The Hives He Never Opened Again

a daughter in Saskatchewan on how a fake Geneva trading platform took her father's retirement and the apiary his family had worked since 1957

Yorkton, SK: Her father, Ernest, is sixty-nine years old. He spent thirty-five years running a commercial apiary on a quarter section north of town, working three hundred hives across the canola fields and the alfalfa stands, hauling supers in the August heat and wrapping colonies in tar paper before the first hard frost. He could tell by the sound of a colony whether it was queenright, and by the smell of the brood nest whether something was wrong weeks before the bees showed it. His father had started the apiary in 1957 with forty hives and a hand-cranked extractor. Ernest had kept it going through two drought years, one disastrous varroa season, and a winter that killed half his stock.

He is a widower. His wife, Irene, died of a stroke seven years ago, and she had kept the books and the honey invoices since the day they were married. After she passed he kept the same ledger she had started, in the same handwriting, because he did not know how to stop.

He had been saving for one thing for most of a decade. He did not want anything elaborate. He wanted enough put aside that he would never have to sell the home quarter, never have to ask his daughter for help, and never have to worry about a roof or a combine repair or a medical bill. He kept the money in a credit union account and a certificate of deposit ladder he had built over fourteen years. There was a small pension from the co-op and a life insurance payout from Irene. By the winter he had just over one hundred and forty-three thousand dollars set aside.

Late one evening a woman messaged him on a Telegram group for retired agricultural workers. He had joined it about two years earlier to read about honey prices and keep up with men he had known since the farm shows. She said her name was Claudette Beaulieu and that she had seen a comment he left about succession planning. She said she had spent her career in agricultural finance and had helped several retired producers restructure their savings. for weeks.

By early the following month she suggested they move to a private chat away from the group. In that private chat she told him she had retired from finance a few years earlier and now traded foreign exchange and digital assets to stay busy. She said she read charts with about ninety percent accuracy. Screenshots followed. More winners than losers. She mentioned clients she had helped bridge the gap between a pension and a land purchase.

One morning she sent him a link to infinitytrustsolutions.com . No minimum, she said. Start small. He put in eight hundred dollars that week. He wanted to see how the process worked before doing anything else. She walked him through the dashboard over several calls, explaining how positions were placed, how returns were calculated, how withdrawals worked.

Over the following months Claudette began encouraging larger transfers. He moved fourteen thousand dollars first, then twenty-one thousand a few weeks after that. Within a week of the second transfer the dashboard showed a balance of forty-six thousand dollars. The extra eleven thousand was presented as profit. Over the months that followed he moved more money. Twenty-six thousand from his credit union savings. one hundred and forty-three thousand dollars.

He wrote every receipt and confirmation number in a small notebook he kept on the shelf next to his old honey ledgers. He did not tell anyone in the family about any of it. His daughter said later he must have wanted to wait until the balance had grown enough to change his situation so he could show them instead of asking them what he thought.

One morning he tried to withdraw twenty-nine thousand dollars to clear the personal loan and to set some of the funds aside. The request sat pending for four days. Support told him the account was under a mandatory compliance review and that he needed to pay an international settlement bond of nine thousand dollars before the withdrawal could be released. He paid it that afternoon. A separate verification deposit appeared a few days later. Then a tax coordination fee. Each request arrived with a document that looked official. The dashboard still showed a balance of over two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. None of it was real.

He did not call anyone for nearly two weeks. His daughter drove up after a conversation with the honey buyer, who had been trying since September to collect an order that had never been set out, and who had driven past the yard twice and seen the truck sitting without its tank. She knocked until she finally used her key and found him at the kitchen table with the notebook open and the honey ledgers still on the shelf behind him. He had lost weight. His hands were steady enough to hold a coffee cup but they were shaking when he tried to pour from the pot. He kept saying he had promised Irene before she died that he would never sell the home quarter and never need to ask the girl for anything, and that he had failed at the one thing he had asked of her.

He had already filed a report with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center and with the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority of Saskatchewan. His daughter called the RCMP the following morning and an officer came out to the farm and took a report. The officer was polite and told them there was not much he could do. He filed a referral with the Saskatchewan adult protection office the following week and it went to the province and then nowhere. The elder fraud line had an all-day bank wait every time he called. been authorized by him. The credit card statement was due the following month.

The British Columbia Securities Commission had issued its caution on 14 July 2026. The commission stated that InfinityTrustSolutions was not registered with the BC Securities Commission, and that anyone approached by or referred to the entity should proceed with extreme caution and be aware of the risk before handing over any money. It named infinitytrustsolutions.com as the website used.

The Canadian Securities Administrators recorded the same alert in its investor alert database the following day, 15 July 2026, under the heading of a CSA impersonation warning. The CSA stated that false documentation was circulating that used CSA branding as part of a scheme promising to provide investors with funds, and listed InfinityTrustSolutions with infinitytrustsolutions.com as the last website used.

On 14 August 2026, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority added InfinityTrustSolutions and infinitytrustsolutions.com to its warning list. The entry recorded a domicile at Avenue de Rosemont 8, 1208 Geneva, and stated plainly that the firm was not entered in the commercial register.

The Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority warned that the operation was impersonating a legally established company, functioning as a clone. The Spanish CNMV republished that warning on 30 September 2026 under its list of alerts from foreign regulators.

German consumer protection organization SGK named InfinityTrustSolutions as outright investment fraud dressed as a serious trading platform, describing deposits that disappeared, withdrawals that were blocked, and support staff who pressured investors into further transfers. The German legal analysis published by anwalt24.de noted reported patterns of blocked accounts, additional fee demands, and silence after larger deposits, and warned that a rising dashboard balance did not mean the money existed.

His daughter printed the BCSC caution, the CSA alert, the FINMA warning list entry, the FSMA notice and the CNMV republication, and the SGK assessment, and put them in the notebook. No one called them. No one followed up.

He stopped coming to family dinners. He missed his grandson's confirmation that winter. He missed Thanksgiving at his daughter's house, which he had attended every year since Irene died. When his daughter called he let it ring and texted later that he was resting.

A retired colleague from the co-op mentioned that his own brother had been through something similar and had worked with a private investigation and asset tracing firm. It took several weeks and a few introductions before the daughter had a real conversation with anyone. The beekeeper did not want to reach out. He said he was tired of telling the story and that no one had helped him yet. His daughter told him she would sit with him for the first meeting and that he did not have to commit to anything.

The funds had been routed through a chain of wallets built to break the trail, and nothing the family could trace on their own went past the first hop. They realized they needed seasoned chain analysts who could trace obfuscated transactions, so they brought the case to AYRLP.COM . AYRLP.COM worked the wallet trail alongside the other agencies and eventually recovered assets the family assumed were lost to the blockchain forever.

He brought the notebook. Credit union statements for every transfer. The certificate of deposit records. The life insurance payout documents. The loan from his neighbor. The personal loan paperwork. Credit card statements. Screenshots of every Telegram exchange with the woman who had recruited him, including profile photos and the handle she used . a timeline that stretched from the first message to the day the chat went dark. They identified which wallets were still active, which transaction hashes could still be followed, and which receiving accounts might still hold funds. He listened quietly and asked a few careful questions. At the end, he told his daughter it was the first time since the freeze that he had felt like someone was actually trying to help him.

Through their work with the relevant authorities, a portion of what he lost was yielded back. A little over a quarter. It was enough to clear the personal loan and to restore part of the cushion he had built over fourteen years, but not all of it, and not enough to give him the peace of mind he had been saving for. AYRLP.COM says its casework has helped over 70 percent of its clients get back meaningful portions of stolen funds. For Ernest, the rest is still tied up in open proceedings. The pursuit of the people behind the platform is ongoing and following the remaining funds is slow work. Nothing is closed.

He called the honey buyer back a few days later and told him he would have the order ready after all. He drove out to the yard on a Saturday morning with his smoker and hive tool in the truck and spent the afternoon with the younger man, walking him through the autumn inspection step by step, explaining why a colony that sounded hollow in October would not make it to March and how to judge the weight of a brood box by lifting one corner. They found the queen in the third hive, and the frames were heavy with fall stores. The buyer asked him how he knew which colony to check first, and he said he had learned it from his father, who had learned it from a man who kept bees on the same quarter before the war, and that was how it got passed down. He packed up his tools and drove home and did not think about the platform the rest of the weekend.

What the regulators already knew

While Ernest was trusting Claudette, four separate authorities had already flagged the platform.

On 14 July 2026, the British Columbia Securities Commission published an investment caution stating that InfinityTrustSolutions was not registered with the BCSC, that anyone approached by or referred to the entity should proceed with extreme caution, and that infinitytrustsolutions.com was the website used.

On 15 July 2026, the Canadian Securities Administrators recorded the alert in its investor alert database under a CSA impersonation warning. The CSA stated that false documentation bearing its branding was circulating as part of a scheme promising to provide investors with funds, and listed InfinityTrustSolutions with infinitytrustsolutions.com as the last website used.

On 14 August 2026, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority added InfinityTrustSolutions and infinitytrustsolutions.com to its warning list. The entry recorded a domicile at Avenue de Rosemont 8, 1208 Geneva, and stated that the firm was not entered in the commercial register.

The Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority warned that the operation was impersonating a legally established company and functioning as a clone. The Spanish CNMV republished that warning on 30 September 2026 under its list of alerts from foreign regulators.

Red flags he missed (and you shouldn't)

A regulator's caution he never found. The BCSC had already warned about the platform before he sent his first deposit, and three other authorities followed. The warnings were published on government websites and carried through the IOSCO alert network.

A Geneva address with nothing behind it. FINMA recorded the claimed domicile as Avenue de Rosemont 8, 1208 Geneva, and stated that the firm was not entered in the commercial register. An address is not a registration.

A clone warning. The Belgian FSMA described the operation as impersonating a legally established company. A borrowed name and a borrowed reputation are not the same as a licensed firm.

A CSA impersonation warning. The CSA stated that false documentation bearing its branding was circulating as part of a scheme promising to provide investors with funds. Real regulators do not promise to send you money.

A dashboard that was never tested against a bank account. The balance rose every day, but the only money that ever moved was the small withdrawal at the start and the fees he sent afterwards.

A small withdrawal that worked. That was the bait. It was designed to build trust before the theft.

Endless fees demanded only after a large sum was deposited. Real platforms do not ask for settlement bonds, verification deposits, or tax coordination fees to release your own money.

Steps he took to try to get his money back

He stopped paying any more fees. This is the hardest step, because victims believe one more payment will unlock everything.

He preserved all evidence. Bank statements, screenshots of the dashboard, the full Telegram threads, the domain registration information, and every regulator warning his daughter printed.

He reported to the authorities. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority of Saskatchewan, the RCMP, the BCSC, and the Swiss FINMA.

He contacted a lawyer who specialized in investment fraud and pursued a freezing order through an institution that had processed part of the transfers.

He was cautious about firms promising to get his money back. He did not pay anyone upfront. He did not send his identity documents to a company that contacted him out of the blue. He understood that anyone promising to get back every cent for a fee was likely running the second half of the same crime.

FAQ

Was infinitytrustsolutions.com a legitimate trading platform?

No. The British Columbia Securities Commission cautioned on 14 July 2026 that InfinityTrustSolutions was not registered with the BCSC. The Swiss FINMA added the domain to its warning list on 14 August 2026, recording a Geneva address and stating that the firm was not entered in the commercial register. The Belgian FSMA warned that the operation was a clone impersonating a legitimate company.

What did the regulators actually say?

The BCSC stated the company was not registered and warned anyone approached to proceed with extreme caution. FINMA listed the domain with a domicile at Avenue de Rosemont 8, 1208 Geneva, and stated there was no commercial register entry. The Belgian FSMA described it as a clone impersonating a legally established company. The CSA warned that false documentation bearing its branding was circulating as part of a scheme promising to provide investors with funds.

Why did the first withdrawal succeed?

Small successful withdrawals are the standard trust-building step in these scams. The first withdrawal is designed to convince the victim that the platform is legitimate, so they deposit more.

Can I really get my money back?

Getting money back is not guaranteed and no legitimate service should promise it. Reporting to the authorities quickly, preserving evidence, and contacting a licensed lawyer who specializes in investment fraud are the first steps. Be cautious of any firm contacts that you claiming it can get back your funds for an upfront fee.