A Bitcoin fund manager who blew up his own trading fund in 2018 and then lied to investors is back on the scene under a new name and targeting Bitcoin traders once again. Ayan Dasgupta operated his Guna Fund within a popular crypto community during the first half of 2018 until he was forced to reveal that the fund had collapsed, but this hasn’t stopped some members of the same group inadvertently signing up to his paid Bitcoin indicator under his Twitter handle @datadater.
Guna Build (and Crash) a Rocketship
Dasgupta used his influence as one of the founders of the crypto community in question to pitch his Guna investment fund, which he said would utilize his hitherto successful Bitcoin trading algorithm. He collected hundreds of BTC from contributors and initially registered positive gains, until in early June requests to withdraw funds went unanswered, team members began to leave the scheme, and eventually the fund’s spreadsheet stopped being updated. Sensing trouble, the group eventually pressured Dasgupta into revealing that he had been liquidated some weeks prior due to, he claimed, a monumental trading error:
I regret to inform that a big loss has been incurred by the fund. Due to a mistake in setting a margin order, accidentally 10 times the intended order was entered and unfortunately suffered liquidation during the price dip to the low 6000s.
The uproar following this revelation was compounded by the news that Dasgupta had been lying to investors about the fund’s performance ever since the catastrophe, leaving them feeling “betrayed, deceived and defrauded”. The fallout resulted in massive losses among investors, many of whom weren’t satisfied with the trading records Dasgupta provided as evidence of the failed trade, resulting in suspicions within the group that he kept some of the fund’s money for himself. Incredibly, some members of the same group were also involved in the CoinSignals debacle of late 2018 which saw a Bitcoin trading fund turn into a Ponzi scheme.
Dasgupta Returns
Following 18 months of the group licking its wounds and trying to move on, it was with a sense of disbelief that an innocent-looking post appeared in the trading section of the group’s Discord, with the poster suggesting other traders might want to look into a trading script he had just purchased through someone with the Twitter handle @datadater. It didn’t take long for one member to spot a familiar-looking username in the screenshot – AyanDasgupta16.
Confirmation that “it’s the same scammer” soon came from other users, although the revelation that one of their number had inadvertently begun lining the pockets of the man who scammed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars less than 18 months previously was taken with the kind of battle-hardened irony commonly found in crypto groups that experienced the highs and lows of 2017 and 2018.
Dasgupta may have pulled off one final coup in obtaining a membership fee from someone he scammed in 2018, but it’s pretty likely that his arrival back on the scene will result in a somewhat less profitable return from some members of the crypto community in the days ahead.
