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Former UFC Champ Exposes Investment Pitch Aimed at Fellow Fighter – UFC Fighter Accidentally Exposes a Huge Scam
Randy Couture thought a fellow fighter might be getting pitched an investment that sounded too good to be true. So the UFC Hall of Famer got on the phone, played the interested prospect and let fund operator Eric McNeil do the talking. The recorded call is now at the centre of a Coffeezilla investigation into McNeil’s claims about The Onyx Reserve. It raises questions about returns, trading records and a proposal to pay Couture for bringing in investors.
McNeil denies that Onyx operated a Ponzi scheme; there has been no legal finding that it did. Couture says McNeil had approached UFC fighter Dan Ige, who was thinking about how to invest his earnings. Couture took the pitch to his own wealth managers. Their reaction prompted him to ask McNeil for details rather than introduce him to anyone else.
“You don’t want to see one of your guys get taken advantage of,” Couture says in the video. There is no evidence in the material reviewed that Ige invested in the fund. McNeil told Couture that the strategy was up more than 101% for the year and had delivered returns exceeding 100% in each of four consecutive years.
UFC and MMA star Randy Couture Asked Where the Money Came From. The Answers Raised Questions
He described trading Bitcoin long and short and said it was less risky than putting money into the S&P 500. Those were McNeil’s claims on the call, not independently verified returns. He also offered Couture 5% a year on capital he referred: bring in $1 million, McNeil said, and that would mean $50,000 annually, paid monthly.
When Couture asked about the arrangement, McNeil said attorneys had reviewed its paperwork. Then came the line made for a clip: “I don’t look good in orange, Randy. I look good in black.” Couture kept the conversation going, but Coffeezilla’s investigation focused on what McNeil said could back up the numbers. McNeil said prospective investors could examine roughly 850 trades over four years, with figures pulled from Binance and reviewed.
Coffeezilla says records in the case file named CPA David Rosenbaum as a reviewer. In a recorded call played in the video, the person contacted about that review said he did not know how his name appeared on the material and did not know the people involved. Coffeezilla also identified entries with matching opening and closing timestamps that appeared to show profits of up to $40,000.
Those findings call for an explanation; they do not, by themselves, establish what happened to investor money. Couture’s team first sent its material to Hindenburg Research, according to Coffeezilla. Hindenburg did not publish a finding about Onyx before closing.
Coffeezilla says he later obtained its case file after spotting people and firms associated with both Onyx and Goliath Ventures. McNeil has said Onyx was not executing the trades itself. He says it used a fund-of-funds strategy, passed on performance information supplied by outside partners and managers, and has exited that strategy. He says investors were able to withdraw their money. His explanation leaves a question for the claimed returns: who produced the trading records, and can the results be independently checked?