Worldcoin (WLD)

Business Insider reports that Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman's iris-scanning startup, hired two law firms last year to investigate allegations of financial irregularities and bribery of foreign officials.

The first probe, conducted by Sidley Austin, examined whether the company's operations in Thailand violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Tools for Humanity had been working with a company linked to a South African businessman whom U.S. and Thai officials have accused of involvement in transnational cyber-fraud scams. The company has since severed ties with that business partner.

The second investigation, conducted by O'Melveny & Myers, looked into concerns raised by a company staffer about potential misuse of funds, including personal expenses charged on company credit cards and alleged misclassification of full-time employees as contractors to lower their tax burden.

It also examined allegations that senior leaders approved six- and seven-figure payments to a foreign firm to boost the value of the Worldcoin token, a potential SEC violation.

Findings from at least one of the investigations were presented to the board, which includes Altman, CEO Alex Blania, and Spencer Bogart of Blockchain Capital. The company says it "is not aware of any facts establishing a violation" of the FCPA by the company or its employees.

The Worldcoin token is currently trading around 61 cents, down 95% from its peak of $11.79 in March 2024. The company recently laid off roughly 15% of its workforce.

🚨BREAKING: S(C)AM ALTMAN'S EYE-SCANNING EMPIRE IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED OVER ITS OWN MONEY.

Here's what people forget about the Orb.

It was sold to the world as the fix for the AI age, a polished silver ball that scans your iris, certifies you as a real human, and rewards you with crypto for sitting still. Tools for Humanity raised hundreds of millions on that pitch, pushed Orbs into more than 160 countries, and kept Altman on as chairman while the token did the marketing.

Then the story slowly turned inside out.

Business Insider reported this morning, as an exclusive, that the Orb startup investigated financial misconduct allegations inside its own walls, the first time the scrutiny moved from how it handles your eyes to where its money actually went.

And that landed on top of a reputation that was already bleeding.

Back in 2024 analysts like DefiSquared and the on-chain investigator ZachXBT openly accused the team and its backers of propping up WLD and letting insiders profit, with ZachXBT going as far as calling it one of the biggest scam tokens of the cycle. The company denied all of it, said it found no evidence of manipulation, and pointed to a trading blackout, yet the label stuck and the token kept sliding until it sat down roughly 90% from its peak.

Then it got darker than tokenomics. A Whale Hunting investigation by Project Brazen found that Tools for Humanity had unwittingly become entangled with a criminal dirty-money network tied to Chinese scam centers in Cambodia, a network that appears to have used its association with Altman's project to buy itself a veneer of legitimacy in Thailand.

Thailand is where the paper trail got loud. The SEC and the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau raided a WLD exchange service sitting right beside a registration site and arrested people for allegedly running an unlicensed digital asset business, though the company insists the person arrested was never affiliated with it. Weeks later the data regulator ordered it to stop scanning Thais entirely and delete the iris records of roughly 1.2 million people.

So trace the whole arc. A company built to prove who is human got investigated for how it harvested your eyes in country after country, watched its token collapse under accusations of insider games it denies, brushed up against an organized-crime laundering network it says it never meant to touch, and is now answering questions about misconduct in its own books.

The most surveilled startup on earth spent years demanding the world prove it was real, and the one thing still waiting to be verified is the company itself.

"Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse"

Thread of the best sections of the new @blockworks piece by @resistancemoney about Sam AltMan's Worldcon 1/18