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Star Citizen Backers Can Be Perma-Banned For Off-Site Activity
Remember back when they did it to me, then tried to lie about it?
Who remembers back when I was saying that Sandi was using backer funded resources to promote her acting career? It’s in two blogs that I wrote. And this was her response to one such query.
Well, some enterprising Goon put it all together last night.
If you go to her online resume, then click on the media tab, you will see a series of videos there.
The 2nd video “Full Performance Capture” is from Squadron 42 shoot.
The 4th video “Interrogation Scene” is Alex Mayberry (ex-CIG producer) as the detective.
The 5th video “Reverse the Verse” was added to a RtV video and has no relevance to that show other than her using company resources.
All of the above were shot on company premises, using company – and backer funded – equipment. Now being used on her personal ventures. In fact, the 5th video has absolutely no relevance to the game or company; and was tacked on the end of that AtV segment.
None of it is true. Aside from the fact that she claims to never take a day off, yet her social media (Twitter, Facebook) as well their very own community media, are littered with vacation and holiday photos with her in them.
The woman has no shame. She is a liar and a charlatan, with zero redeeming qualities.
In case you missed this in that exchange. Since this is patently false – it will come back to haunt her at some point.
“I’m pretty confident I am the most formally educated person in this whole company“
This first appeared as a section in my Interstellar Pirates blog. I needed a link directly to that section, hence this post.
THE GIZMONDO MONEY LAUNDERING CONNECTION
Five of the six top execs at this company, Chris Roberts, his brother Erin Roberts, their lifelong friends, Nick & Simon Elms (brothers), Derek Senior – all from Manchester – through their previous company Warthog, were associated with the Gizmondo money laundering operation that was busted worldwide a few years ago.
Simon Elms, now the CFO of Foundry 42, was also the CFO for Warthog which was bought by Gizmondo and becameGizmondo Texas. Gizmondo had previously bought Tiger Telematics which was used as the entity company to purchase Warthog.
Nick Elms is also reported to have been investigated by the UK FSA back when he dumped Warthog shares, thus crashing the share price, when his brother was CFO of that company.
As the story goes, Gizmondo was a money laundering front for the Swedish Uppsala mafia headed by Swedish Gangster named “Fat Steve”. Along with his partner Mikael Ljungman, they bought the company. Simon Elms was the CFO for Gizmondo since the begining and he was also director of several companies, including Virtual Poker (of which both Simon Elms and Erin Roberts were officers). That company was quietly dissolved in early 2008, while Gizmondo went bankrupt later that same year.
It gets better.
Swedish newspapers (such as this one see translation) reported that, among other things, the crooks who founded Gizmondo were previously involved in various illegal activities. Those included distributing counterfeit money, blackmail, extortion and assault. And the icing on the proverbial criminal enterprise cake is that they were debt collectors for the Swedish underworld aka the Uppsala mafia. I kid you not. Here is the partial rap sheet for these charmers back then.
Stefan Eriksson, Executive Director at Gizmondo Europe, was previously convicted to five years in prison in 1993 for planning to distribute counterfeit money. He got another five years for trying to defraud financial institution for approximately $3 million.
Peter Uf, also a director, was previously sentenced to almost 9 years on similar charges as Stefan.
Johan Enander, head of security at Gizmondo, had been convicted for blackmail and aggravated assault.
Later in 2009, Mikael went to jail for various financial crimes and Carl Freer was being investigated by the FBI on RICO charges.
The whole thing was so freaking outrageous, that not even the US media back in the day could believe it. Here is one such accounting. Which brings us to the crashed Ferrari that was seemingly the final act that got everyone busted.
Fast forward.
Warthog, which was in financial trouble, was bailed out by Gizmondo to become Gizmondo Texas. Eric Peterson (remember him?), was made head of global studios, while Erin Roberts was studio manager of Gizmondo Manchester, along with Simon Elms. The company was supposed to have been working on various casino games which were to be released for the Gizmondo device. These are games that were reportedly never going to be released, since the device was nothing but a pipe dream. That company was dissolved before this was all publicly known.
After it all collapsed, Simon Elms later went off to Cubic motion and Nick Elms and some other guys set up Embryonic studios. Erin showed up at some point. Embryonic was later bought by Travelers Tales. Erin and Nick were there for awhile, until Chris showed up with a bag of money and asked his brother and his band of merrymen to join him on his epic quest for loot: that being the pipe dream that was to become Star Citizen. Chris then built his brother a brand new, multi-million dollar studio, Foundry 42; and gave him Squadron 42 to develop.
After I pieced this all together a few weeks ago and tweeted that I was working on a blog about it, someone else decided to do the leg work and wrote a pretty good synopsis of the whole thing and which also links all these four people to a massive international money laundering operation. It’s as crazy as you’d expect. But let me quote that person’s closing statement.
“In the end, it is all hearsay. People in the industry work with each other all the time. Bad projects happen. After all, it isn’t everyday a charismatic con man and a sociopathic leg breaker go into the videogame industry. Chris Roberts would surely want to bring people he’s familiar with onto his project. Though as time wears on and deadlines are missed and where the budget is being spent obscured, the comparisons to Gizmondo become hard to ignore. With the way things are going, we might see Chris Roberts sitting next to a crashed sports car, blaming a mysterious German for everything that went wrong.”
In 2006, Wired magazine also wrote about this fiasco.
Gamers have given this outstanding group of people over $94m to build a game. And four years later, there is still no “game”. And thus far, nobody has a clue where most of the money went.
There are those who are saying stupid things like; well they have over 200 people working, that’s where the money went. The only response that I could muster for anyone making this stupid claim? You’re an idiot.
