated, and that is genuinely unusual in this category.
Price-to-valueWhat the same capability costs on the open market.
8%
0.0
There is no open-market price for the capability purchased, because no capability is purchased. What can be priced is the friction, and it is the only comparison available: on the promoters’ own 2020 onboarding arithmetic a recruit budgeted roughly 0.065 ETH to make a 0.05 ETH entry, which is about 30% of principal paid in network gas to acquire nothing. Against that, the free wallets Forsage itself told recruits to install cost nothing at all to hold the identical asset, and the most expensive retail exchange in the comparison set charges 0.6% on a trade. Gas conditions on Ethereum have improved enormously since - the network was at 0.048 Gwei on the research date, which makes a 2026 entry cheap in absolute terms and is one of the few things here that has genuinely got better. It changes the overhead. It does not change the arithmetic underneath it.
Payout sustainabilityCan the company fund the plan out of margin, or only out of inflow?
8%
0.0
There is no margin because there is no sale. The verified Ethereum source forwards every inbound payment to other participants inside the same transaction; the contract’s balance is zero ETH and the BNB Chain contract’s is zero BNB, and that is by design rather than by collapse. Of every unit paid in, 100% is routed to uplines and spillover recipients, 0% to a company, 0% to cost of goods, 0% to fulfillment, support or compliance, and 0% retained. The plan is not merely inflow-dependent in the way a thinly-capitalized operator’s is; it is arithmetically identical to inflow, and the published source code proves it rather than implying it. The exposure that follows is not the headline price. The doubling ladder plus the blocking mechanic means a participant who is succeeding is forced to commit escalating capital or forfeit what they have earned, and the full ladder across both Ethereum matrices is 204.75 ETH - $385,795 at the 1 August 2026 price of $1,884.22.
Marketing conductIncome claims, regulator run-ins, hype, deadline stacking.
7%
0.0
The founder told a launch audience on video that Forsage carried "zero risk", offered "unlimited" earnings and that "you can become a millionaire"; the site told participants "100% of the income goes directly and transparently to the members of the project with zero risk"; and the founders claimed that "50 people became millionaires" from it, against an authorities’ chain analysis reported by the ICIJ finding exactly one identity over $1m and it was one they controlled. The live 2025/26 site still displays selected identities with dollar figures attached and no denominator, still tells readers the entry threshold "is equal to just a couple of cups of coffee", and still says the reward can be received "indefinitely". Promotion continued after two cease-and-desist actions - the Philippines in September 2020 and Montana in March 2021 - a point the SEC put in its own press release; and eight days after being sued the lead founder published a video claiming there were "no victims". In May 2025 the YouTube back catalog spanning Forsage and its successor brands was mass-privatised shortly after critical coverage, removing years of income claims from public view. That last act is why the quotations in this report are taken from court filings rather than from the videos.
Operator terms & exitWho owns the customer, what you forfeit, how hard it is to leave.
5%
1.0
This is the highest number in the file and the point is credited honestly, because the good half is real. There is no autoship, no subscription, no monthly fee, no annual renewal, no minimum volume, no rank maintenance and no stored payment instrument: nothing recurs, nothing bills you, and every single payment requires the participant to sign a transaction personally. There is no termination clause, because there is no operator with the power to close your account, void your position, reassign your downline or claw back your earnings - a genuine protection that the standard termination-at-will contract in this category does not give. Positions never expire. There is no arbitration clause, no class-action waiver, no non-disparagement obligation, no non-compete and no exit friction of any kind: you simply stop, with no form, no notice period and no forfeited book of business. Everything else is as bad as it can be. Funds are irrevocable on transfer; no refund is mechanically possible because the contract holds nothing to refund from and its verified interface exposes no withdraw, refund, cancel or unwind function of any kind; the recipients are strangers who owe you nothing; there is no counterparty to claim against; and the blocking mechanic is a live forfeiture that redirects income you have earned to somebody above you. No receiver was appointed in the SEC case, no asset freeze appears on the docket and no fair fund exists. What you paid is gone.
Weighted composite
0.10
F

Dimension profile

Further from center is better. Hover any point.

Comp structure& Koscot 0.0 Securitiesexposure 0.0 Ownership &track record 0.0 Product reality& demand 0.0 Participanteconomics 0.5 Price-to-value 0.0 Payoutsustainability 0.0 Marketingconduct 0.0 Operator terms& exit 1.0

Hard caps that bind here

Ceiling at F - non-binding the nine dimension scores already reach 0.10 on their own arithmetic, so a ceiling at F describes where the file lands rather than pulling it down to that band. It binds nothing, and it should not be read as a second helping of any dimension. What it does record is what the grade rests on and what it does not. It rests on the code and the measurement: 100% of inflow forwarded to other participants inside the same transaction from a contract holding a zero balance, no product of any kind sold to anybody, a company-stated yield of 200% to 1020% against an irrevocable 0.05 ETH minimum, and third-party academic measurement putting 88.2% of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses net negative. It does not rest on the legal file, and a reader must not infer a charge this report has not made. There is no contested civil finding anywhere - seven consent judgments entered without any admission and three default judgments entered for non-appearance, neither of which is a litigated finding of fact. There is no criminal conviction in the United States against anybody. No defendant has admitted anything. The lead founder has no judgment against him at all and his motion to dismiss remains unruled. The one criminal conviction in the file is Georgian, in absentia, for money laundering, and unenforced. Strip every one of those out and the nine numbers are unchanged.

The lowest binding cap wins, regardless of the weighted arithmetic.

Sources consulted

What we read

Every source below links to the document itself. Tier 1 is a primary record - the company’s own plan, policy or disclosure, a court filing, a regulator’s decision or an SEC filing. Tier 2 is a self-regulatory or secondary regulator record, tier 3 reporting or academic work, tier 4 an open-market price comparison. Where a document can be moved or withdrawn, an archived copy is linked beside it. If a link is dead when you try it, that is a correction we want.

  1. SEC v. Vladimir Okhotnikov, et al., No. 1:22-cv-03978 (N.D. Ill.) - Complaint filed 1 August 2022 (PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2022-08-01archived copy

    SEC v. Okhotnikov et al., No. 1:22-cv-03978 (N.D. Ill.), filed 1 August 2022 - complaint (paras 4, 12, 30, 31, 42, 45-48, 71-78), Litigation Release 25460 and Press Release 2022-134; charges under Securities Act sections 5(a), 5(c), 17(a)(1) and 17(a)(3) and Exchange Act section 10(b) with Rules 10b-5(a) and (c)

  2. SEC Litigation Release No. 25460 - Vladimir Okhotnikov et al. (1 August 2022)
    RegulatorTier 1U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2022-08-01archived copy
  3. SEC Press Release 2022-134, "SEC Charges Eleven Individuals in $300 Million Crypto Pyramid Scheme"
    RegulatorTier 1U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2022-08-01archived copy
  4. Docket, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Okhotnikov, No. 1:22-cv-03978 (N.D. Ill.) - CourtListener/RECAP
    Court recordTier 1CourtListener (Free Law Project) / U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois · 2022-08-01archived copy

    Full CourtListener docket in 1:22-cv-03978 - consent judgments at Dkt 15, 16, 24, 25, 31, 33, 71, 77, 83; default judgments at Dkt 111 and 133; Scheduling Order Dkt 93 (bifurcated monetary track); Joint Status Reports Dkt 149 and 161; motion for limited lift of stay Dkt 170, opposition Dkt 182, and denial 6 March 2026 at Dkt 187

    Not established by this document: The individual docket entries named in the prose (Dkt 15, 16, 24, 25, 31, 33, 71, 77, 83, 93, 111, 133, 149, 161, 170, 182, 187) are PACER documents; only the consolidated CourtListener docket is openly linkable. Two entries (Dkt 73 and 84) are also mirrored on Docket Alarm behind a paywall and are not cited.

  5. Indictment, United States v. Vladimir Okhotnikov et al., No. 3:23-cr-00057 (D. Or.), returned 22 February 2023 (PDF)
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon / U.S. Department of Justice · 2023-02-22archived copy

    United States v. Okhotnikov et al., No. 3:23-cr-00057-IM (D. Or.), indictment returned 22 February 2023 - one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 18 U.S.C. §1349, with forfeiture allegation under §981(a)(1)(C); Justice Department victim-notification page carrying the arraignment of 11 May 2026, the not-guilty plea and the continuance of trial from 14 July to 10 November 2026

  6. Victim Notification System case page - United States v. Vladimir Okhotnikov et al.
    Court recordTier 1U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Divisionarchived copy
  7. U.S. Attorney's Office (D. Or.) press release, "Ukrainian National Extradited from Thailand to Face Conspiracy Charges", 12 May 2026 - arraignment, not-guilty plea and 14 July 2026 trial date
    Court recordTier 1U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Oregon · 2026-05-12archived copy
  8. Docket, United States v. Okhotnikov, No. 3:23-cr-00057 (D. Or.) - CourtListener/RECAP
    Court recordTier 1CourtListener (Free Law Project) / U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon · 2023-02-22archived copy
  9. Justice Department press release, "Forsage Founders Indicted in $340M DeFi Crypto Scheme", 23 February 2023
    Court recordTier 1U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs · 2023-02-23archived copy
  10. Kell, Yousaf, Allen, Meiklejohn & Juels, "Forsage: Anatomy of a Smart-Contract Pyramid Scheme" - arXiv:2105.04380 (full text)
    AcademicTier 3arXiv (Cornell Tech / IC3 / University College London) · 2021-05-10archived copy

    Kell, Yousaf, Allen, Meiklejohn and Juels, "Forsage: Anatomy of a Smart-Contract Pyramid Scheme", Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023 (Cornell Tech / University College London / IC3) - full-population extraction of 1,040,000 Ethereum addresses to 14 January 2021, 88.2% net negative, 0.33 ETH mean loss among losers, top 1,000 addresses taking 50% of profits, owner address at 5,409.6 ETH and 2.04% of profits, 98.89% first-time wallets, and the position-scrambling analysis

  11. "Forsage: Anatomy of a Smart-Contract Pyramid Scheme" - Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023, LNCS 13950 (DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-47751-5_14)
    AcademicTier 3Springer / International Financial Cryptography Association (via ACM Digital Library) · 2023archived copy
  12. Author-hosted PDF of the Forsage paper (Ari Juels, Cornell Tech)
    AcademicTier 3Ari Juels, Cornell Tech / IC3 · 2021-07archived copy
  13. Ingo Weber (TU Berlin), "Forsage" dataset page - "A Collection of Resources for Process Mining on Blockchain Data" (5,448 of 42,738 user IDs, 12.7%, reaching break-even)
    AcademicTier 3Ingo Weber, Technische Universität Berlinarchived copy

    Weber (TU Berlin), process-mining resource on Forsage event logs - 5,448 of 42,738 identities (12.7%) reaching break-even, an independent reproduction of the academic result on a different dataset by a different method

  14. Forsage.io contract 0x5acc84a3e955Bdd76467d3348077d003f00fFB97 - verified Solidity source (SmartMatrixForsage) on Etherscan
    Open-market comparisonTier 1Etherscanarchived copy

    Verified contract source, SmartMatrixForsage (Solidity 0.5.16) on Etherscan and ForsageProxy on BscScan for 0x5acc84a3e955Bdd76467d3348077d003f00fFB97 - the 0.05 ETH registration requirement, the doubling levelPrice ladder to 51.2 ETH, the blocked flag and MissedEthReceive event, the owner’s pre-activated unblockable levels, the two state-changing functions, and the proxy update(address newImpl) and removeOwnership() functions

    Not established by this document: Both block-explorer contract pages return HTTP 403 to automated retrieval; the URLs were taken verbatim from search results whose titles identify the correct address and contract label, and were not fetched.

  15. Forsage: x3/x4 BUSD contract 0x5acc84a3e955Bdd76467d3348077d003f00fFB97 - ForsageProxy source on BscScan (BNB Chain)
    Open-market comparisonTier 1BscScanarchived copy
  16. forsage.io homepage - the "immutability of conditions", "zero human factor" and instant-transaction claims
    Company documentTier 1Forsage · 2026-08-01archived copy

    forsage.io and support.forsage.io, retrieved 1 August 2026 - the "unchanging conditions" claim, the "zero risk" and "best alternative to trading" framing, the "yield per cycle" figures of 200% / 300% / 580% / 500% / 1020%, the passive-income and "even when you take a break" wording, the "Forsage School" and "AI powered" features, the live counters and the selected individual earnings displays

    Not established by this document: The specific per-cycle yield figures (200% / 300% / 580% / 500% / 1020%), the "Forsage School" and "AI powered" sections and the footer Disclaimer page are rendered client-side and did not appear in the retrieved homepage text; no separate stable URL for them could be confirmed.

  17. support.forsage.io - "What is FORSAGE, how it works?" help-center article
    Company documentTier 1Forsage Help Centerarchived copy
  18. Philippine SEC advisory: "FORSAGE is NOT REGISTERED with the Commission…", posted 30 June 2020
    RegulatorTier 1Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines · 2020-06-30archived copy

    Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines - public advisory 30 June 2020 applying the investment-contract test, and cease-and-desist order 17 September 2020; Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance cease-and-desist with proposed agency action, March 2021, finding no product other than positions and proposing (not imposing) fines

    Not established by this document: The signed PDF of the Philippine CDO (Case No. 05-20-064) and the Montana docketed order itself are not published on either regulator's public site; the regulators' own press releases are cited in their place.

  19. Philippine SEC press release, "SEC Issues Cease and Desist Order Against Forsage" (PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines · 2020-09archived copy
  20. Philippine SEC Cease and Desist Orders index (sec-issuances)
    RegulatorTier 1Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippinesarchived copy
  21. Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, "Montana regulator issues cease and desist order against Forsage scam", 7 April 2021 - notice of proposed agency action, 24 days to contest
    RegulatorTier 1Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance (Office of the Montana State Auditor) · 2021-04-07archived copy
  22. Scilla Alecci & Fergus Shiel, "The Russian crypto guru's Hollywood gambit", ICIJ Coin Laundry, 17 November 2025 - Tbilisi court's March 2024 in-absentia ten-year sentence, 53 bank accounts, sixteen multi-level ventures
    ReportingTier 3International Consortium of Investigative Journalists · 2025-11-17archived copy

    ICIJ, "Coin Laundry" investigation - the sixteen prior multi-level ventures, the Tbilisi City Court conviction in absentia in March 2024 and its ten-year sentence for laundering $1.1m, the deposits across at least 53 bank accounts, the extradition of a co-founder from Thailand on 8 May 2026, and the authorities’ chain analysis finding one identity over $1m

  23. Fergus Shiel, "Alleged cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme 'goddess' extradited from Thailand to face conspiracy charges in US", ICIJ, 17 May 2026
    ReportingTier 3International Consortium of Investigative Journalists · 2026-05-17archived copy
  24. "About The Coin Laundry" - ICIJ investigation methodology and dataset
    ReportingTier 3International Consortium of Investigative Journalistsarchived copy
  25. BehindMLM company archive - Forsage (index of contemporaneous reviews and follow-up coverage)
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLMarchived copy

    BehindMLM Forsage archive - six contemporaneous reviews from 2020 onward, the count of eight relaunches, the transcription of the official BUSD tier tables including 9,870 BUSD against a stated 100,674 BUSD return, and the May 2025 mass-privatisation of the YouTube back catalog; plus a commercial analytics platform’s "High Risk" listing dated 8 April 2026 and the block explorer’s own warning banner on the contract address

    Not established by this document: The unnamed commercial analytics platform's "High Risk" listing dated 8 April 2026 could not be identified from the prose, and the block explorer's warning banner is on the Etherscan/BscScan pages already cited at index 5 (both of which refuse automated retrieval).

  26. BehindMLM, "Forsage Review: Ethereum based cash gifting scheme"
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2020archived copy
  27. BehindMLM, "ForsageTron Review: Lado Okhotnikov's 3rd Forsage Ponzi"
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLMarchived copy
  28. BehindMLM, "Forsage BUSD Review: Lado Okhotnikov's 5th Forsage Ponzi" - the BUSD tier table (9,870 BUSD in, 100,674 BUSD stated return)
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLMarchived copy
  29. BehindMLM, "Fortron Review: Forsage gifting scam reboots with tron"
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLMarchived copy
Unable to verify

What we could not get

  • Current daily on-chain volume on any Forsage contract. Lifetime transaction counts were obtained - 3,635,519 on Ethereum, 2,384,782 on BNB Chain - but per-transaction dates were not: the block explorer returned 403 to one retrieval path and served the transaction list without dates to another, and direct network egress from this environment was blocked. This is the highest-value open item in the report, because "the contract exists" and "the contract is being used" are different claims and the site’s own counters cannot settle the second.
  • Whether removeOwnership() has been called on the BNB Chain ForsageProxy. It is a single state read that this report could not perform. This report asserts neither that it was called nor that it was not. It determines whether the live "conditions cannot be changed by anyone, including the developers" claim is false on that chain or merely unproven.
  • The contents of the Disclaimer page linked in the forsage.io footer. The link was identified but the page was not retrieved. It is the only candidate document on the entire site that could contain anything resembling terms, and its contents would be worth quoting either way.
  • The finality of the Philippine and Montana orders. Whether the Philippines cease-and-desist order was ever made permanent after the statutory contest period, whether any Philippine penalty was imposed or collected, and whether Montana’s proposed fines and restitution were ever finalised or collected. No final order in either jurisdiction could be retrieved. Note the direction of the uncertainty: both are recorded here at the stage they were issued, and neither is described as a finding.
  • Current vendor fee schedules for the exchanges, wallets and fund managers used in the replacement stack, and the current expense ratios of the index funds named there. All are list prices as generally published and none was re-retrieved for this report. The load-bearing figures in that section - the ETH quantities of 0.05, 0.35 and 204.75, and the ETH price of $1,884.22 on 1 August 2026 - are verified, and the argument does not turn on any fee being exact.
  • The exact median outcome per participant in ETH. The academic paper publishes the 88.2% net-negative share, the 0.33 ETH mean loss among losers and a median of one level purchased, from which "the median participant lost money" follows unambiguously; a precise median figure is derivable only from the raw dataset and is not published.
  • The identities of the lead founder’s sixteen pre-Forsage ventures - the investigative count was published, the list was not - and the third-party analytics estimate of the first-year intake of his immediate successor platform, which appears only in trade reporting and could not be traced to a primary publication.
  • Whether the $68,770 collected from the one settling defendant has been or will be distributed to participants. No fair fund and no distribution plan appears on the docket, and the exact entry dates of three of the seven consent judgments could not be confirmed from the docket pages retrieved.

Not advice

This is independent analysis for decision-making, not legal, financial or investment advice. Allegations reported by third parties should be verified against primary court and regulatory records before any decision.

Who writes this

Researched by Claude. Reviewed by an editor.

Every report is researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, from the company’s own plan documents, policies, terms and regulatory file - then reviewed before publication by Rob Fore, who checks the sources and the stage-label on every allegation.

  • Nine weighted dimensions, published with their weights
  • The editor checks the evidence and cannot change the number - the build rejects any page whose grade does not reconcile to its own arithmetic
  • Every affiliate position we hold is disclosed on the report it touches
  • No company has paid for a grade, and no report carries an affiliate link
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Common questions

Forsage - frequently asked

QIs Forsage still running in 2026?
Yes. forsage.io was serving a complete, maintained marketing site when retrieved on 1 August 2026, carrying a 2025 copyright, present-tense income claims, a "Forsage School" training program, an "AI powered" strategy feature and eight contract addresses across Ethereum, Tron and BNB Chain. The Ethereum matrix contract has 3,635,519 lifetime transactions and the BNB Chain contract 2,384,782. Deployed smart-contract bytecode with no self-destruct path cannot be removed by any regulator, any court or the founders themselves, so the contracts are permanent by construction. One thing this report could not measure is current daily activity: the block explorer returned an access error to one retrieval path and served the transaction list without dates to another, so the report states lifetime counts and explicitly does not claim the contracts are inactive.
QWhat do Forsage participants actually earn?
The answer comes from outside the company, because no income disclosure has ever existed. A peer-reviewed study by researchers at Cornell Tech, University College London and IC3, published at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2023, extracted every transaction to the Ethereum contract through 14 January 2021 and computed profit and loss per address net of gas. Of 1,040,000 addresses, 123,979 - 11.8% - ended in profit and 919,194 - 88.2% - ended net negative. The mean loss among the losers was 0.33 ETH, six and a half times the entry price. The median participant bought one level. The top 1,000 addresses, 0.096% of the population, took half of all profits between them. A second academic team at TU Berlin independently found 12.7% of 42,738 identities reaching break-even, on a different dataset by a different method. Justice Department analytics, offered in support of an indictment and untested at trial, put over 80% as receiving fewer ETH than they put in and over 50% as never receiving a single payout. None of these figures is a company figure.
QHow much does it cost to join Forsage?
Registration on Ethereum is exactly 0.05 ETH, enforced in the contract by the line require(msg.value == 0.05 ether) - about $94 at the 1 August 2026 price of $1,884.22, and about $9 on launch day in 2020. That buys level 1 of the x3 matrix and level 1 of the x4 matrix and nothing else. The headline is not the real number, for a reason written into the code: completing a level sets it to blocked unless you have already bought the next one, and a blocked level earns nothing because payments walk past it to the first unblocked account above. Prices double at every rung to 51.2 ETH. The promoters’ own onboarding guidance was therefore to fund the first three levels of both matrices immediately - 0.35 ETH, seven times the headline - expressly so that you "do not lose any profits if your team members below you decide to upgrade before you do." Opening every slot in both Ethereum matrices costs 204.75 ETH, which is $385,795 at the 1 August 2026 price. On BNB Chain, full participation across all four programs was transcribed at 89,836 BUSD, and because BUSD was dollar-pegged that figure does not move with any token price.
QHas anyone been convicted or found liable over Forsage?
Not on any contested basis, anywhere, and the distinctions matter. In the SEC civil case, No. 1:22-cv-03978 in the Northern District of Illinois, seven promoter defendants settled by consent without admitting or denying the allegations - a consent judgment is not a litigated finding of fact - and three founders had default judgments entered against them because they never appeared, which under the rules means the complaint’s allegations are taken as admitted for failure to defend rather than because a court weighed evidence. There is no judgment of any kind against the lead founder: his November 2022 motion to dismiss for want of personal jurisdiction has never been ruled on, the case has been stayed since March 2023, and his motion for a limited lift of that stay was denied on 6 March 2026. Separately, a federal indictment in the District of Oregon, No. 3:23-cr-00057-IM, charges all four founders with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. §1349 - an indictment is an allegation, not a finding. One defendant was extradited from Thailand on 8 May 2026, pleaded not guilty, is detained pre-trial and is presumed innocent; her trial was continued from 14 July to 10 November 2026. Three co-defendants are at large. No Forsage founder has been convicted of anything in the United States. The one conviction in the file is Georgian: the Tbilisi City Court convicted the lead founder in absentia in March 2024 and sentenced him to ten years for laundering $1.1m of proceeds, a conviction entered without him present and never enforced. Four years on, the total collected from all eleven SEC defendants is $68,770, from one of them, and none of it has reached a participant.
QCan you get your money back from Forsage?
No, and the obstacle is mechanical rather than a matter of policy. The verified contract forwards every payment to other participants inside the same transaction that receives it, so the contract balance is zero and there is nothing to refund from. The published interface exposes exactly two state-changing functions - one to register and one to buy a level - and neither is a withdraw, refund, cancel or unwind; there is no admin escape hatch on the Ethereum contract. The recipients of your money are strangers with no agreement with you, and reversing a blockchain transfer would require their private key and their voluntary cooperation. There is no chargeback, no acquirer and no payment scheme in the chain. And there is no counterparty: Forsage is unincorporated, so there is no company, no directors, no insurance, no bond and no assets anywhere to attach. In the SEC case no receiver was sought or appointed, no asset freeze appears on the docket and no fair fund has been established. The one route that does exist is the Justice Department’s victim-notification page for the criminal case, which lets participants identify themselves and file impact statements; it is a route to being counted and heard, and to a possible forfeiture distribution only if there is a conviction and only if assets are recovered.
Who wrote this report

Author, editor and publisher

C
Written by Claude AI
Reviewed by Rob Fore · Published by Listech Inc · August 1, 2026

This report was researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from primary documents - Forsage’s own compensation plan, its policies and procedures, its terms of service, its income disclosure statement where one exists, and its regulatory and self-regulatory file. It was scored against nine weighted dimensions that are published in full, with their weights, on the methodology page.

Before publication it was reviewed by Rob Fore, who checks every source link, every figure against the document it came from, and every allegation against its stage-label - an investigation is not a finding, a warning letter is not an enforcement action, and a filed claim is not a verdict.

The editor does not set the grade. The published score is the weighted composite of the nine dimension scores, and the build refuses to emit a page where the two disagree by more than 0.06. A grade moves when the evidence moves it and not otherwise.

Rob Fore has marketed online since 1996, wrote Online MLM Marketing (2014), and is CEO of Listech Inc, the Nevada corporation that publishes this site. He holds affiliate positions in companies graded here - including LiveGood, which this site grades D, SendOutCards, which it grades C−, and the Home Business Academy, which it grades B−. Those positions are disclosed on the reports they touch, and changed nothing on this page.

About the author and our conflicts  ·  Contact the editor  ·  Corrections: corrections@opportunitygrade.com

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Corrections

Every factual claim on this page is sourced, and the ones we could not stand up are named in the unable to verify list above. If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from Forsage than from a reader.

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