How Go X Stole $4 Million from 300 People

A Scooter Startup, a YouTube Pitch, and Hundreds of Investors Left Holding Nothing

Go X promised you could 1.5x your money in 88 days renting scooters in Honolulu and Daytona Beach — and then kept your money for two years while running a business that had never turned a profit.

The Scam in Plain English

Go X operates a scooter rental business across Florida, Hawaii, and Nevada. Between July 2021 and November 2023, the company ran what the SEC now calls a fraudulent investment scheme — soliciting everyday people on its public website, through YouTube videos, and via direct phone calls and emails from its own executives.

The pitch was simple and seductive: hand over anywhere from $2,000 to $30,000 (the equivalent of one to fifteen months of rent for a median American renter), and Go X would share 50% of its gross scooter rental profits with you every month. Returns of 50% to 100% in a year or less. Guaranteed refunds. Zero risk. Less risky than the S&P 500.

Every single one of those selling points was a lie.

The Numbers Behind the Lie

Go X claimed on its website that investors had earned more than $3 million (enough to cover a year of groceries for 600 American families) in a 180-day window. That claim first appeared no later than August 2022. According to Go X’s own accounting records, the company had paid investors roughly $800,000 total by that point — barely one quarter of the number they were publicly advertising.

By the end of 2023, after two-plus years of taking investor money, Go X had paid out only $1.45 million (roughly equivalent to buying a modest house in a mid-tier American city) against the $4 million (enough to send 133 students to a state university for a full year) it collected. The company’s total scooter rental revenue across 2021 through 2023 was only $8.5 million (enough to fill about 85 million seconds of parking meter time) — meaning returning investor principal alone would have consumed more than 47% of every dollar Go X ever earned from renting scooters.

Go X recorded negative net income in 2021. Negative net income in 2022. Negative net income in 2023. That is a cumulative $1 million loss (equivalent to wiping out the retirement savings of 40 average American workers) over the entire period Debelov and Salam were telling new investors the company was a cash machine.

The Non-Financial Ledger

What $4 Million Feels Like When You’re the One Who Lost It

Numbers on a page do not capture what it feels like to hand over $5,000 — or $20,000 — to a company that promised you a way out. The people who invested in Go X were not hedge fund managers. They were ordinary people who saw a YouTube video, visited a clean-looking website, spoke to a friendly salesperson on the phone, and believed they had found something rare: a low-risk, passive income stream that could make their money work while they worked, or rested, or raised kids, or tried to survive. That hope is precisely what Go X weaponized.

The investor agreements were not just contracts; they were promises printed on paper. They said double your money. They said 3 to 6 months. They said monthly payments. They said guaranteed refund, same day. For investors who signed those documents, those words had the weight of a handshake — real, binding, human. When the payments stopped arriving and the emails went unanswered, the betrayal was intensely personal. These were people who had done everything right: read the materials, asked questions, signed the paperwork. The system failed them not through complexity or fine print, but through deliberate, documented lies.

One investor waited sixteen months before writing to Debelov and Salam that he had not seen a single dollar of return on his initial investment. Another spent nearly two years emailing, calling, and waiting before writing the words: “it has been almost 2 years with not even receiving my initial investment back which is laughable.” That word — laughable — carries a whole universe of grief inside it. It is what exhaustion sounds like after hope has been used up completely.

One investor tried for close to a year to withdraw just $3,000 (roughly two months of utility bills and groceries for a family of four) from his account. He had to threaten legal action before he got a response. Another investor wrote that she had been told she would see returns in 10 months; instead, she was watching her investment crawl forward at a pace that would take years. She wrote this in May 2023. Go X was still taking new investors as late as November 2023. The executives who received her complaint kept selling the same pitch to new people after reading her words.

Legal Receipts

Their Own Words, On the Record

“YOU MAKE $ WHEN SOMEONE RENTS A SCOOTER FROM US. WE WILL SHARE 50% OF THE GROSS PROFIT” — and — “INVESTORS ON GO X PLATFORM EARNED” more than $3 million “IN THE LAST 180 DAYS.” — Go X public website, content overseen and approved by CEO Alexander Debelov. Per SEC complaint: by August 2022, Go X had paid investors only roughly $800,000 total — less than 27% of the claimed figure.

“At any point, if you would like to get your money back, then just email me . . . and I’ll make sure you get it refunded to your card or wired within 24 hours.” — CEO Alexander Debelov, in a “welcome letter” emailed to prospective investors by Khodr Salam in February 2023. The SEC complaint documents multiple investors who requested refunds and received nothing.

“I am starting to feel like I got scammed.” — Investor email to CEO Alexander Debelov, August 2023. Both Debelov and Salam received this message. Go X continued soliciting new investors through November 2023 using the same sales pitch.

“Our investors [had] made over $3M on the platform. As we calculated the average rate of return across all markets, it came out to an astonishing 87% annual return for a typical investor on [the] Go X platform!” — Email sent to prospective investors by both Alexander Debelov and Khodr Salam. The SEC complaint confirms Go X never paid $3 million in returns at any point during the entire investment period.

“I havent [sic] seen a return on my initial investment” — written after approximately sixteen months as a Go X investor — and separately: “I have not receive [sic] a payout”; “I want to pull out everything”; “I will go to the proper authorities!” — Two separate investor emails to Salam and Debelov, June 2023 and August 2023 respectively. Salam continued selling Go X investments, including into a new Las Vegas market, after receiving these complaints.

Societal Impact Mapping

Why This Is Bigger Than One Bad Company

Economic Inequality: Who Bears the Risk When the Pitch Is a Lie

The Go X investment program was structured to extract money from people who cannot afford to lose it. The minimum investment was $2,000 (roughly one month’s take-home pay for a worker earning $15/hour). The maximum documented investment was $30,000 (more than half the annual income of a full-time minimum-wage worker). These are sums that represent real sacrifice for everyday people — not disposable capital, but delayed rent payments, borrowed savings, or money set aside for emergencies.

The pitch deliberately targeted people drawn to “passive income” — a phrase that resonates most powerfully with people who are exhausted from working multiple jobs, caregiving, or trying to build wealth with limited tools. Go X framed itself as democratizing investment by letting ordinary people tap into scooter rental revenue without any expertise or effort required. The SEC complaint confirms investor funds were immediately comingled with Go X’s general operating accounts and used to cover basic business expenses. The “investment” was, in functional terms, an interest-free loan to a money-losing startup, dressed up as a wealth-building opportunity.

Go X sold to approximately 300 investors across multiple U.S. states. Many made multiple investments. The geographic spread — Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, and beyond — means the harm radiated outward from communities that are already contending with high costs of living, tourism-driven wage suppression, and limited access to mainstream investment vehicles. When a company like this takes $4 million from 300 people and returns less than half, the damage does not stay abstract. It cancels vacations, delays retirements, drains emergency funds, and forces people to distrust the concept of investing altogether — which is exactly the kind of financial isolation that keeps working people poor.

Public Health: The Invisible Toll of Financial Betrayal

The SEC complaint does not count the sleepless nights. It does not measure the cortisol spikes that come with checking a bank account for a payment that never arrives, month after month. But the documented timeline of investor complaints — stretching from June 2022 through August 2023 — shows people enduring more than a year, in some cases nearly two years, of unresolved financial anxiety while continuing to send emails that went unanswered or received hollow reassurances.

Financial stress is one of the most well-documented drivers of physical and mental health deterioration. Studies consistently link unresolved debt and investment loss to elevated rates of anxiety, depression, hypertension, and relationship breakdown. One investor in the Go X complaint waited close to a year just to withdraw $3,000 (the average American’s out-of-pocket annual medical expense). Another spent sixteen months in limbo. This is the kind of sustained, low-grade crisis that compounds: the money is gone, the returns are not coming, the refund was promised and denied, and every week that passes makes the situation feel more hopeless and more humiliating.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

What Now?

The People Responsible. The Bodies Watching. The Steps You Can Take.

Who Ran This

• Alexander Debelov — Founder, CEO, and approximately 85% owner of Go X (Cheetah X Inc.). Maintained residences in Hallandale Beach, Florida and San Francisco, California. Approved all website content, appeared in YouTube videos, signed investor agreements, and personally emailed investors. Named defendant in SEC complaint filed July 3, 2025.
• Khodr Salam — President of Operations, approximately 2% owner of Go X. Primary direct contact for prospective investors via phone, email, and text. Sent misleading performance claims, distributed investor agreements, and continued soliciting new investors after receiving documented complaints from existing ones. Named defendant in SEC complaint filed July 3, 2025.
• Cheetah X Inc. (d/b/a Go X) — Delaware corporation, formed June 2018. Named defendant in SEC complaint. SEC seeks full disgorgement of all ill-gotten gains plus civil monetary penalties.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — Active plaintiff. Filed suit July 3, 2025. Seeking injunction, disgorgement, and civil penalties.
• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) — Monitor for any consumer lending or financial product crossover as this case develops.
• State Securities Regulators — Go X sold across multiple states. Each state’s securities division has independent authority to pursue enforcement.
• FBI Financial Crimes Unit — Unregistered securities fraud and interstate wire communications may trigger parallel federal criminal investigation referrals.

If You Invested in Go X

Document everything: emails, texts, agreements, payment records, and any refund requests you submitted. Contact the SEC directly at sec.gov/tcr to file a tip or complaint. Connect with a securities fraud attorney — many work on contingency, meaning you pay nothing unless they recover your money. Do not wait. The SEC’s ability to disgorge funds and return them to harmed investors depends on assets being frozen before they disappear.

The Bigger Picture

Go X is not an anomaly. It is a textbook example of what happens when unregistered securities offerings target everyday people through social media and direct outreach, with zero regulatory oversight until the damage is done. The answer is collective: support organizations that fund free financial literacy education in working-class communities, back legislation that strengthens SEC enforcement budgets, and treat every “passive income” pitch — no matter how polished the website looks — with the same scrutiny you would give a stranger asking for your wallet.