In any story, you need a rise, a struggle, a fall – you need a cast of characters, a plot – and action. We have it all coming folks. I believe this might be perhaps 5-7 parts, but things have started pouring in from a lot of you that I could not fathom. Let me be clear – in this story, I want to stick to the facts, things that are ALLEGED (and not proven as guilt), and higher level plot points. I need to stay out of the weeds with Susie said this about Bob, and Bob maybe did this to Nancy because I heard through Brian….there’s a lot to cover here.

Chapter 2 – cue legal disclaimers

In this chapter, I want to talk about the rise of WallStreet Silver. What it is, how it grew – and how big it eventually became. In the NEXT installment, we will start to talk more about the fall of it. Further chapters may talk more about how the camps, characters, and touch on some sub plots.

Before I go further, I need to educate the audience on one particular point. 95% of the people in this story have no idea what defamation is – which is leading to a lot in part 3. I do. And, I’m sure as hell going to stay away from it – and a lot of what transpired has to do with a lot of folks not understanding the internet is not the wild west and you have to be accountable for things you say. Written defamation is libel. Spoken defamation is slander. Let’s start high level here.

So what I am going to do here, to be clear – is report on FACTUAL items I know to be true. I also have sources – and plenty of them who all have versions of the same type of thing happening to them. In addition to this, I can speak about ALLEGATIONS that are out there, as it is factual there are allegations. I also want to be clear that things that are ALLEGED are NOT necessarily true, so it is very important for a writer to say “alleged acts” rather than “acts”. Where possible, I will err on the side of caution to the accused. It is not to say I am taking sides, it is to work within our legal system to not find someone guilty on social media and thus prosecute them in the court of public opinion.

GameStop!

My first understanding of any of this came because my buddy MF, who is a former IRS agent, told me that he was looking to short GameStop. He had never really shorted anything before that I was aware of, and he claimed it was “a $5 stock trading for $38”. Mike is a savant with the books, and with this, I bought puts. I typically never “short” anything because I once heard you can have “infinite losses”. No bueno. Within a day, I got like a $600 win and was out. The next day or two, GameStop went to $450. OMFG.

It was at that point I first had heard about WallStreet Bets. This was a Reddit home page (which they call a sub reddit – I believe, as I’m not a Reddit guy too much) in which groups of people – up to 10 million of them, piled into stocks. In this case, they looked for stocks that were heavily short, and with this, many of them would pile in and buy the stock, pushing it up – and with this, forcing short squeezes.

It was around this time, I had seen people trying to post silver squeeze ideas on WallStreet Bets – and one character we will talk about more in the fall of WallStreet Silver, is the Happy Hawaiian. In a future part, I also define camps and lay out how all of these entities intertwine, like if you were making one of those boards with a mob family – meaning piecing who does what, and is in what camp. Happy is in the “contributors/DD/meme camp” of content makers who were powerful in bringing awareness to the imbalance of the silver trade that’s going on.

The owners of WallStreet Bets made millions off of these short squeezes. Many people would post “loss porn”, where it could be a right of passage to lose $50,000 in a day. Whoever was running the show – groups of “mods” or moderators, were then deleting this content. Frustrated, it was at that point I heard of a spin off group called “WallStreet Silver”.

The WallStreet Bets created a character called “Troy” I believe – who was a mascot of sorts.

The WallStreet Silver mascot looks eerily similar….

This is probably in part 15 or so in the future, but yeah, there’s apparently trademark wars going on as well. That might be sub plot 39 to the story, but here’s where we are in January 2021 or so.

The brand is formed

A group formed, and well, there was a lot of infighting. Saving some high level details for the next part, but suffice it to say, there was a power struggle and this eventually led to Jim Lewis and Ivan Bayoukhi running WallStreet Silver. I think I joined somewhere around 10,000-20,000 members, as the site grew exponentially in a short time. (Note, I’m leaving off a few others in this who were either split off and will be fighting in part 3, or are innocents and when they saw the shit show, realized what was happening and got out).

The pitch was simple – on a date on the last Saturday in January 2021, everyone connected with this was going to SQUEEZE silver. They were going to buy up all the bullion in the world – more or less. Many of us thought it was an interesting idea – but I had already been tapped out on physical. I made some bets on miners, as the idea here was that if the price of silver went up, miners would go vertical. That Sunday night, the price of silver went up like $2. I was like, “I’m gonna be rich!” As mentioned in part 1 – some of my First Majestic call options I had I got a 5x out of and sold them. That was an incredible day!

But as quickly as it went up, it came back down.

More pressure was needed.

WallStreet Silver then came up with an idea for a billboard campaign for awareness. What they would do is put billboards everywhere, and with this, get more people to come to wallstreet silver to learn about the silver squeeze. #silversqueeze on twitter took off. And around the same time that WSB was getting attention for bringing hedge funds to their knees over GameStop, WSS was making bets that they could get the same recognition for silver.

Many people poured into a gofundme billboard campaign. In no time, I saw WSS grow to over 70,000 members. Old stackers from 1980 and 2011 were re-stocking back up. Industry pros scoffed at the ability to squeeze silver. Many people like myself, Happy, and others did “Due Diligence” posts on WSS. The idea was, that hedge funds or others with deep pockets would be reading our research and using this with their billions of dollars of money.

Likewise, people started sharing “stack porn” on WSS – pictures of the big stacks of silver. Memes were created to get people to rally around the cause. And meme-like videos were created where leaders of the movement had their faces digitally added to movie clips like Braveheart to rally the troops.

WSS even partnered to create rounds – I bought some tubes of them. The url was on the round to get awareness out. You could then hand these out as gifts, tips, etc to get curiosity about silver. I thought it was genius! So – for them to pull that off, good for them. (Side note – this potentially means they have a way of getting my address. This…is concerning when you see what is coming in episode 3)

At the same time, WSS launched a YouTube channel – and with this, you would have Ivan acting as the host, and Jim as a former “banker/trader” who would land these incredible guests. In these interviews, Ivan didn’t say a lot, but always seemed to bring a positive attitude. Jim seemed like everyone’s affable uncle or older brother. I didn’t know much about these guys – but they were bringing a LOT of eyes to the cause. At this point – for perhaps almost 20 months – the machine ran. Video after video.

Sometime in 2022 – Elon Musk started following WSS on Twitter. The last check on this had….

Almost 1 MILLION followers. This is roughly about 4x the followers they now have on Reddit.

Daily – the Twitter account would post interesting news around the world. Sometimes silver related. Sometimes not. The Reddit though, apparently was starting to get accused of posting a lot of non-silver content. And, many complained about how the political leanings were not of their taste.

Still – Ivan and Jim Lewis were able to grow this “brand” to enormous size.

I had seen criticisms of Ivan online – “he’s just a used car salesman who lives with his mom”. So what. To play devil’s advocate here – I have 10 years of college and multiple advanced degrees, and there is no such thing as a “gold and silver major” – unless perhaps you are talking about the mineral and you are in one of those Canadian colleges that teach mining. Meaning – I felt the guy was trying to get involved on the silver industry. Trying to hustle. I admired it. I figured he’s working 40 hours a week selling cars, coming home, doing some videos with Jim, taking a look at Reddit in the evenings. Zero problems with that. He wasn’t claiming to be an “expert” in silver. Dude was a big fan. Wanted to get involved.

So I ended up contributing like $600 towards the billboard campaign. I had heard they were going to create ledgers and record where every dollar went. My thinking – I have GOBS of money tied up in PMs and miners. IF this campaign were to take off, and get a million people to this, then I’d probably 10-20x my portfolio. No one knew where this was going. But the billboards eventually came out, and like I said – the movement grew!

Elon was following these guys! Elon follows 150 people or so, the last time I checked. And he is following these guys? You even had Jim Lewis going back and forth with Elon!! Wow – wait – Elon needs a lot of silver for his EVs. I had heard he might buy nickel mines someday. Maybe he would start a trend of buying silver mines? If HE started tweeting about this – all of us involved would buy large islands and retire!

Many YouTube interviews continued. I had been doing some media as a writer/analyst. No, I didn’t work in “the industry”. In fact, who the hell did? Bullion store owners…work IN the industry. Wholesalers…work in the industry. You then have the Jeff Christians of the world who come up with hedging strategies – who work in the industry. But many of us are academics, writers, researchers – and we clamor for every nugget and morsel of information we can get.

WSS became a strong place for “DD”. I would often write here, and then cross post to WSS. Sometimes I’d lurk in the comments. But I didn’t spend a lot of time there, nor do I now. Reddit can be a really fun place, but it can also be a dark place of anonymous people who really don’t have a lot going on in their lives other than to make your day miserable. So, I tend to not hang out in many of these.

That being said, I felt like the dude in the matrix regarding WSS.

I didn’t know much about them other than they seemed to be doing well. I figured someday I’d do a video with Ivan and Jim to talk about some article. But I had been doing quite a bit of YouTube videos and didn’t “need” them. As best I could tell, they really didn’t have a clue who I was, or I wasn’t “big enough” for them. At the onset of all of this, I alluded to in part 1 where “galatic trader” reached out to me to do something on Reddit at 8PM. I showed up, chatted with people, and know one had any idea where I was there. I had asked about it the next day or so, and as I recall, crickets. Ok – not a big deal. I wasn’t anyone. There was zero hard feelings. I was just having a blast.

So that’s where we were until about January 2023. They were cruising along. I was happy for their success. I didn’t spent a lot of time on their reddit, and didn’t watch as many videos. Their Twitter put out some fun news from time to time, but that was that.

But bombs started dropping January 2023. It turns out, that somehow, some way, these guys were making thousands upon thousands of dollars per month. Now, this came out as part of the downfall which I’m teasing here for the next episode – but part of me was also in shock:

“how the @#$%@#$%^ are these people making hundreds of thousands of dollars from a reddit site”. (Side note, recently, I wondered how this would actually have worked with ethical people who treated each other kindly and had a professional business relationships)

My immediate next thought was, “wow – they built something very profitable. Lots of work, promotion, business acumen – good for them. And those rounds!!”.

So to score this – these two unknowns grow a reddit site to 250k users, 1m twitter followers, and had hundreds of interviews on YouTube which generated ungodly amounts of advertising and ad revenue – along with profits from rounds? Whoa.

Teasing the downfall

In our next episode….

  • Jim Lewis….is not a real name? Allegedly he never had the work experience he claimed from Merrill Lynch?
  • A writer exposed the real Jim Lewis as someone else – Jim Morrison? A DD writer then exposed Morrison as someone who did a LOT of bad things – and posted the mug shots and court records
  • How many Jims are there? A tale of 3 Jims. How a decorated former Air Force military officer (and PhD aerospace engineer) has been conflated with a felon due to sharing the same first name combined with too many low IQ people fanning the flames of defamation and even lower IQ people not able to understand the difference because they have been gaslit with lies and half truths.
  • Death threats, intimidation, lawsuits of different factions
  • Fraud with no ledger for the billboard?
  • Advertisers being defrauded based off of inflated user account numbers
  • Alleged pump and dump schemes performed by members of WSS insiders regarding miners they were about to interview which could be SEC violations.
  • Antisemitism by one of the team?
  • Endless stories of bullying and harassment – and possible hitman??
  • How many factions and groups are there actually fighting?
  • Are people’s lives in danger over all of this?

For any of you out there wondering…

  • I will not discuss company names. Period. I may discuss industries, but not companies. The best that I can tell, all companies involved were all acting above board doing simple promotion and advertisement.
  • Nothing said to me in confidence will ever be betrayed.
  • My purpose is to tell this story, as I feel that down the road, this will be picked up into a bigger story. Imagine you were watching a documentary on A&E. Even the accused have families and I want to cover this as balls and strikes the best I can.
  • I will not dox people whose identities I know (that they don’t know I know), that tried to dox me. It’s not how I roll. Even some people in this entire story I deeply dislike, I do not want any harm to come to them or their families. Many items are already moving – I’m just reporting on events that took place.
  • From what I can tell, many of you will be in court for the next few years and making a lot of lawyers rich cashing in your stacks to write checks to the suits. At some point I may use initials to separate out characters, but that’s as far as it will go.
  • At the end of this, I will be suggesting a cease fire for all – where possible. Much is broken, but there’s a particular means of decorum and how to properly disagree with people without using defamation or doxxing me or others.
  • Those “fighting” over WSS right now have not come to the understanding that the brand is irreparably damaged and you might be lucky to get a 6 pack of tacos with the advertising money that remains. When these parties get in court in the next few weeks, the mud will start to be slung. That’s going to be good infill for the book, whoever writes it.
  • Some participants in this may get out of this with a slap on the wrist. Some may have deep probe of the IRS, SEC, and perhaps even FBI from this as using the internet for a lot of these crimes are federal offenses. Some may be in civil court for years.