Lightning Shared Scooter Company

Stay Safe: The Story of a Scam, Part 2

In my last blog post, I shared some of what I’d learned about Lightning Shared Scooter Company (LSSC), a pyramid scheme that stole millions of dollars from investors under the guise of a scooter installation and leasing company. After scrutiny from the FBI and customer complaints in more than 20 US states, LSSC shuttered its doors and vanished into thin air. When the company disappeared, so did many investors’ hard earned money.

In hindsight, I’m sure many of the participants in the scheme can identify multiple red flags that were always present. However, when in the throes of the excitement of generating income quickly, some of the usual caution is often disregarded. Some people who had been part of the company for a few years were earning the equivalent of an average US salary in less than two months’ time, and as a result, they probably didn’t ever stop to ask themselves, “Does any of this make sense?”

I want to be VERY clear: a pyramid scheme can only be effective if it causes participants to doubt their instincts. Even savvy investors can be scammed, as history has proven – time and time again – over the last 50 years. Nothing that I’m sharing should be interpreted as victim blaming, because the key to an effective scheme is sophisticated deceptive practices. NO fraudulent scheme can be effective if it’s obviously scammy, so naturally, victims may not identify the scam immediately. While I suspected the business was a scam as soon as I heard it, it was difficult to identify it as such when there are multiple people earning consistent profits from it over several years.

With that being said, here’s a list of some of the red flags, as well as ways to identify scams and schemes as they are presented to you.

  • Recent launch and request for individual investors instead of using institutional funds. Companies at the size and scale that LSSC claimed it was DO NOT seek random individuals to fund it. Companies that plan to expand and to set up an effective presence in a new country or market will use the banking structures of that country. And yes, crowd sourcing is an option for smaller companies, but even that is generally conducted on a third-party platform that offers some neutrality and security to investors.
  • Promise of a quick return of investment. The old adage, “If it sounds too good to be true . . . ” comes to mind.
  • Usage of a profit model that doesn’t look like any others that you’ve seen or experienced. Most compensation structures have already been created and tested: truly innovative models are as rare as hen’s teeth. If the profit model is new, then you should probably wait a while to see how it works, and if it’s sustainable over the long term. If some of the participants had just waited for a few months or a year, they would have seen that the company’s profit model was fraudulent and could have avoided being fleeced.
  • Complicated pay structures and mechanisms.If you don’t completely understand how and why you’re getting paid, then that could be a reason to pause and do some additional research. You should be clear on how the money gets to you and why you’re getting it.
  • Multiple concurrent activities that are not connected to the company’s mission. These are also known as “distractions”. Hosting dinners, raffling items, logging into a chatroom that requires constant involvement throughout the day, required training hours that don’t actually teach you anything related to the business, multiple unrelated “meetings” per week: all of these things add up to a company that wants you so distracted that you won’t notice that they’re failing to pay you on time . . . again.
  • Conflicting messages regarding pay, participation, etc.,. Once a company flip flops a number of times, you can bet that they’re simply readjusting as they realize that the time for the scam is running out.
  • Insistence upon involvement in activities that have nothing to do with the company’s mission and profit generation. If they want you, as an investor, to do anything other than put in money and read quarterly earning statements, then they are likely trying to distract you. If the company wants you participating in contests for no clear reason other than “community building” AND if the activities being promoted have nothing to do with the income generation of the company, you can better believe that this is part of the deception that makes investors more comfortable with sinking in additional funds.
  • Unclear connection between company activities and company mission and profit generation. Why would a company raffle off house plants, air fryers, and televisions daily, especially if the company doesn’t specialize in selling house plants, air fryers or televisions? Again, another distraction.
  • Structures that claim to be inspired by existing models but have very little actual connection. This is a common tactic that causes the investor to “fill in the blanks” when they should be more skeptical. LSSC claimed to be similar to companies like ride-sharing platforms (think Uber and Lyft), but the scooter operations were more akin to rental car agreements. The company also claimed to be focused on the “sharing economy”, but nothing in the scooter business requires that. This was part of getting the investors to associate the company with trusted models that had proven themselves, even though the company had not actually employed the model that they claimed was their “inspiration”.
  • Cryptocurrency as the sole means of conducting business. Please know that I’m not anti-crypto: I believe any platform or method of acknowledging currency is “valid”, so long as all participants are knowledgeable and agree to use the platform/method as intended. But the focus on recruiting individuals that are unfamiliar with crypto, then insisting that the individuals only operate within cryptocurrency platforms, is a red flag to me. It should be noted that the appeal of cryptocurrency lies in the fact that it exists outside of government regulations. So prosecuting people who have committed criminal acts on crypto platforms is challenging, and oftentimes impossible. Also, the relative anonymity that can be accomplished by using crypto platforms means that identifying culprits is almost always impossible.
  • Poorly constructed training sessions, and training that reads more like indoctrination than specialized education. When a business is newly formed, you can expect that some of the training and other information sessions may be a little disorganized, and trainers may not be able to answer every question that comes from the audience. However, after several years in business, there should be a streamlined, organized and fairly seamless training program in place, with trainers that are well-versed and poised. Also, your spidey senses should go off when training sessions focus heavily on indoctrinating participants as opposed to educating them. What’s the line between indoctrination and education? Even experts debate this, but generally speaking, any statements that push people towards ideologies without critical analysis would fall under the indoctrination umbrella. If you find yourself in a space that presents opinions as “logic”, uses an assortment of formal and informal fallacies to make arguments and utilize shaming and embarrassment tactics to encourage certain behavior, it’s likely that indoctrination – not education – is the goal. When you see poorly constructed training paired with indoctrination, what you’re likely experiencing is a scam.
  • Fanaticism is the main attraction, not the product or service. Going back to the point about indoctrination, one of the outcomes of being brought into a business that operates like a cult is that participants go from interested supporters to fanatics, allowing the business to take over their lives. One of the most peculiar things about the LSSC scam was how much time the business demanded of investors while still calling itself a source for “passive” income. There was nothing passive about the number of discussions, training and meetings that investors were required to attend each week. There was also nothing passive about the activities required by participants to maintain the payment levels that they achieved when they first invested. As a slight aside, it’s worth noting that requiring fanaticism from participants is one of the hallmarks of cults, and, in my opinion, so many things about the LSSC scam read as cult behavior.

Those are the main red flags I identified in the LSSC scam, but I can comfortably state that most scams use a number of the tactics that I mention. I hope that everyone involved with the LSSC scam is made whole, and I hope that anyone that’s questioning an investment opportunity does their research and makes sure that the opportunity is a legitimate one.

That’s all for today. I’ll talk to you all soon!

Stay Safe: The Story of a Scam, Part 1

In the financial world, the only guarantee that exists is that there is always a scam or scheme on the horizon, ready to take advantage of the ambitious but ill-informed masses. Recently, a large group of global investors and entrepreneurs fell victim to a scooter scam to the tune of millions of dollars.

If you have been keeping up with the world of frauds, scams and schemes, you may have heard of the Lightning Shared Scooter Company (L.S.S.C.) The Hong-Kong based company purported to set up scooters in densely populated cities, and investors could pay a flat fee to lease a set of scooters for 3 years. These leases were supposed to fund the initial scooter purchase and subsequent mechanical maintenance. Larger investments created the opportunity for more scooter leases, and more leases meant more money could be made by the investor. The company would maintain the scooters, and the investors made money by “turning on” the scooters every day of the work week (Monday through Friday). The claim was that investors would recover the initial investment within 30 working days (about 6 weeks). After that 6 week period, all subsequent income generated was profit.

This sounds simple enough, but the story quickly fell apart as the company revealed more about what they expected from investors. First of all, the company was compensating investors for “turning on” the scooters, but it didn’t seem logical that, in this age of automation, these devices would need to be manually powered on. The company alternated between claiming that investors didn’t need to bring in additional participants and claiming that the only way to make money was to add new “team” members as quickly as possible. Additionally, the training and investor meetings were extremely disorganized and repeated the same canned, surface-level information in slightly different ways. Investors were expected to attend YouTube “training” sessions that weren’t substantive, but simply a way to continue to spin the illogical compensation structure of the company and leverage the excitement of new investors that were ready to make “easy” money. These “trainings” offered fluffy, poorly constructed arguments in favor of the company, and were little more than a way for the YouTube trainers to quickly become part of the YT Partner program, offering a way to make money beyond LSSC’s scooter scheme.

Another peculiar point about the scam was the method for compensation. The company only paid through cryptocurrency on Coinbase, and they required a complex process for remitting investment funds to start. The company would have different short term investment opportunities for participants, where investors would remit $10,000 or more and, within 2 or 3 days, they could receive from 10% to 25% over their initial investment. LSSC went a step further, and also started making claims that the money received from the company was nontaxable due to the fact that the company was Hong-Kong based, offering awful and oversimplified tax guidance to excited but uneducated investors (at the point where I heard this, I KNEW, for sure, this was a scam and would cause financial ruin for the participants if it continued).

Further, the company’s rapid expansion was supposed to be part of a strategic plan to corner the North American market by “proving” public interest in scooter usage (all while scooters devices have been in use for many years here in the US). Relying on investors’ ignorance of how foreign companies enter new markets, the “logic” presented argued that the fact that investors’ participation would make a stronger claim for LSSC as it navigated the process of setting up US presence. The company attempted to bolster its appearance of legitimacy by offering business registration information and documents on live videos, telling investors (and I paraphrase here, but not much), “If we were crooks, would we register with regulatory agencies?” Personally, the registration documents provided by the company were among some of the flimsiest I’ve ever seen, and didn’t actually confirm the legitimacy of the company, but that should be no surprise, given the way things turned out.

In the end, the company came toppling down in late July 2025. In the weeks leading up to the collapse, the company amped up activity, promising to gift Teslas to some of the lucky investors, planning multiple grand openings of scooter stores in the US, and giving away the equivalents of thousands of dollars in household items to investors each day. After failing to pay investors timely, AND after failing to disperse rewards promised through games and competitions on the company’s BonChat platform (their exclusive communication channel structured similarly to WhatsApp), it became clear that LSSC was what it claimed to be. On the heels of FBI scrutiny, the company closed down and left many people with lightened wallets and shamed faces.

Further, some of the more public members of the organization – who were also investors who lost significant money – have become victims of harassment, despite the fact that they were not the masterminds behind the scheme. Several individuals have been forced to keep a low profile in light of the scandal. It has been rumored that the different higher level individuals that interacted with investors were actually AI generated entities, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint the actual parties responsible for the scam.

In any case, I have a lot of sympathy for the victims, and there were plenty of them: the entry point for investors was fairly low (less that $1000 USD when the company shuttered its doors), making it accessible. And, because the company initially kept its promises to investors, the early investors (some of whom came into the structure when the fees were less than $500 USD) were encouraged and inspired to bring in as many family members and friends as they could. I have several family members who fell victim to the scheme, however, they personally incurred the loss for the individuals that they brought into the company (they made the investment on behalf of the people they brought in, only to be repaid when the participants were beyond the 30 day investment recoup period).

There were many red flags with the scheme, and I will explore ALL of them in my next post. So stay tuned for Part 2 of The Story of a Scam. I’ll talk to you all soon!