A fraud case against HEX creator Richard Heart was dismissed today in court.
Proseucutors had claimed that Mr. Heart had knowingly defrauded investors and enriched himself in what they called the “HEX Ponzi scheme.” Among other things, they pointed to the alleged emptying of the HEX “origin address” and Mr. Heart’s seemingly inexplicable rise in wealth over the last few years. They also tried to make the case that Richard himself had essentially admitted it was a scam dozens of times.
Mr. Heart’s lawyers did not directly dispute this claim that Heart was a scammer who had bilked his investors for up to a billion dollars, nor that Heart himself had all but said HEX was a scam to make himself rich, but in a novel twist that is certainly to go down in legal history, they successfully argued that HEX could not be considered a scam precisely because “all of its users know its a scam.”
To demonstrate this to the court, Heart’s lawyers retained an expert evolutionary psychologist, Dr. Hans Frederick Betrüger, who testified that after reviewing hundreds of hours of footage on Richard Heart’s YouTube channel, HEX’s website and marketing materials, and Richard Heart’s Twitter account, that there was “no biological basis for believing that any human being—even the most inexperienced or unintelligent among us—could possibly believe HEX was anything other than a scam.”
The jury was convinced by Dr. Betrüger’s expert testimony and unanimously voted to dismiss the case against Mr. Heart on the grounds that HEX is not a scam because everybody knows it is a scam.
