"We were informed last Monday that Evolve was only going to pay us $500 out of that $280,000," Morris said during a court hearing last week, her voice wavering. "It's just devastating."
One Yotta customer, Zach Jacobs, logged onto Evolve's website on Nov. 4 to find he was getting back just $128.68 of the $94,468.92 he had deposited — and he decided to act.
Andrew Meloan, a chemical engineer from Chicago, said he had hoped to see the return of $200,000 he'd deposited with Yotta. Early this month, he received an unexpected PayPal remittance from Evolve for $5.
Yotta was a fintech startup with the premise that instead of paying out interest, they would give you "free" lottery tickets that ran once a week. It was heavily advertised among financial youtubers/tiktokers like Graham Stephan who was a partial owner. I don't think anyone actually ever won the grand prize(still less rigged that the lottershe 
) but this thread suggests some meager wins. In January they added casino games instead of the lottery which didn't ring alarm bells for anyone.
Yotta had advertised as being FDIC insured, but what they really meant was that they used a intermediary (Synapse) who used a bank that was FDIC insured. Synapse is a middle man who held one bank account (lol) at Evolve Bank and was behind a bunch of different alternate bank fintechs.
Back in March, Synapse said they had $500 million in Evolve bank. Evolve Bank said prove it ( 
) and then Synapse went bankrupt. Since the bank didn't fail itself, the FDIC said it's not their problem and that Synapse itself was never FDIC insured (this is somehow not a crime). Other regulator shrugged their shoulders too and said good luck. There is supposedly $96 million in missing money, a lot of being from Yotta.
So I had a couple thousand in Yotta. Not anywhere near what these people did, but enough to where it's been hurting to not have access to it.
For two years, I used them with no problem, just like a bank, being told the money was FDIC insured and everything else.. just like a bank.
The difference was that I was getting higher interest rates than I could at any local banks. It was nice. For the longest time, they would give you a number of tickets based on what you had saved with them - I was "winning" maybe 50c on average per day. Nothing crazy, but it's definitely better than the local banks.
Anyway, it's been half a year now. I'm still hoping to get the money back at some point. I'm one of the unlucky ones who had theirs deposited into an account at Evolve instead of one of the banks that was able to find and return the money. Evolve even recognized that I have 'x' amount in the "synapse ecosystem" (which matches what Yotta says), but they are claiming that they hold 0 of it.
Here is a tik tok about it where a girl talks about her money being frozen and how she got it due to a youtuber she can barely remember.
https://tiktok.com/@abby.ritter8/video/7434291100145290539
r/yotta has a bunch of threads about people getting offered pennies on the dollar
Here's a comment on tik tok which made me chuckle. A little late for that my dear.
close the account. they have 90 days to write and send you a check
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The problem is that it takes forever to get FDIC insured even if you're a regular banker so all these fintech startups have to create these weird partnerships with banks that can go belly up at any moment.
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