Patterns & Playbook

Kiziloz's name has repeatedly been kept off the public-facing leadership of his own ventures.

• At Lanistar's incorporation, Companies House filings identified Gursel Niyazi as the wholly-owning director, not Kiziloz, despite Kiziloz being the public CEO. (FinTech Futures)
• For two years at BlockDAG, the founding team was anonymous. Antony Turner was presented as CEO while Kiziloz remained concealed. (DL News)
• The name "Gurhan Kiziloz" is reportedly a banned word in BlockDAG's official Telegram group, with messages mentioning him deleted automatically. (Cryptopolitan)

Kiziloz himself acknowledged the concealment in his December 29, 2025 AMA:

"The reason we hired Antony was because I had a few failed projects in the past."

• Lanistar coordinated approximately 3,000 paid influencers — including Premier League footballers and reality-TV celebrities — before it had FCA authorisation to provide financial services. (Sifted)
• At the time of the FCA warning in November 2020, Lanistar had not onboarded a single customer despite the volume of marketing spend. (Crowdfund Insider)
• BlockDAG used aggressive presale marketing — "$0.0000061 LIMITED SUPPLY, 95x POTENTIAL!" — directed at retail investors, despite no live exchange trading. (CryptoPotato)

BlockDAG's presale was repeatedly marketed as ending — June 2025, August 2025, late January 2026, early February 2026 — with each "final" deadline followed by another extension at lower prices.

Critics describe this as a manufactured-urgency tactic that pressures investors into buying at each successive "final" deadline. The same urgency framing appeared in Lanistar's pre-launch period, where multiple "imminent launch" announcements preceded eventual functionality by years.

When critical coverage appears, the response is consistently to suppress rather than rebut.

• Multiple YouTubers covering BlockDAG report receiving copyright takedown complaints. One creator specifically had a video titled "BlockDAG's Co-Founder Linked to Scams" removed. (TheHolyCoins)
• ZachXBT was blocked on X by the BlockDAG account, and his replies naming Kiziloz were hidden. (Cryptopolitan)
• Reputation-investigation site CyberCriminal.com has separately documented allegations that Kiziloz's organisations submitted fraudulent DMCA notices to Google to suppress critical articles about Lanistar. (CyberCriminal)

Former employees have alleged on Glassdoor that Lanistar offered staff a £2,500 prize for the most convincing fabricated five-star review on the Glassdoor platform, with £100 paid simply for participation.

The same employees describe being directed to write press-release-style articles promoting cryptocurrency presale tokens through WPRO, the in-house marketing arm — at a rate of five articles per day, each strategically pairing established assets with low-cap presale tokens to lend credibility.

A high volume of nearly identical promotional articles — published across the Jerusalem Post, Insider Monkey, Punch Nigeria, Crypto.news, DailyCoin, Finbold, European Gaming, ABC Money, and others — describe Kiziloz as a self-made billionaire and Nexus International as a $1.2B+ revenue success story.

Many of these articles carry an explicit disclosure that they were "prepared in collaboration with BlockDAG" or note that the publisher received compensation. The volume and uniformity of the messaging — same statistics, same phrasing, same narrative arc, published within weeks of each other — is itself evidence of a coordinated paid-placement campaign rather than organic editorial coverage.

The full sponsored-content corpus is documented in the source list. The pattern is best understood by reading three or four of these articles back-to-back: the similarities are striking.

When regulators in one jurisdiction push back, the corporate structure is moved.

BlockDAG was registered as DAG Systems Ltd. in Seychelles. After the Seychelles FSA issued its warning in March 2025 and the entity was struck off in April 2025, BlockDAG allegedly attempted to move its registration to Samoa — but Samoa's business registrar shows no record of the company.

Lanistar's UK collapse was followed by a pivot of operations into Nexus International, which operates primarily out of the UAE.

The pattern is to maintain the customer-facing brand while quietly migrating the legal structure to whichever jurisdiction offers least scrutiny at the time.

When Lanistar's UK fintech business collapsed under regulatory pressure and unpaid debts, the assets were folded into Nexus International and the focus pivoted to Brazilian online gambling.

When the BlockDAG founder concealment broke down following ZachXBT's October 2025 disclosures, the project rebranded as "Value Era" and the public CEO was fired. Kiziloz's own family loan was restructured. The customer-facing narrative was rewritten.

The pattern across both ventures is consistent: when accountability arrives, the structure changes faster than the substance.

The most consistent operational pattern across Kiziloz's ventures is the simplest: as soon as a person, supplier, or partner is no longer useful, the payments stop. Legal obligations are ignored. Cease-and-desist letters, invoices, and statutory demands are treated as background noise until a court forces the issue.

• Sponsorships — Borussia Dortmund, Inter Milan, the Seattle NFL tie-in, and Alpine F1 were all used to launder BlockDAG's credibility with retail investors. Reporting and rights-holder action describe unpaid invoices and continued unauthorised use of team marks and imagery long after the contractual relationship had broken down.
• BlockDAG suppliers — DL News documented investors and contractors who paid for X-Series mining hardware that never arrived, alongside commercial counterparties left with unpaid invoices and breached agreements.
• BlockDAG staff and contractors — the same investigation describes employees and freelance contributors going unpaid, in some cases for months, while presale revenue continued to be marketed as a record-breaking success.
• Lanistar suppliers and winding-up petitions — Lanistar's UK entity faced multiple winding-up petitions from creditors over unpaid sums before its eventual collapse, a pattern Sifted and other outlets covered in detail.
• Lanistar staff — former employees on Glassdoor describe abrupt mass dismissals, unpaid final wages, and being asked to keep working on the promise of money that never arrived.
• Legal demands ignored — across both BlockDAG and Lanistar, cease-and-desist letters from rights holders, regulator warnings, and statutory demands have repeatedly gone unanswered until the counterparty either gave up or escalated to court.

The behaviour is not random non-payment driven by cash-flow stress. It is selective: marketing spend, influencer fees, and sponsored articles continued to be paid because they generated more presale capital. The people and suppliers who stopped being paid are the ones whose work was already complete and whose leverage to enforce was weakest.