Two of Australia’s most notorious alleged financial predators. One playbook, two generations of technology — and the same trail of broken investors.
March 2026
The rise of cryptocurrency was supposed to make financial fraud harder. Immutable ledgers. Transparent transaction histories. No central bank to call. Instead, it handed a new generation of financial predators exactly what they needed: speed, pseudonymity, and the ability to move money across jurisdictions in seconds — often through stablecoins like USDT (Tether) that mimic the stability of the US dollar while operating entirely outside traditional banking surveillance.
Tony Iervasi and Jamie McIntyre never worked together. They don’t appear to have known each other. But their careers, examined side by side, tell a single story about how financial predators evolve — and how the tools change while the psychology stays exactly the same.
Iervasi built his scheme in the era of forex trading rooms and weekly email updates. McIntyre built his in the era of Bitcoin evangelism, offshore ICOs, and Caribbean shell companies funded through digital remittance platforms including USDT transfers. One is now in prison. The other is navigating active investigations across four jurisdictions as regulators try to follow the money through a tangle of offshore structures that would have been unimaginable when Iervasi was printing fake trading statements on Bondi Junction letterhead.
“Same scheme. New blockchain.”
ACT ONE: THE FOREX FLOOR
Courtenay House opened during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Tony Iervasi had previously worked in property but claimed he wanted to try his hand at forex trading. According to liquidators who later examined the wreckage, he had never intended to trade his clients’ money legitimately. As the Supreme Court noted, he had “little or likely no knowledge” of the foreign exchange market — and yet he was extraordinarily effective at convincing people to give him their savings.
The pitch was elegant in its simplicity. Iervasi told investors their funds would be placed into sophisticated forex and futures trading operations — the kind of high-velocity currency plays that institutional banks conduct at scale. He promised consistent returns of around 15 per cent, with what he characterised as manageable risk. Between 2010 and 2017, investors enticed by those promises deposited approximately $180 million into Courtenay House. Less than three per cent of that money was ever actually traded.
The rest funded a Ponzi — new money paying old investors’ “returns” — and a lifestyle. Iervasi personally extracted over $12 million from his victims to fund holidays, leases of waterfront properties, and luxury cars. Photographs that emerged during proceedings showed him in first-class airline seats, grinning in Las Vegas, and sprawled across hotel beds surrounded by Armani and Hugo Boss shopping bags.
The financial instrument at the centre of the scheme — forex trading — was itself a legitimate market. That was the genius of it. Forex is real. Futures are real. The returns Iervasi quoted were plausible if you didn’t look too closely. And the victims, introduced through friends and family networks, rarely looked too closely. They trusted Tony.
Crucially, Iervasi’s Courtenay House was a fiat-only operation. Money came in via ordinary Australian bank transfer. Fake returns went out the same way. The only digital innovation was the weekly email newsletter — clients were told they had made profits from special trades, including the theatrically named “US Inauguration Special Trade” timed to Donald Trump’s 2017 election win. There was no Bitcoin. No stablecoins. No offshore wallets. When ASIC froze the accounts in April 2017, the scheme collapsed overnight. The money trail, while messy, was ultimately traceable through the domestic banking system.
ACT ONE (PARALLEL): THE SEMINAR STAGE
McIntyre’s vehicle was not a trading room but a conference hall. From the early 2000s through the 2010s, he filled hotel ballrooms across Australia with his 21st Century Education seminars, positioning himself as a self-made millionaire whose methods would transform your financial life if only you would follow them. The books were self-published. The credentials were self-declared. The branding was sophisticated. The underlying product was, in several cases, legally problematic.
ASIC alleged that McIntyre’s 21st Century Group companies had been unlawfully carrying on an unlicensed financial services business, promoting and selling interests in five unregistered managed investment schemes — land banking operations — to over 100 investors. His 21st Century Academy was liquidated in 2012 owing AUD $5.41 million to 13 creditors, none of whom recovered their money.
Like Iervasi, McIntyre weaponised a legitimate concept. Land banking — acquiring undeveloped land on the expectation of future rezoning — is a real strategy. Sophisticated developers use it. The difference, as ASIC put it in Federal Court proceedings, was that the land McIntyre was selling interests in was “highly unlikely” to be rezoned in the foreseeable future. Some of it wasn’t even owned outright by McIntyre’s entities at the point of sale.
Both men, in other words, understood the rules of the game well enough to dress their schemes in the language of legitimate investing. The forex desk looked like a trading operation. The land banking pitch looked like property investment. Neither was what it claimed to be.
ACT TWO: THE CRYPTO PIVOT
Here the stories diverge in a critical way — and reveal something important about how financial fraud has evolved across a decade.
Iervasi had no cryptocurrency angle. His operation was entirely domestic and entirely fiat. That simplicity ultimately made it prosecutable within a single jurisdiction: ASIC obtained a court order, the accounts were frozen, and the scheme was over in a day. Clean, if brutal.
McIntyre’s operation evolved alongside the cryptocurrency revolution — and he used it actively, both to build his personal brand and, investigators now allege, to obscure and move money.
His earliest crypto involvement was as a self-styled visionary. He was among the first prominent Australians to publicly advocate Bitcoin investment, claiming he recommended it when prices were around $75. He leveraged this — accurately, as it turned out — as evidence of his prescient financial intelligence. The Bitcoin call became a cornerstone of his personal mythology: the man who saw what the banks refused to see, years before anyone else. It was also, critics note, exactly the kind of credibility anchor a promoter needs when the next “opportunity” comes around.
“Iervasi had a weekly email newsletter. McIntyre has a media empire — and on those platforms, he is always innocent.”
Then came the murkier chapter: Bitxcoin. McIntyre promoted this obscure digital token to his follower base across multiple platforms. Bitxcoin had no verified exchange listing, no institutional backing, no transparent development team, and no independently audited whitepaper. Investor complaint sites documented losses, with victims describing it as one of multiple crypto plays used to raise money from the McIntyre community. McIntyre has denied wrongdoing, but the Bitxcoin project produced no discernible legitimate commercial outcome.
Bitxcoin fits the profile of what regulators call a fraudulent ICO — Initial Coin Offering. In a genuine ICO, a technology team issues tokens representing a stake in a new blockchain project, lists them on exchanges, and uses the capital raised to build something real. In a fraudulent ICO, a promoter announces a new cryptocurrency, creates promotional materials, sells tokens to early believers — often the promoter’s own existing audience — collects the capital, and then either abandons the project or allows the token to collapse. The investor is left holding a worthless digital asset. Unlike a Ponzi scheme, there is no ongoing obligation to pay returns. The exit is clean and fast.
Bitxcoin was not the only crypto-adjacent promotion in McIntyre’s history. His Australian National Review platform became a vehicle for promoting various cryptocurrency and investment opportunities to his audience — often without the disclosures that Australian financial services law requires of anyone carrying on a financial services business. And McIntyre, it bears repeating, had been banned by the Federal Court in 2016 from carrying on a financial services business for ten years.
ACT THREE: MOVING THE MONEY — THE STABLECOIN LAYER
Here is where the McIntyre story enters territory that Iervasi, operating a decade earlier, simply could not have navigated — and where the mechanics of USDT and offshore corporate structures become central to the regulatory concern.
USDT is a stablecoin: a digital token issued by Tether Limited, pegged one-to-one to the US dollar. It was designed to give cryptocurrency traders a stable unit of account within volatile digital asset markets. It has also become, in financial crime circles globally, a preferred instrument for moving money across borders quickly, cheaply, and with significantly less immediate visibility than a SWIFT bank transfer. USDT transactions settle in seconds on the blockchain. They can move from a wallet in Sydney to a wallet in the Caribbean with no bank, no correspondent, and no mandatory reporting trigger at the point of transfer. Reversing or tracing them requires forensic blockchain analysis and, usually, coordinated international law enforcement.
This is not hypothetical. The US Secret Service, in a 2024 prosecution, documented a scheme involving over $73 million laundered through US financial institutions and converted to USDT via offshore accounts. AUSTRAC’s own guidance identifies rapid conversions between fiat and stablecoins with no economic rationale as a primary indicator of suspicious financial activity.
In the McIntyre case, AUSTRAC is reportedly examining fund flows from Australian investors through Australian intermediary entities, transmitted via international transfer platforms including Wise, into offshore accounts connected to Azure Wave Enterprises — a company registered in St Kitts and Nevis, co-owned by McIntyre. The fund flow documented in bank records runs: Australian investor → Australian intermediary entity → Wise or international transfer platform → McIntyre’s operational accounts → Azure Wave Enterprises (St Kitts and Nevis).
St Kitts and Nevis is not a coincidence. It is a destination chosen for a reason. It is among the world’s most opaque financial jurisdictions — a Caribbean offshore centre with minimal beneficial ownership disclosure requirements, no effective exchange of financial information with Australian regulators, and a corporate registry that does not require directors to be residents or even identifiable to the public.
McIntyre’s Federal Court ban from managing Australian corporations makes his co-ownership of an offshore entity in a secrecy jurisdiction — through which investor funds reportedly flowed — a matter of acute regulatory interest. The ban, handed down by Justice Bromwich in 2016, explicitly warned that any future breach, including online activity related to financial products, would be treated as serious contempt of court carrying a high risk of imprisonment.
Iervasi had no equivalent structure. He was a domestic fraudster — extraordinarily damaging, but ultimately containable within Australia’s legal system. His money was in Australian banks. ASIC could freeze it with a single court order. The entire enforcement action happened in one jurisdiction, in one language, with one regulator.
McIntyre’s operations are spread across Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and now the Caribbean. Active investigations are reportedly underway from ASIC, AUSTRAC, and the AFP. Separately, active civil proceedings were filed at the Denpasar District Court in Indonesia in March 2026. Multi-jurisdictional cases of this complexity can take years to resolve. That, some argue, is precisely the structural advantage.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTANTS
Strip away the technology, and Iervasi and McIntyre are the same person.
Both built trust before they built schemes. Iervasi held client events at the Sydney Opera House and Star Casino — not ostentatious affairs, but gatherings that made investors feel they were part of something exclusive. He wore jumpers to the office. He took investors for coffee. He was, as one victim described him, “very nice. Ordinary.” By the time the money was flowing freely, relationships had been built that made scepticism feel like disloyalty.
McIntyre operated the same dynamic at scale, and extended it into the digital era. The seminars created community. The books created authority. The Australian National Review created a media ecosystem in which McIntyre was the trusted, persecuted truth-teller and all critics were either financially illiterate or agents of the deep state. This mechanism — community + authority + enemy — is identical in structure to Iervasi’s client events + presentations + weekly updates. The technology changes. The social architecture does not.
Both exploited the credibility of legitimate financial instruments. Iervasi’s forex desk looked like something a sophisticated trader would run. McIntyre’s land banking looked like something a property developer would do. His Bitcoin advocacy looked like visionary analysis. His ICO promotions looked like early-stage technology investment. The promotional language of each product was accurate enough to be plausible and vague enough to be unfalsifiable — until ASIC or a liquidator arrived to examine the actual accounts.
Both operated for years without a valid Australian Financial Services Licence. Iervasi did so for nearly seven years, knowingly, while raising $180 million. McIntyre’s land banking operation ran similarly without proper licensing, a fact the Federal Court found proved on the evidence. The licence requirement exists precisely to ensure that people soliciting investment funds from the public are subject to minimum competence and disclosure standards. Both men decided those standards did not apply to them.
A NOTE ON ICOS AND THE ABSENCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY
The ICO era — roughly 2017 to 2020 — was the single greatest unregulated fundraising period in financial history. Promoters around the world raised an estimated $20 billion through token sales, many of which had no underlying technology, no development team, and no intention of building anything. Australian regulators watched it happen in real time, largely unable to intervene because the legal framework had not yet caught up to the technology.
McIntyre operated in and around this window. Bitxcoin was promoted to his audience during this period. The promotion occurred across his social media channels and ANR-adjacent platforms — reaching an audience already primed to trust his financial instincts by the Bitcoin call.
The regulatory challenge with fraudulent ICOs is that they are, on paper, indistinguishable from legitimate ones at the point of sale. A whitepaper is just a document. A token is just code. The question — whether there is genuine intent to build something, or whether the capital raised will simply disappear into operational accounts and then offshore — is a question of intent, documented over time through fund flows. It is precisely the kind of question that AUSTRAC’s forensic examination of international fund flows is designed to answer.
Iervasi faced none of this complexity. His fraud was analogue: bank in, bank out, fake statements, lifestyle expenditure. The evidence trail was bank records and email logs. It took ASIC years to build the case, but the architecture was simple.
The McIntyre case, if it proceeds to prosecution, will require investigators to trace funds through Australian bank accounts, international remittance platforms, offshore corporate structures in the Caribbean, cryptocurrency wallets, and potentially USDT transactions across multiple blockchain networks. It is an order of magnitude more complex — and that complexity is not accidental.
THE BLAME GAME: CONFESSION VERSUS COUNTER-ATTACK
Iervasi, in the end, admitted what he had done. He acknowledged in sentencing that Courtenay Trading was a Ponzi scheme from its very inception — a statement that carried genuine weight and earned him a sentencing discount, but came only after seven years of fraud, nearly $180 million raised, and $54 million in net losses to 585 ordinary Australians.
In sentencing him, Justice Sweeney noted that the harm extended far beyond financial losses to breakdowns of marriages and family relationships, emotional and physical health crises, and the need for victims to delay or abandon retirement entirely. Iervasi was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment and will not be eligible for parole for at least seven years.
McIntyre’s response to accountability has been the inverse. Rather than acknowledge wrongdoing, he has constructed an elaborate counter-narrative in which regulators are corrupt, the media is conspiratorial, and he is a political dissident being persecuted for launching an independent news outlet. He has announced plans to sue the Australian Government and ASIC for $250 million, alleging malicious prosecution and economic sabotage. These claims originate entirely from platforms McIntyre controls and have not been tested in any independent court.
What has been tested — and upheld — is the Federal Court’s finding in ASIC v McIntyre [2016] FCA 1276 that his schemes were unlawful. That finding is not disputed, not appealed, and not overturned. It is the legal record. Everything else is content marketing.
In the cryptocurrency era, the counter-attack strategy has advantages Iervasi never enjoyed. McIntyre can publish his version of events to hundreds of thousands of followers instantly. He can saturate search results with favourable content from his own media network. He can frame USDT transfers to a Caribbean shell company as legitimate international business and present every regulatory action as evidence of deep-state persecution. He can claim, on a platform he controls, that ASIC owes him $250 million. Iervasi had a weekly email. McIntyre has a media empire. On his platforms, he is always innocent.
“The tools have changed. USDT moves faster than a bank wire. An ICO raises capital faster than a seminar. An offshore entity in St Kitts is harder to freeze than an account at Westpac. But the fundamentals have not changed at all.”
THE NEW PLAYBOOK
What the parallel careers of Tony Iervasi and Jamie McIntyre reveal is the evolution of a specific type of financial predator — not the anonymous online scammer, not the organised crime syndicate, but the personality-driven fraudster: the man who builds genuine relationships, co-opts legitimate financial concepts, exploits regulatory gaps, and constructs a mythology of personal success that makes victims feel privileged to participate.
Iervasi ran the 2010s version of this playbook — elegant, domestic, ultimately prosecutable within a single jurisdiction.
McIntyre is running the 2020s version — global, crypto-layered, media-defended, and deliberately structured to make the money hard to follow and the narrative hard to pin down. The addition of cryptocurrency infrastructure — the ICO promotions, the potential USDT flows, the Caribbean offshore entity — does not make the scheme fundamentally different. It makes it harder to prosecute, slower to resolve, and more expensive to investigate.
The promise of exceptional returns. The unlicensed operation. The lifestyle funded by other people’s capital. The contempt for regulatory oversight dressed up as principle. The community of true believers who see every enforcement action as confirmation of the conspiracy rather than evidence of wrongdoing.
None of that is new. None of it requires a blockchain. But the blockchain makes it exponentially harder to stop.
Tony Iervasi is in prison. The money trail led directly to his front door through the Australian banking system.
The question that now preoccupies multiple agencies across four jurisdictions is whether the money trail that leads through Wise, into Azure Wave Enterprises in St Kitts and Nevis, and potentially through USDT wallets on the blockchain, will lead to the same destination.
This article is based entirely on publicly available court records, official ASIC and CDPP media releases, Federal Court judgments including ASIC v McIntyre [2016] FCA 1276, and on-record investigative reporting. All references to ongoing investigations remain allegations unless and until determined by a court. McIntyre denies all allegations of wrongdoing.
Sources: ASIC Media Releases 15-214MR, 16-357MR, 22-307MR, 24-193MR; CDPP Case Report — R v Iervasi; AUSTRAC Suspicious Activity Indicators (Cryptocurrency Sector, 2026); Federal Court of Australia — ASIC v McIntyre [2016] FCA 1276; The Hype Magazine investigative report (March 2026); Women’s Weekly (April 2025); Business News Australia (September 2024).
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