The September 2024 settlement that ended securities fraud allegations against Josip Heit and the GSB entities across North American settling jurisdictions came with obligations. One of them concerned soliciting investors in those jurisdictions. In June 2026, the Apertum Foundation held a marketing event in Hong Kong, running from the 12th to the 14th. Several DAO1 investors from settling jurisdictions attended.
That attendance is reported as a violation of the North American settlement. It happened while the refunds that same settlement required had produced no determinations, fourteen months after the claims deadline closed.
What Came Out of Hong Kong
The event was not incidental. Three things followed from it within days. DAO1 announced it was terminating its trading bot investment scheme on June 16 and its multi-level marketing operation on June 15. DAO1 was then rebooted as Apertum DAO, also styled APTM DAO and ADAO, with the trading bots replaced by what the marketing calls minerbots. And Andrew Eaton, having been in contact with Heit and other insiders at the event, told investors outside the settling jurisdictions that no refunds would be paid.
The two new Apertum DAO domains, aptmdao.info for marketing and aptmdao.io for the promoter back office, were both privately registered on June 9, 2026, three days before the Hong Kong event began. Neither site discloses ownership or executive information. A further spinoff, Run Run Run Club, appeared with a privately registered domain on July 28, 2026, also without ownership details.
The Timing Against the Token
The relaunch came as the underlying asset collapsed. APTM had fallen 84.56 percent year on year by the time DAO1 announced it was terminating the trading bot scheme. Website traffic had been declining for months. The pattern is the one this operation has repeated since 2019: the product stops working, the product is shut down, and a new product with a new name and a privately registered domain opens in its place, carrying the same token and the same people.
Nobody Is Enforcing It
The settlement violation has produced no visible consequence. Arizona is the only settling North American jurisdiction to have issued any public statement on the settlement at all, and its comments concern the refund delays rather than the Hong Kong event. In its Fifth Joint Status Report the Securities Division noted that the delays are not attributable to it, and that Heit and the GSB entities, through counsel, had indicated an intention to resolve outstanding issues as promptly as possible. The Arizona Corporation Commission then set the next status report for October 13, 2026.
Heit has reportedly made no public appearances since the Hong Kong event. The settlement he signed remains the only mechanism through which North American investors can be repaid, and its enforcement rests on regulators who have so far said nothing.
What the Settlement Required
The obligations Heit accepted in September 2024 were the entire consideration for the regulators standing down. He paid no financial penalty. He admitted no violation, and did not concede that anything the GSB entities had sold was even a security. In exchange the settling states withdrew their allegations of fraud and dishonest practices against him and the corporate entities.
What he gave was a commitment to refund investors in the settling jurisdictions, and to refrain from further conduct of the kind the orders had addressed. California’s parallel settlement required the return of all funds deposited by Californian clients, less withdrawals. The value of the bargain to the public rests entirely on those undertakings being honoured.
Soliciting investors from settling jurisdictions into a successor product is not a technical breach of a formality. It goes to the substance of what the regulators accepted in place of enforcement.
The Enforcement Machinery That Has Not Engaged
The settlement was structured in two phases, and the sequencing gives the breach its significance. Phase one is the refund process. Phase two arrives only once every valid claim is refunded, at which point Heit and the GSB entities consent to entry of an enforcement order concluding they illegally offered or sold unregistered securities, expected to carry a permanent injunction in the settling states.
The Texas State Securities Board has noted that violating a cease and desist order in Texas is a third degree felony carrying between two and ten years. That is the consequence sitting on the far side of phase two. Because phase one has produced no determinations, phase two has not begun, and none of that machinery is engaged.
The practical result is an operator who has neither paid the refunds nor received the formal finding, and who in the meantime held a marketing event that investors from the settling jurisdictions attended. Arizona is the only settling North American jurisdiction to have made any public statement about the settlement at all.
Conclusion
An operation bound by a settlement to refund North American investors held a marketing event in Hong Kong that investors from those same settling jurisdictions attended. Within days it shut down its trading bot scheme, relaunched under a new name on domains registered three days before the event, and told everyone outside North America they would never be repaid. The token had fallen 84.56 percent in a year. Fourteen months after the claims deadline, not one determination had been made. No regulator has publicly responded to any of it.
