Greed and madness in the Berformance universe

‘They thought they could walk on water.’
– Former Berformance executive on his bosses

The day was slow to get started. Zurich was shrouded in a blanket of grey. I thought of the Berformance lawyers sitting in their offices with the expensive metal cabinets. They were probably drawing up a defamation suit against me at that very moment.
My phone lit up. ‘The bomb has dropped,’ it read. .
It was just before 10 a.m. on 11 June 2024. The message came from an informant. He recorded a voice message. ‘Full tilt, vehicles all around, police everywhere,’ he said hastily. ‘They're tearing the place apart in Erfurt right now. I assume the same thing happened in Switzerland.’
Erfurt, the capital of the Free State of Thuringia. is a medieval trading town with half-timbered houses and stone bridges, later modernised by the German Democratic Republic with the construction of stacks of box-like flats blotting out the sky so that even homes didn’t escape the clutches of their bureaucracy. Erfurt did not feel at all like a city of gangsters. It is a city of building society loans and corn schnapps. But it was in Erfurt that the Berformance adventure had begun. And now it seemed to be coming to an end there, too.
Four hours earlier, at six o'clock in the morning, the Midas special commission, under the direction of the Thuringian State Criminal Police Office, had launched a large-scale international operation. In Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, 280 police officers searched numerous homes and offices. Six top Berformance employees were arrested, three in Germany and three in Switzerland.
The authorities are accusing them of ‘commercial and gang fraud’. The alleged fraudsters had marketed supposed investment products concerning cryptocurrency. And with a return of 200 percent in three years. All of this was in one of the police search warrants that I was able to obtain.
‘Even from an economic point of view,’ said the search warrant which the officers from the Midas task force had turned up with at the doors of the suspects and potential witnesses, ’returns in the amount advertised with a tripling of the capital employed within three years cannot  (…) realistically be achieved. In fact, the advertised investment plan was never implemented after the investment was made, or only to an extremely limited extent.’
It goes on to say: ‘Knowing that the investment product did not actually exist as advertised, they directly sold the fraudulent investment model to potential investors via direct marketing, social networks or marketing events, as well as through intermediary distribution partners.’
The Midas task force assumed that the damage amounted to EUR 113 million. It was not yet possible to say how many people were affected. It was certainly thousands – tradespeople, salespeople, waiters and their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles – who invested their savings, which they had put aside over years of hard work.
The investigations continue. All those involved are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

1. Dubai all-inclusive

One year before the raid, July 2023. I heard the strange name Berformance for the first time when the company entered into a sponsorship deal with FC Schaffhausen. Roland Klein, the then president of the football club, said: ‘We are delighted to have a dynamic and forward-looking partner standing by us. The collaboration will extend beyond the name and sponsorship.’
The stadium was immediately renamed the Berformance Arena.
The Berformance website looked as if it had been put together at random. Like a yearbook created by schoolgirls at the end of their studies. It was full of faces and quotes from people who expect great things and smile confidently. The ‘we’ they invoked seemed to promise an all-inclusive life-long holiday at a resort in Dubai.
Somehow it was about the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and computer technology. But I couldn't find out anywhere how Berformance made money.
A new breed of professionals advertised Berformance on Facebook and Instagram, ingeniously bourgeois free spirits, and above all they fuelled a huge fear of turning up too late to the big Bitcoin party, where everyone had got stinking rich.
One of these guys uploaded pictures of himself in the new ‘Berformance VIP Lounge’ at the FC Schaffhausen stadium. He also shared photos of blue skies with white vapour trails from aircraft, convinced that someone was poisoning us all the time with ‘these damn chemtrails’, i.e. with finely atomised chemicals in the air. He also shared calendar sayings like ‘If you want a better return than the crowd, you have to act differently than the crowd.’ Or: ‘We are the people.’ The man had been a football goalkeeper in the past. He reminded me of Oliver Kahn, the longtime goalie for Bayern Munich, which is why I call him the Titan here. I dialled his number and told him I was interested in Berformance.
‘If you feel like investing,’ the Titan said, very pleased, ‘then it's a great thing.’ Without me asking, he added, ‘Not a Ponzi scheme at all.’
‘Maybe I want to invest,’ I replied unconvincingly, and the Titan suggested a meeting to convince me to finally stop being poor.

2. The Titan's promises

On a very hot evening in August 2023, Chinese tourists were traipsing through the old town of Schaffhausen, following a man with a flag in his hand. The Titan was waiting for me in a restaurant on the Rhine. He gave me a handshake and ordered a non-alcoholic wheat beer.
‘If you invest now,’ he began, without wanting to know anything about me. I looked at my watch. Four minutes had passed since he had said hello to us. He said that within three years – he said 36 months – the money invested would triple. If I were to invest CHF 20,000, for example, I would be promised a fixed monthly profit, paid out in bitcoins. After three years, I would have 60,000.
A guaranteed return of 200 per cent.
The Titan wanted to log into his laptop in the Berformance office to show me a pre-prepared contract. But the internet connection wasn't working.
The Titan had recently lost his job as a car salesman and was now working on a construction site. He had come to Berformance through his wife. An office colleague had convinced his wife of the matter. His wife quit her job and became a self-employed Berformance partner. She had her pension money paid out and invested a hundred thousand francs in Berformance. Every month she received a fixed return in Bitcoin.
I said that was all interesting, but what I couldn't get my head around was how someone could make so much money.
‘High-performance computers,’ the Titan explained. ‘Right now, we're investing in Norway. We're building a facility there with our partner. For 100 million and more. Underground. It's cooled with water, sustainably.’
I didn't understand where he was going with this.
He said, ‘They'll sell the power to the film industry and all the other companies afterwards.’
The film industry?
‘Avatar’ – all films today are generated with AI, and they need so much computing capacity. It's insane.’ The Titan took a sip of beer.
That was all he knew about this Norwegian facility, this goldmine that apparently no one is exploiting except for a few clever Berformance people. He knew a lot about how Berformance was structured though.
If you recruited more people, like the Titan was now recruiting me, and these people invested money, you received commissions that were paid out regularly according to a system that was incomprehensible to me. The Titan used terms like ‘below me’ or ‘above me’. Apparently, there was a pyramid-shaped scheme. The money seemed to flow from the broad base upwards to the top.
‘Chantal, who lives upstairs, is such a big cheese now, she's emigrated to Mexico,’ said the Titan. Chantal's real name is different. ‘She has maybe fifteen people under her. And they also have people under them. She works entirely from Mexico. She does everything by computer now. She earns between seven and eight thousand a month.’
I nodded in awe.
‘You know what's cool?’ he asked. ’When you build this up, you'll have a team working for you.’
We don't have to rush into anything, the Titan told me as he bid me goodbye. He invited me to the Berformance VIP lounge at the FC Schaffhausen stadium to enjoy a meal, watch a game and discuss the details of the contract.

3. The number one

The security of the Berformance website was astonishingly poor for a company that claimed to make money from the latest computer technology. If you changed a few numbers in the address bar of your browser, you could access the company's HR database.
A man named Andreas Baese was registered as the number one. It all began five years ago with him.
In the Stotternheim district of Erfurt, GDR punks used to tear apart churches at underground concerts. But the only thing that still goes on here is the fleet of vehicles at the huge Amazon warehouse. In 2019, Andreas Baese set himself up in an unassuming new white building. He called it the ‘House of Bitcoin’.
He drove to the Stotternheim headquarters in his white Audi cabriolet with the BTC logo printed on the side to give lectures on the Bitcoin boom, on blockchain, on the decline of the old banking system and on the opportunity he wanted to give ordinary people to get a piece of the action.
That was the central promise of blockchain as a public, decentralized database: you no longer have to trust the banks. You no longer have to trust Wall Street. You no longer have to trust any institution. We, the mass of small investors, can use blockchain technology to overcome the old financial world.
Baese often used the word ‘democratisation’. He said: ‘At Berformance, you are part of a group of people who have decided to take control of their own lives.’
When you watch his explanatory videos about cryptos and blockchain, you get to know a man in his late forties who wears tailored suits and cufflinks, with a pocket square with the Bitcoin logo in his breast pocket. Baese comes across as a visionary salesman, and although he produces polished sentences in quick succession, we learn little about him. Almost no one, including those who have worked under him for years, really knows him.
In one episode of his podcast, he said that he did an apprenticeship as a carpenter and then joined the German army, where he stayed for eight years and served abroad.
At one point, he sold life insurance. At another point, he persuaded people to switch to Teldafax, a cheap electricity provider with football icon Rudi Völler. With Teldafax, you had to pay the bill a year in advance. The company went bankrupt after four years, and thousands of customers lost their money.
Finally, Baese said, a colleague persuaded him to buy bitcoins. The price rose, which convinced him to ‘change the course of his life’.
What Baese did not explain in detail, however, was the fact that he had been the managing director of Blue Pegasus, a company that enticed people with cheap cars. To get one, you had to pay a deposit of  EUR 15,000. Blue Pegasus promised to invest the deposit profitably, with the returns from the deposit being used to pay for new cars. Most of the cars were never delivered.
According to a court in Klagenfurt, Austria, Blue Pegasus defrauded customers out of EUR 2.2 million. The public prosecutor criticised ‘the particular ruthlessness of the wheeling and dealing at any price’. Three representatives of the company were convicted of ‘serious commercial fraud’ in 2011. The names of the convicted are not publicly known.

4. Mountains of cash in the vault

For a while, Baese sold toy cars in Erfurt. Then he switched to a company called Bitclub, founded in the US in 2014, and there was nothing real about that business at all. The only thing that was real was the general crypto craze that the world was on. In 2017, around USD 4.6 billion were invested in crypto start-ups worldwide. According to a study, 78 per cent of these start-ups turned out to be scams.
Bitclub was presumably one of the largest crypto-fraud schemes ever. Investors were promised to invest the money in computers. These computers would mine crypto currencies, the operators claimed. The money invested would double within a thousand days. And there would be more money if you recruited other investors yourself, and even more money if they in turn recruited investors. A gigantic pyramid scheme emerged, organised in such a way that more and more people at the bottom accumulated huge amounts of money, which the few people at the top skimmed off.
Six of the Bitclub bosses were arrested in 2019. The business collapsed. The US Attorney's Office brought charges. Those responsible are accused of misleading thousands. Investors were allegedly tricked into believing that computers existed that never did. Bitclub is said to have taken in USD 722 million in this way. One of those involved has since confessed. A court ruling against the remaining defendants is still pending.
‘It didn't always work,’ Baese said in his podcast about this time, without mentioning the name Bitclub. He spoke about the arrests and the thousands who had lost a lot of money as if it were a normal sales transaction. He said: ’We are currently in the process of being liquidated by the authorities.’
Shortly before the first Bitclub bosses made their way into custody, Baese set up his own business. He called it Berformance, and the orange and grey logo was similar to the Bitclub logo in colour and font.
Baese's latest promises began at the headquarters in Erfurt-Stotternheim. One slogan went like this: ‘Financial security on autopilot’.
One of the first to hear about it was David, a computer scientist in his mid-thirties who goes by a different name in real life. ‘Baese had something very engaging about him,’ David said when I called him. ‘He conjured up the feeling that we were a family.’

In 2019, Baese convinced David of his idea of investing money in vending machines that exchanged crypto currencies for money. Baese wanted to rent out these crypto vending machines and make a profit. The money invested would triple within three years. 200 per cent return. Two such vending machines were located in the House of Bitcoin. Everyone could touch them.
In the beginning, Baese only accepted cash from investors. People brought tens of thousands of euros to him in Stotternheim. They signed a contract that guaranteed them a monthly payout in Bitcoins. Baese put the money in a safe. In the evening, he packed it up and sped off in his white convertible.
David knew the extent of the crypto hype, and that made him believe in the returns on such machines. He started to convince other people to enter the business. Believing he was doing them a favour, he recruited fifty to sixty customers. David became one of the top men in the company. By the end of 2023, he claimed to have brought in a million euros.
‘The money promised came every month,’ said David. He had dropped out a few months earlier, and it was clear that it was painful for him to discuss his experience. ‘Right on time like a Swiss watch. That was the slogan. That's what everyone always said. You know, if you'd been paid for years and years and the crypto prices kept going up – would you have been unhappy?’

5. VIP in the crypto lounge

The FC Schaffhausen stadium is located in the industrial district of Herblingen, a few kilometres outside the city. It is a massive concrete structure as charming as a remand centre. On a warm September evening in 2023, when FCS played against FC Sion, I had dusted off my blue suit and taken the train to the Berformance Arena. The Titan was waiting at the entrance. He recognised me and he waved.
In the weeks beforehand, I had checked a few things above Berformance, and virtually all the checks had been negative. High-performance computers in Norway, computing and storage capacity for data-hungry industries, AI animations for ‘Avatar’. All I found out about it was that Berformance had only recently started stating that it invested in this technology.
The promised dream returns remained as before. But way the company presented itself had changed fundamentally. Nobody was talking about crypto-vending machines anymore. There was a new logo with new colours. The name of Berformance founder Andreas Baese disappeared from the website (which several sources considered to be a purely symbolic act because Baese was still very much present).
As I approached the Titan, I thought that none of this made sense: neither that Berformance promised a dream return by investing in crypto ATMs, nor that a completely new business model should generate exactly the same dream return.
What did make sense, however, was the expansion into Switzerland. Into the investment paradise, into the richest country in the world.
The Titan was in a very good mood. He complimented me on my suit. He climbed up some stairs and hurried down a windowless corridor. Everything was as grey as concrete, including the room labelled ‘Berformance VIP’. The furnishings consisted of a blue velvet sofa, a coffee pod machine, a TV and a fridge with beer, wine and soft drinks. A few people were sitting at a long table with a white tablecloth. A large window front offered a view of the playing field.
The Titan introduced his wife, who wanted to have the word ‘Berformance’ printed on her car. She obviously saw a lot of untapped potential in me. If I invested through her husband, she explained, I would be investing under her, because her husband was already investing under her. ‘If you have three people investing, then it works,’ she continued. ‘To be very honest, I've never seen such a great system as this one.’
The result of this system seemed pretty clear – the money flowed from bottom to top.
When I asked how this system worked exactly, the others in the room looked up from their soup. They provided details to prove that they knew their stuff, until someone else came up with new details. The discussion turned into a constant one-upmanship. After a while, they agreed that Berformance was like a family. A family in which there was no envy at all.

6. The Baron of Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn

‘Berformance doesn't need us,’ said a bald man with a Henriquatre beard in broad Thurgau dialect. He showed me a business card with the title ‘Dr H.C. Baron von Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn’. His real name sounded rather ordinary, and as I found out later, you can buy all kinds of noble titles from all over the world for a few francs in some rather strange online shops.
When the Baron spoke, the others listened. He knew the answer to every question. He continued: ‘Berformance could do all this with big investors. But the risk is that if you have big investors, if one or two of them jump ship, you have a problem. They don't want that. They want to give the little guys a chance to make money too. They just need us as a cog to carry the name out into the world.’ The Baron had become louder and louder. The fans in the stadium beat their drums and ignited firecrackers, and we had to shout at each other.
‘Have you ever seen Lamborghini advertise?’ shouted the Baron. He moved his face to within a few centimetres of my ear. ’Nada! They don't need to!’
The waitress brought the main course. Chicken in a mushroom cream sauce, beans wrapped in bacon, noodles. The players of FC Schaffhausen ran after the ball. The Titan emptied his plate at top speed. The Baron barely touched his food. He talked non-stop. I couldn't understand everything. In any case, it was about the fact that he had been in hospital for almost five years after an operation. In bed, he watched a virtual seminar by Berformance – featuring Andreas Baese – which he said he liked because it had nothing to do with Asia, and he had once got bogged down in shit with Asia.
‘You know, the greatest joy in life is schadenfreude,’ said the Baron. ’In the past, my colleagues used to laugh at me. Today I have the last laugh.’
He now has about fifty people under him. All in all, he has been able to collect EUR 9 million in investments. Last month he earned 15,000, the month before 24,000, and the month before that it was 18,000. Annually, that came to 228,000. I assumed that he was talking about francs.
The Baron of Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn was, that much was clear, one of the best salespeople for cutting-edge technology that Berformance had to offer. The Titan, on the other hand, who was just getting by with odd jobs in construction and catering, was at rock bottom. The same applied to his wife, who had quit her office job. The only thing they had in common was that they had never had anything to do with computers or crypto currencies in their lives.
Hungry from so much storytelling, the Baron set about the cold food. The Titan's wife pushed her plate aside. ‘In 2025, Bitcoin will go up,’ she said. ‘And really. So they say.’
Who’s saying that?
‘Let's say: those who are very involved in it... With Bitcoin and the global economy and the top ten thousand, who actually control the whole world with their power. It's all connected.’ I nodded sympathetically.
It slowly dawned on me that this was not about understanding new technologies or business models. It was about telling the stories that people in the performance universe heard as often and as comprehensively as possible.
The Titan's wife continued: ‘We know that the so-called bull run is coming. Bitcoin always moving like this.’ She moved her hand up and down.
‘And it will go up again, and really go up, because the most powerful people at the top also...’ She paused. ’I don't know exactly how it works. But they will switch to Bitcoin. Because they just call the shots...  Cautious estimates say that Bitcoin will reach EUR 120,000. The brave say: 250,000.’
At the time, one bitcoin was worth around CHF 24,100. But since it seemed like it was only a matter of time before everyone was rich, we emptied the beer supply in the fridge. Then it started to rain. At first it was just a drizzle, then came the giant drops. The footballers trained in vain to put on a show in the Berformance Arena in the soaking wet jerseys sticking to their bodies. We waited greedily for the fridge to be refilled.

7. The confession of number eight

One Sunday, a man who used to be listed as number eight at Berformance called me. He’d been there from the very beginning. In the inner circle. He was sitting in his car. From time to time, you could hear his child giggling and his wife giving instructions.
Number eight said that he was an engineer and had invested in crypto currencies early on. He had come to Berformance through a good friend. He began to convince friends himself. Judging by the photos he posted online, he had done quite well in recent years. He showed off his Rolex Daytona, which was rarely sold for less than ten thousand, and drank from a 330-franc bottle of champagne. An Aston Martin Vantage and a Porsche Cayenne were parked in the driveway in front of his house. The Aston only had two seats. I assumed that number eight and his family were sitting in the Cayenne as we spoke.
‘In the beginning,’ he said, ‘there were two crypto ATMs in the House of Bitcoin in Erfurt. And a few of those POS devices, card payment devices for cryptos. They came from the company Walledo. So they pulled off the Walledo logo and put a Berformance sticker over it. They said the devices had been built especially for Berformance. When we wanted to see more machines, they kept coming up with new excuses. We never saw them. At the beginning of 2024, I asked Andreas Baese about the machines. I asked where the devices were. He said that they didn't exist. I asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Then he said, ‘We have to put something in the contracts to suggest to the customer that there is something there.’ I was gobsmacked. And that was the end of it for me.’
He got out.
‘I once sat with Andreas Baese on the beach in Warnemünde,’ said number eight. ’On the outside, he comes across as extremely caring towards his fellow human beings. On the beach, I told him: It's very important to me that no one is left behind by Berformance. He said he could guarantee the Berformance system because he had 100 per cent control over it. The perfidious thing is that they knowingly went along with people were investing their money from their pension fund or life insurance.’
‘Do you know where the money went?’ I asked.
‘No,’ replied number eight. He didn't sound angry, but rather dejected. Before saying goodbye, he said: ‘I know that Baese always carried bitcoins worth between EUR 100,000 and 150,000 in the wallet on his mobile phone. He also once told me that he had some hidden wallets that not even his wife knew about.’

8. Only Christian knows

Dusk settled over the concrete stadium, but the floodlights bathed every corner in a harsh, timeless light. The fingerprints on the window front of the VIP box shimmered faintly. The Baron took his phone out of his pocket. He used a special stylus to operate the touchscreen. His reading glasses sat well forward on his nose.
‘Let's go to my office,’ he said and logged on to the Berformance page. He opened a document. It looked like a contract created in Excel. ’This is a customer who has invested a hundred thousand francs. It says it very clearly in her case. Norway. Operator: to be determined. They don't tell you exactly who is where.’
Nothing in the document was entirely clear. No address, no name of a plant, a company or an operator, not even exactly which technology was meant. Only a country – Norway, which is almost ten times the size of Switzerland.
‘If I invest money somewhere,’ I said, ’I want to know where. I want to know if the operator is trustworthy.’
‘They don't advertise that,’ said the Baron. ‘Otherwise everyone would do it.’
‘The most important thing is trust,’ said the Titan's wife. ‘Just invest and build trust.’
‘You don't have to understand everything. It's like when I buy a new car,” said the Baron. ‘I don't have to get under the hood. I just care if it runs and if the price is right.’
The Titan piped up: ‘The plant in Norway: nobody knows where it is.’
‘You can't just walk in there. It's heavily guarded,’ said the Baron. ‘Only Christian knows where it is.’
By that, the Baron meant Christian Lux, who had founded Berformance together with Andreas Baese. He was the face of the company, the guy who smiled confidently in all the photos.
I had found even less reliable information about Christian Lux than about Baese. I only knew that he was the same age as Baese, born in 1976, grew up in Potsdam, was a rower in his youth, and that he claimed to have served as a sniper in an elite unit of the German army.
He also claimed in an interview that he had worked in sales for a real estate company, where he had looked after four hundred clients. It sounded as if he had convinced people to invest in property and had received commission for doing so. The company went bust, he said, but he had kept the client base. Judging by his social media profiles, he liked inspirational thoughts like ‘Everyone wants to eat – but only a few are willing to hunt’. He was also interested in accounts of scantily clad young women. Some of them were fake profiles that wanted to foist something on people, even if it was just a good old Trojan virus.

9. Really a billion-dollar company

What probably kept the system running for five years wasn't necessarily the beautiful pictures of incredibly powerful computers. It wasn't the many group photos of people who seemed incredibly happy, and it wasn't the Bitcoin price, which rose incredibly steeply. What kept the system running were the stories and promises that people heard every week in virtual seminars. The stories and promises were so exclusive that you absolutely could not afford to miss them. Unless you wanted to remain poor forever.
Someone had recorded one of these seminars, which the organisers had actually forbidden, for whatever reason.
In the recording, a few graphics proved that our pensions were going down the drain. Then Christian Lux talked about the state pension solution, which could not be a solution, he talked about war, about the system of hope that was dwindling, and about the opportunities that such difficulties offered the clever, and the clever, that was clear, were he and his friends from Berformance.
‘It's a good thing there are people like us,’ said Lux. He always talked like that. Driven by the burden of a visionary who was personally responsible for our happiness.
As a desktop background, Lux had chosen a light-flooded office that could be in New York or Singapore. He claimed he was sitting in Switzerland. After a while, he turned to the new business model.
High-performance computers. Norway.
He gathered his thoughts and addressed the hundred or so salespeople who were following the seminar, encouraging them to achieve even greater sales success.
‘We're not looking for an investor who understands the technology,’ said Lux. ’It's really and exclusively about asking the customer whether they agree with us that storage space and computing capacity is needed.’
He looked irritated at the camera. Then he pretended to be talking to a potential investor to show those present how to conduct a sales pitch properly.
‘There is a possibility,’ he said, ‘that you will get all your money back and double in a relatively short time... Does that sound interesting to you in general? Reputable company, many years in the market, huge legends in the past – there are real videos, photos and so on.’
Lux narrowed his eyes. ‘Any of you who says otherwise is lying... What do I care about yesterday's customer. I'm interested in tomorrow's customer.’
He looked sternly into the camera. ‘Now I ask all of you again to reflect. Think about the insurance and financial advisor who sat on the couch with you or your parents in the past: what did she sell? She came up with a fund’ – Lux pronounced the word as ‘Fong’ – ‘What was in this investment fund? Did you ever understand it?’
He was now talking really fast. It was obvious that anger had been building up inside him.
‘Did you go to where the oil fields are? Where the palm trees are? Where cotton is picked? Where gases are made out of the earth? Where children use shovels to get sulphur out of the earth? Did you or your parents go there, did you understand the business model? Or...' – Lux was almost shouting into the camera – ‘did it matter relatively little, and the only motivation was: secure money or increase money?’
He seemed genuinely offended that someone had dared to question his genius. Then he said: ‘End, out, eximus.’
Later, a man named Mr Bleach joined the call, who in reality has a very ordinary German name. His face was very tanned and his teeth were very white. It was said that he was somewhere in the USA and catapulting Berformance sales into new spheres.
‘I believe that this concept can really allow us to create a billion-dollar company,’ said Mr Bleach. He had the aura of a carnival character who, with a microphone to his cheek, turns a vegetable grater into the next world sensation. ‘I think everyone who’s here today can count themselves lucky. Say something nice, Christian.’
Lux replied: ‘I think it's remarkable that you just casually mentioned that what we have had in our heads for years could become a billion-dollar company... What was the biggest team you coached?’
‘Definitely over forty thousand people, and I’ve coached in languages I didn't even speak. I’ve trained people on all possible continents, making myself understood with signs and gestures as needed.’
‘Do you think we can inspire another forty thousand people to join the Berformance world?’ Lux asked.
‘I'll say keep it to us,’ said Mr Bleach, smiling. ‘We're a little family here: I'd like to add a zero.’
Four hundred thousand Berformers – that was a vision that matched Christian Lux's ingenuity. Finally, someone understood him.
Lux, now relaxed, addressed those present directly again. ‘We want to take you with us on the journey,’ he said. ‘The next four months will be crucial. And we can promise you that the journey will be even more comfortable for the top one hundred who are then on this list than for the others... So, our promise is: there is something great in store for you, and the best way to get into pole position is to generate a lot of your own sales. Then Berformance will reward you for the rest of your life.’
‘May I add one more point, dear Christian?’ said Mr Bleach. ‘We have an interim ranking here every month. A points-based ranking, as you know from cycling. I'll say: friends, please go full throttle.’
‘Well,’ said Lux, ‘sleeping, holidays – that's certainly feasible. But not for everyone and especially not if you want to be really successful.’

10. Don't question anything

A man pushed a small trolley with beer into the VIP box of the Berformance Arena and stocked up the fridge. The Berformers applauded. Later, the waitress brought lemon mousse for dessert. The stadium announcer thanked the main sponsor, Berformance. The Baron said that the investment was absolutely safe because it was protected by law. He didn't say which law he meant, but the people at the table nodded.
The Titan's wife looked at me intently for a brief moment. She obviously didn't like the fact that I was not realising my potential and hadn't invested a penny yet. The thought of my account balance made me itch under the hair cover. She said that tripling my capital would not be possible for much longer. Soon there would be a new package with a lower return.
‘Time is running out,‘ she said.
‘That's right,’ the Baron confirmed, adding a laborious explanation that had something to do with slow banks, lawyers and a Dubai package, but that the Dubai package didn't exist because of new tax laws, and so everything would stay the same, meaning in Switzerland, which meant that the package would have to be rewritten.
‘A switch from Arabic to German,’ I said, not understanding what the problem was. There was probably no problem. ‘Exactly,’ the Baron said. ‘Now it's up to the banks to move forward. Berformance has been ready for a long time.’
I was used to statements like that by now. Time is pressing. The fault lies with the others. Berformance first. Don't question anything.

This concludes part 1 of the nominated article. Part 2 is no longer online. The criminal trial against Christian Lux and three co-defendants began on 30 July 2025 at the Regional Court in Erfurt (Germany). It remains to be seen whether criminal proceedings will be brought against other parties involved.