The Winter Bears founders have been given every opportunity to publicly disclose the name of their company and its jurisdiction. They’ve been asked to disclose this information during a livestream AMA, in private DMs, in their own Discord server, and on Twitter — but they’ve refused. The fact they’ve not provided it left them open to personal liability, whether they intended to do that or not.
So therefore, in this article we’ll share all the relevant personal information required to pursue legal action against them that is known to us. Every victim should have the opportunity to submit legal claims against these criminals, whether through civil court or other entities.
From September 2021 until May 2022 these people willfully misled and defrauded thousands of investors across their three NFT collections: Winter Bears, Summer Bears, and 3D Bears. These projects have done over $10.000.000 in volume, with them pocketing over 1000 ETH in the process through mints and royalties. They’ve completely abandoned the project for nearly two months now, whilst trying to delete and cover up evidence.
Also known as: 0xNushi, Zetaleak
Real name: William Lewis Brealey
Legally registered: United Kingdom
Residential address: 32 Bodmin Avenue, Stafford (ST17 0EF)
William is the brain behind this multi million dollar fraud scheme. He orchestrated all of it, and out of the 3 founders has been in contact with investors the most. He went above and beyond, stringing investors along for months with lies of future utility and earnings.
He’s put in a decent amount of effort, like using a different name on LinkedIn, to cover his tracks for someone claiming to have “never been anonymous”. If he truly meant that then he would’ve had no problem sharing his real name to his investors, or their company name, but we all know the reason why now. Luckily the internet left us a lot of bread crumbs, and we were easily able to identify him. William used to write a lot of blog posts, in some of which he introduced himself, and through his links with PieDao we’ve come across a bunch of his social media accounts. He’s even been on a crypto podcast as a guest, so much for anonymity indeed. In exchange for a small fee we were able to find his residential address at UK phonebook.
William likes to travel abroad, he’s spent these past years in countries such as Turkey, Vietnam, and Thailand. He probably thought he could hide away in anonymity in these foreign countries, walk away with the money, but reality has caught up with him.
Also known as: Gumption
Real name: Elliott Wakeman
Legally registered: United Kingdom
Residential address: 26 Old Croft Road, Stafford (ST17 0LS)
Elliott is the creative lead behind Winter Bears, he claims to have created the artwork for Winter Bears, but we have strong indications that even that was a lie. He possibly created some animated shorts for Winter Bears that were posted on their YouTube channel, but other than that we don’t think he contributed much within his role as a creative lead. He’s mainly been William’s right hand man, adding weight to his claims during livestreams and in their Discord server.
GumptionBear has been dubbed by William as “my best friend”, apparently they are childhood friends as both of them grew up in Stafford. Figuring out his identity was a bit more difficult, but we found a clue when scrolling through one of William’s old social media accounts. GumptionBear once mentioned that he played guitar, so when we found a guitar player on William’s social media we knew we were on the right track. Especially when their LinkedIn profile mentioned “playing in a pop punk band called Gumption”. Google search confirmed that there was once a band called Gumption in Stafford, and the associated rateyourmusic webpage mentioned the band members’ names, which was the final confirmation that we needed. The band had 3 guitar players however, which made things more difficult, but through process of elimination we’ve had several strong confirmations that Elliott is the one and only GumptionBear. Same as with William we were able to find his residential address at UK phonebook.
Also known as: OphidianDev
Real name: unknown
Legally registered: unknown
Residential address: unknown
Ophidian is the development lead behind Winter Bears, we have no reason to doubt that he who wrote their NFT contracts and is a Solidity developer. He basically enabled William to pull off this fraud by writing the mint contracts and such.
Unfortunately we haven’t been able to identify Ophidian yet, he has been somewhat elusive. We know that he studied at Edinburgh university, as that’s where he and William met each other. What’s more relevant is that we have several leads that could help identify him, but they all require involvement from law enforcement, so we won’t share these leads publicly.
The Winter Bears community has requested many times for the company name and its jurisdiction to be made public, but it has been to deaf ears. The Winter Bears founders have gone completely AWOL for many months now (since the end of April 2022), only showing signs of life by banning anyone from their Discord who dares to call them out on their fraud scheme. Taking all of this into consideration they left themselves open to personal liability. We don’t even know if the Winter Bears company really exists or if that’s just another lie.
On April 25th 2022, in their own Discord server, Nushi deflects the question by claiming that it’s a private company, equally owned by the three of them.
Also on April 25th 2022, in their own Discord server, Nushi straight up refused to disclose the information, whilst also claiming that they are legally registered outside the UK. “Where and under what name will not be made public.”
Well… maybe they should have thought of that before raising millions of dollars from thousands of investors. Real people, real lives have been effected, for all we know people might have killed themselves over the financial losses incurred through this fraud scheme of theirs. Victims are well in their right to pursue legal action against them.
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To request additional information or get involved please join us in the Angry Bears Discord server: https://discord.gg/c7uj8PyUEJ
