Susan Lawrence was one of the main UK promoters of HyperVerse, a cryptocurrency operation named in US court documents as an alleged pyramid and Ponzi scheme that extracted an estimated $1.89bn from investors worldwide between 2020 and 2022. She is now a Reform UK councillor on Wolverhampton city council, sitting on its audit and risk committee — the body that independently reviews governance, risk management, and financial reporting for a multimillion-pound public budget. Lawrence did not dabble. She participated in lengthy promotional videos and webinars marketing the project to the public and recruiting new participants. She continued promoting the scheme and its iterations even after the UK's Financial Conduct Authority issued a 2021 consumer warning that the firm may have been promoting financial services without regulatory permission. The FCA's message was blunt: "You should avoid dealing with this firm and beware of scams." Her network connections run deep. Lawrence worked alongside Desmond Amey, described as the schemes' key UK-based promoter, whose company was later forcibly shut down by the UK high court for funnelling millions into the platforms. She travelled to Dubai to meet HyperVerse's alleged co-founder Sam Lee, who was charged in the US in 2024 with civil and criminal offences. Lee has denied all charges. Lawrence was referred to as a "super leader" for one of Lee's investment platforms — a status typically earned by recruiting large numbers of participants. She promoted further iterations of the same network, including one later subject to a US federal cease and desist order that described it as a "fraudulent pyramid and Ponzi scheme" with "no apparent source of revenue other than funds received from investors." Some victims who took out bank loans to buy packages reported feeling suicidal when they could not withdraw funds, with documented cases of self-harm. Reform UK's defence is that Lawrence was herself a victim, losing her pension and tens of thousands of pounds on a scheme she believed was genuine. The party says she became involved with a successor platform, HyperNation, to recoup her losses. She has not been questioned by any authority, the party says, and has no current involvement in similar schemes. The defence raises more questions than it answers. Being a victim of a scheme does not explain sustained promotional activity across multiple platforms, continued recruitment after a regulatory warning, or earning "super leader" status in the network. Reform did not respond to the Guardian's question about whether its vetting processes flagged any of this background before Lawrence's candidacy. The story lands amid broader pressure on Reform UK's vetting procedures following separate allegations about the conduct of councillors and candidates. Placing someone with Lawrence's promotional history on an audit and risk committee is not just an optics failure — it is a structural one, putting someone who actively marketed an unregulated financial scheme into the room where public financial governance is scrutinised.
