This is the story of a grifter, a faked death and new identity, securities fraud, cryptocurrencies, shell companies, an impossible tech gadget, fictitious employees, and stolen valor. Let’s begin.
Because a large part of my job is finding interesting news to share with our readers, I spend a lot of time browsing various tech websites, blogs, YouTube channels, and crowdfunding sites. It was during one of those sessions that I stumbled across a “revolutionary new quantum navigation device” on Indiegogo. Anything with “quantum” in the name instantly makes me suspicious, so I dug deeper and found a scam so audacious that I’ve had to contact the authorities.
I should say that “quantum navigation” is a real thing. The term actually describes a few different related technologies, but they’re all part of cutting-edge research that has only gained traction in the past couple of years—the kind of thing being funded by organizations like DARPA. Existing quantum navigation “devices” are just prototypes that have only recently been deployed in a few test settings.
The First Red Flags
Knowing what real quantum navigation tech looks like, this device, strangely named “The Sword of Durandal,” sure looks ambitious.
Only renders exist, but it will supposedly look a lot like existing handheld GPS devices. Somehow, that compact device will contain all of the fancy quantum tech necessary for navigation, the batteries to power that, and a nice full-color display.
For comparison, consider Ironstone Opal, which is “a compact yet powerful quantum navigation system” prototype being built by Q-CTRL—a legitimate company and a leader in this field.
Their single colinear Q-CTRL scalar quantum magnetometer alone is too large to fit in The Sword of Durandal’s enclosure. And that is just one small part of the complete system, which is much, much larger.
A diagram claims that The Sword of Durandal contains an atomic clock, an atom chip interferometer, a micro vacuum chamber and pump, and a VCSEL laser. How those work to achieve quantum navigation is anyone’s guess.
The video on the campaign page doesn’t help clarify anything. It’s AI-generated, consisting entirely of tech buzz words and weird fearmongering:
Any reasonable person would be skeptical at this point. But what if there is some scientific genius behind the scenes with a major quantum breakthrough?
Introducing Dr Guido Demedici
The Indiegogo page lists Dr Guido Demedici as the project creator, so let’s take a look at his story. The exact formatting of his name varies, so I’ll stick with how I initially saw it on Indiegogo.
The man has many different websites (most of which don’t work) and social media accounts. On each of those, he describes himself in a different way.
On guido-de-medici.org, he claims to be part of Italy’s famous Medici family. He references that many times across the internet in an apparent attempt at legitimacy by association. He even devotes that site’s sole working page to a brief summary of Medici history copied wholesale from themedicifamily.com, which he doesn’t seem to have any connection to.
In fact, I’m now quite sure Dr Guido Demedici lacks any connection to the Medici family or any other Medici family.
Still, a person’s ancestry doesn’t define them. So, let’s dig further to find out what the man himself has accomplished.
His LinkedIn page describes him as:
“Investor in Companies. Geo-Physicist. Chartered Professional Engineer. Investment Focus: REE mining, IT+AI, quantum computing, space, defence. Join 172,000+ newsletter subscribers – sign up: neom@samarium.group”
The about section on the LinkedIn page further makes the claim:
“I have more than 28 years if experience in the venture and founder sector. Total value: 4.2 billion USD.”
And:
“My current company, Samarium Group, has managed to increase its net assets from zero more than 12 billion USD – within less than 3 years.”
Don’t worry, we’ll come back to the Samarium Group. First, let’s verify the man’s credentials.
He claims to be a Doctor of Philosophy with an engineering PhD from Austria’s Universität Innsbruck, which he says he attended from September of 1986 to October of 1993.
Searching on Google Scholar, I can’t find any mention of a relevant Guido Demedici. In Italian, “de” simply means “of” or “from” when found in a surname. But even searching variations and “Medici” alone doesn’t yield anything.
It seems odd to me that a physicist working on groundbreaking quantum tech hasn’t published a single paper. Interestingly, he does have a handful of repositories on his GitHub page and the ones that have actual content within are related to crypto (this is foreshadowing).
That said, his YouTube channel does show him “in the quantum lab” in a video from April of 2025:
(Yes, that is Google’s Sycamore quantum computer in the background. Yes, the audio seems to be missing for some reason.)
But Dr Guido Demedici is also a working renaissance man, which we know because of his Fiverr profile that he uses to offer information security services to anyone with at least $980 to spare. He has reviews there from as recently as a year ago. Those reviews are all five stars and come from a total of three clients, located in Bulgaria, Pakistan, and Nigeria, respectively.
To find out why he needs the money, it only makes sense for us to take a look at his companies to see what they’re all about.
Samarium Group
Depending on the site or profile you’re looking at, Samarium Group has assets (or at least a valuation) somewhere between $4.2B and $18B.
That’s pretty incredible for a company that only lists two people on LinkedIn: Dr Guido DeMedici (CEO) and Jennifer DeMedici (Director).
What does the Samarium Group do? Well, your guess is as good as mine. The samarium.group website, which has some neat early ‘00s-inspired web design, is very vague.
Most of it seems related to investment and acquisitions. And Dr Guido DeMedici himself has posted on several social networks that they’re looking to make more acquisitions—but only of entities pulling in at least $1M in earnings.
Samarium Group uses lots of buzz words that are popular in the world of venture capital, including “AI” and “quantum.” But for a company working with such vast sums of money, they don’t list a single acquisition or investment.
They even helpfully provide their CIK (Central Index Key) for the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) in the United States. But that number, 0002074139, doesn’t return any filings results from the SEC’s EDGAR (the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system).
Though in addition to The Sword of Durandal, they do list another project: The CAL SHALOUD NET.
That is supposed to be some sort of quantum replacement for the internet. As you would expect, it works “by taking advantage of quantum physics effects.”
If that sounds farfetched, consider this quote:
“The underlying scientific basis has been awarded in the year 2022 the Nobel Prize for Physics.”
The emphasis there is mine, because if you check the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, you’ll see that it was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with entangled photons. Fascinating stuff, but only tangentially related to whatever would supposedly drive The CAL SHALOUD NET.
But Samarium Group isn’t Dr Guido Demedici’s only company. At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the man was also in the crypto game.
The House of Medici LLC
The House of Medici LLC, sometimes referred to as The House of Medici Corp, is the cryptocurrency arm of Dr Guido Demedici’s organization.
LinkedIn lists three people in the company: Dr Guido Demedici, Danielle Medici, and Steve Galvez.
As far as I can tell, Steve Galvez doesn’t have any real involvement in any of this. He’s a designer and I think he might have created some of the visual assets for The House of Medici LLC—probably as a freelancer.
My initial assumption was that Danielle Medici is Dr Guido Demedici’s daughter and Jennifer is his wife. But I was very wrong about that, as you’ll find out later.
The House of Medici LLC appears to be your typical cryptocurrency mill. They’ve launched crypto coins and tokens, along with NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens).
None of those had saw any adoption or success. According to Etherscan, one of them, called Samarium Group Common Shares, only had a single transfer: 100 trillion to House of Medici Corporation.
But things get much, much more interesting when you pull that thread.
While researching those cryptocurrencies, I found came across an OSC (Ontario Securities Commission) Bulletin issued on February 8th, 2018.
That names one Volkmar Guido Hable and alleges that Hable committed securities violations related to his work as the Executive Vice President of Mining and Exploration of Samaranta. The same bulletin states that:
“On February 18, 2013, Samarium Group Holding (Samarium), submitted a letter to Samaranta indicating it was going to make a take-over bid for at least 51% of Samaranta’s shares at $0.12 per share. The letter was signed by Hable, and listed Hable as one of Samarium’s directors.”
For those who care to give it a read, the bulletin also describes many other financial and corporate shenanigans. Including a false registration of Samarium Group (Holding) Pte. Ltd. as an entity incorporated in Singapore.
But that leads to an obvious question:
Who Is Volkmar Guido Hable?
Volkmar Guido Hable is Dr Guido Demedici. They are the same man, but with very different backgrounds and facial hair styles. He never claimed any Medici ancestry when he was still using the Hable name, of course.
There are numerous chains of evidence proving that Hable and Demedici are one and the same, including that “Dr. Guido De’Medici” on Instagram still has the handle volkmar_therock. You can also see that they’re the same man if you look on YouTube, rather than at the stock image on Demedici’s LinkedIn page.
If that weren’t enough, The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) published an alert back in 2018 notifying the public that Hable was using the name DeMedici and telling people he was the founder of DeMedici Capital Partners. At that time, they said he had changed his name to Jacob Jason Volkmar Guido DeMedici.
In a bizarre interview posted at volkmarguido.weebly.com, Hable says he was born in Copenhagen and his family moved to Sydney when he was just three years old. There, he remained until afteruniversity.
Except that isn’t true, either. That entire interview was actually from Forbes, conducted by Celinne Da Costa. She was interviewing Vickie Mogensen, who runs Waluaa Surf & Yoga. Hable simply copied the text and performed a find-and-replace to swap her name with his—he just forgot to change the feminine pronouns.
At this point, I don’t think we can trust any of the information we find online about either Hable or Demedici—at least not that he has published himself.
I did come across this post written by Chris Parry back in 2018, which highlighted many of the same tactics I found in my own investigation. Including Hable’s tendency to copy biographies and replace the names with his own in a nonsensical manner.
Military Service
Hable’s Facebook page, inactive since August 8th, 2022, says that he is from London, lives in Medina, Washington, and studied Geology at the University of British Columbia.
Numerous photos on Instagram at least imply that he was in the military, potentially deployed in Afghanistan. But those photos are inconsistent about which branch of the military he was in, his role, and even which country he served—some pictures depict Canadian forces, others American.
Hable also claims that he was a “special forces operative” in some posts. Someone close to me is a US Marine that has served for 16 years and counting, so I asked him if it looked like Hable was former military. The answer was “initial thoughts are that he is not military.”
I’ll let you decide for yourself if there is any stolen valor happening there.
The Death
Sadly, the website volkmar-hable.org has a notice saying Hable “after a short but severe illness passed away in the midst of his family.” According to that page, he died on July 7th, 2022.
Though news of his death might have been premature. You may recall that I already told you that Hable’s Facebook page was active until August 8th of that same year. There were several posts between those dates, including a geology lesson video in which Hable looks quite well.
I don’t know where he actually is today, but his last Instagram post (at least from the volkmar_therock account) was about a year ago and shows the Swiss Alps. It has the caption “View from home.”
Putting the Pieces Together
We now have a pretty clear picture and can draw some conclusions. The upcoming Indiegogo campaign for The Sword of Durandal is a farce. It is for a device impossible to make with current technology and is the work of conman.
And if you’re wondering how Demedici came up with that nice render, the answer is simple: it is just a Syride SYS’Nav XL Vario GPS navigation device.
This is a grifter with a long history of using the internet to defraud and scam people. This is a man who literally faked his own death to escape the fallout from his cons, just so he could start some new ones.
This is also a man without the intelligence or skill to cover his tracks with any kind of competency, which is why there was such an obvious digital trail for us to follow.
What needs to happen next? I’ll be in touch with Indiegogo, informing them of everything I’ve found and insisting they kill the campaign for The Sword of Durandal. I have already contact the BCSC.
Demedici, Hable, or whoever he poses as next will inevitably continue grifting if he remains free. When he does, my hope is that this article is the first thing that comes up when someone starts digging. As we’ve already seen, the man isn’t capable of scrubbing his trail.
But we still have questions left to answer: who are Jennifer Demedici and Danielle Medici?
Jennifer does not exist. Or rather, she’s a fashion model whose photo Hable/Demedici stole from a Polish retail website to create the fake LinkedIn profile for Jennifer Demedici.
Danielle seems to be a very real person, but I don’t believe she even knew about this. She doesn’t list The House of Medici LLC on her own LinkedIn page. My best guess is that Hable/Demedici simply saw a pretty woman with the Medici name and added her to his company.
Volkmar Guido Hable, Dr Guido Demedici, Jacob Jason Volkmar Guido DeMedici, or whatever he calls himself after he reads this article is just another in a long line of charlatans who use technobabble to sell digital snake oil.
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