On September 7, 2026, South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority issued a public warning about DAO1. The regulator said it had received information that DAO1 was soliciting funds from members of the public for investment in cryptocurrency and trading, confirmed that DAO1 is not authorised to provide financial services in South Africa, and noted that it had been unable to contact the operation on the contact details DAO1 itself had provided. Soliciting investment from the public without authorisation is a breach of South African financial law. DAO1 runs under the Apertum Foundation banner, the current vehicle associated with Josip Heit, the German-based businessman whose previous operation, GSPartners, was the subject of a coordinated enforcement sweep by American and Canadian regulators in November 2023. This is the second time the FSCA has warned South Africans about a Heit-linked business. The first was in November 2023, when it issued a warning about GSPartners itself.
The warning matters because of what happened in between. In September 2024, Heit and GSB Gold Standard Corporation AG reached a settlement announced by NASAA on behalf of state and provincial securities regulators. The claims process that followed was open to investors across 34 US states and six Canadian provinces, covering money placed in any GSPartners scheme from its 2020 launch through November 2023. The core promise of that settlement was that investors would get their money back through an independent administrator. Two years later, reporting on the claims process indicates that determinations have still not begun.
The Settlement That Carried No Penalty and Erased the Fraud Allegations
The terms of the 2024 settlement are unusual enough to be worth stating precisely, because they are frequently described in shorthand that gets them backwards. Heit and the GSB entities consented, without admitting or denying any violation of law and without conceding that any product they had offered was even a security, to cease offering or selling unregistered securities in the five settling states. There was no monetary penalty. And as part of the agreement, the settling states undertook to withdraw all prior allegations of fraud or dishonest practices against Heit and the GSB entities. That relief was not universal. The Texas State Securities Board recorded that the pending consent order does not apply to the prior fraud allegations against Swiss Valorem Bank Ltd., Dirc Zahlmann, Bruce Innes Wylde Hughes and Aline Lima, which remain on the record. His counsel at the time described the outcome as an important milestone, noting that it included no monetary penalty and withdrew all allegations of fraud. Heit said his customers always come first and that he was committed to refunding all eligible customers through the claims process.
That structure is the whole story of the settlement. The states gave up their fraud allegations. Heit gave up nothing financially. What he gave instead was a commitment to return investor money through an administrator, which means the entire value of the deal to investors rests on that commitment being honoured. The refunds are the consideration. If the claims process does not produce determinations, investors have traded a set of live fraud allegations against a named man for a promise that has not yet paid anyone.
DAO1 Collapsed in June and Came Back in Weeks
DAO1 is not the first name this operation has used, and on current form it will not be the last. GSPartners solicited investment through instruments it called MetaCertificates until it ceased North American operations in December 2023. It attempted a rebrand as Swiss Valorem Bank in May 2023, which was dropped within months. A GSPro reboot was announced and abandoned. Billionico and Auratus followed in March 2024. DAO1 launched under Apertum Foundation, collapsed in June 2026, and was rebooted within weeks as APTM DAO, presented as a MinerBot product. A feeder spinoff called Run Run Run appeared in August 2026. Each name arrives with new marketing and the same underlying proposition: put money in, receive returns generated by something the investor cannot inspect.
The FSCA’s warning language is the same language it applies to any unauthorised operator, and it is deliberately restrained. The Authority said that without commenting on the business of DAO1, it confirms DAO1 is not authorised to provide financial services to members of the public. It urged South Africans to exercise caution with unsolicited investment offers, particularly those arriving through social media, and observed that there are many fraudsters operating scams and the number is growing, and that South Africans lose millions of rands every year. The regulator is not characterising DAO1’s business. It is confirming that nobody has authorised it and that it could not be reached.
What the 2023 Orders Found, and Why They Still Apply
The reason a warning about an unauthorised crypto operation carries weight here is the documentary record already sitting behind the people associated with it. In November 2023, California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation named Josip Heit, Bruce Innes Wylde Hughes and Dirc Zahlmann personally in a desist and refrain order, finding that GSPartners had represented itself as a licensed bank while omitting that its licence came from a fictitious regulator in the Comoros, that it had claimed a forex partnership that did not exist, that investor funds were not FDIC-insured, and that the company had threatened and initiated litigation to suppress criticism of its investments. Texas, New Hampshire, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky and Arizona filed their own actions within days, naming roughly a dozen individuals between them. Those findings and the individuals named in them appear in the orders themselves, which remain publicly available on the regulators’ websites.
Most of that enforcement was not extinguished by the 2024 settlement, which covered five states. More than a dozen orders and warnings across North America remain in effect. Outside North America, warnings tied to the Apertum and DAO1 operations have been issued by Germany, Lithuania, Latvia and Alberta, and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority previously warned that G999, Lydian World and Gold Standard Trade were not authorised and might be targeting people in the UK. The Securities Commission of the Bahamas listed GSB Gold Standard Bank and twenty associated entities in a public notice in August 2024. The Central Bank of Comoros had already stated that GSB Gold Standard Bank was operating illegally and that its banking licence was not valid.
Conclusion
South Africa’s financial regulator told the public this month that DAO1 is not authorised to take their money and that it could not find anyone at the contact details DAO1 published. That is the eighth jurisdiction to issue a warning connected to this network. Two years ago Josip Heit settled with five American states on terms that cost him nothing, removed the fraud allegations from the record, and rested entirely on a promise to refund investors through an administrator. Those refunds have not been determined. In the same period the operation has run through DAO1, APTM DAO and a feeder called Run Run Run. The settlement was supposed to be the end of it. The warnings have kept arriving.
