Ninety-seven dollars bought a position, and the position came with a name: Founder. In Ashraf “Ash” Mufareh’s OnPassive, that word extended well beyond the person who created the company. It described participants buying an early place in a proposed business built around artificial intelligence, software subscriptions and the prospect of passive income. The invitation had an appealing simplicity. Arrive before the crowd. Let technology handle the difficult parts. Benefit when the crowd arrived.
The price made the proposition approachable. The title made it feel consequential. “Founder” usually suggests someone wrestling with payroll, broken software and a printer that has developed political objections to printing. Here, it offered the feeling of a beginning without requiring the buyer to build the enterprise. That difference sits at the centre of Mufareh’s public story.
In August 2025, that story acquired a concrete legal ending. Mufareh and OnPassive consented to a final judgment in a civil enforcement case brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. They generally neither admitted nor denied the allegations. Mufareh was ordered to pay a $4 million civil penalty. The company received separate financial obligations. The founder’s promise and the judgment now belong in the same account of his career.
As described in the SEC’s allegations
Before the software, the network
Mufareh’s professional trail runs through internet marketing. A LinkedIn profile under his name describes work with GDI Fusion and lists projects including ASHMAX, affiliate marketing, referral systems and downline building. Those terms describe a world in which the relationship between people can be as important to distribution as the product being distributed. Recruiting and organising a network were already part of his public professional identity.
The same profile lists American InterContinental University for 2000 to 2002 and a master’s qualification in information technology and e-commerce. These are self-reported credentials. They should be read with that qualification attached, rather than converted into an independently certified academic biography. His later OnPassive LinkedIn profile places him in Greater Orlando, linking the international technology pitch to a Florida base.
By 2020, his name also appeared on articles about artificial intelligence and marketing. His YourStory author page lists pieces on preparing an organisation for AI, software testing and video content optimisation. The subjects are revealing in a modest, practical way. He was addressing business owners trying to attract customers and manage technology. OnPassive would offer that audience a much broader promise: an integrated set of tools and a business opportunity around them.
A company with room for more “Founders”
OnPassive was established as a Florida limited liability company in November 2018 and converted to a Delaware LLC in September 2021. The SEC identified Mufareh as its co-founder and co-owner with his spouse, Asmahan Mufareh, and as chief executive throughout the period described in its complaint. GoFounders and OFounders were also names used around the enterprise. The vocabulary could shift; Mufareh remained its central public figure.
The SEC alleged that the $97 offer gave early participants positions in a multi-level structure, with promised commissions linked to subscription payments by people placed after them. Participants were encouraged to buy multiple positions. Founder enrolment ended on June 22, 2022. By March 2023, the agency alleged, more than 800,000 investors had bought over 1.12 million positions, contributing more than $108 million.
Those figures describe the scale alleged by the regulator. They do not measure satisfied software customers, income earned or businesses improved. A position and a person were different units, especially when one person could buy several positions. Keeping the units straight matters. A large number can dominate a room while leaving the most useful question unanswered: what, precisely, is being counted?
The word “passive” carried much of the sales proposition. The SEC alleged that participants were told the company would automate marketing and direct traffic to their websites. For someone weary of finding customers one by one, the attraction is easy to understand. The prospect placed considerable weight on what Mufareh and his company would eventually deliver.
- 01 / Pay $97Secure an early position
- 02 / Await launchSoftware subscriptions would follow
- 03 / Receive commissionsPromised from later participants’ fees
Hyderabad gets a flash mob; Dubai gets a name
OnPassive’s expansion acquired a physical setting in Hyderabad. In December 2020, the company announced a facility with 380 staff and plans to accommodate more than 1,000. Those were the company’s stated numbers and ambitions. Its account of the inauguration included a ceremonial lamp-lighting and an employee flash mob. Mufareh joined virtually from the United States, appearing remotely at an occasion meant to make an international operation tangible.
“The support and welcome that we are getting from the people of Hyderabad is immense,” he said. The line catches the expansive register of his public appearances: the company’s progress presented as a shared occasion. The flash mob supplies a smaller, more human detail. Even a business promising automation still needed people to rehearse the dancing.
In September 2022, OnPassive announced a UAE headquarters and an outdoor advertising campaign reaching from the Burj Khalifa to Dubai Mall screens. In that promotional coverage, Mufareh described the company as “a one-stop solution for all your business needs.” He also promoted O-Bless, a crowdfunding platform intended to support causes, start-ups and innovators. His stated ambition put ordinary business tools beside a wider language of opportunity.
By January 2023, the brand had entered Dubai’s transport vocabulary. A naming-rights agreement was announced for Al Safa Metro Station on the Red Line, to carry OnPassive’s name for ten years. The arrangement involved RTA and Hypermedia. It extended the brand into signs, transport applications and station announcements. Few advertisements are quite as conveniently repeated as the name of the place where passengers must get off.
For Mufareh, the agreement provided a public expression of international ambition. For a reader assessing his career, it establishes something specific: the company secured a prominent branding arrangement. A station name can demonstrate advertising reach. It cannot, by itself, answer questions about software performance or investor returns.
“ONPASSIVE is a one-stop solution for all your business needs.”Ash Mufareh · September 2022 promotional coverage
The arrival that mattered
The central dispute concerned the gap between the offer and its delivery. The SEC alleged that, as of June 30, 2023, OnPassive had launched no product for a fee and had paid no investor commissions. That is a dated allegation about paid products and commissions. It should retain both its date and its wording, particularly when read beside promotional announcements using “launch” in other contexts.
The agency filed its case on August 11, 2023, and amended its complaint that November. It accused Mufareh and OnPassive of a fraudulent, unregistered securities offering operating as a pyramid scheme. The promised dependence on the company’s efforts was central to its argument. Investors were allegedly paying in expectation of profits generated by others, making the arrangement an investment contract under securities law.
The August 14, 2025 judgment followed the defendants’ consent rather than a trial resolving the allegations. That procedural detail protects the accuracy of the story in both directions. Allegations remain allegations; the remedies imposed by the court are established facts. A fair account can hold both ideas without turning one into the other.
The judgment permanently enjoined Mufareh and OnPassive from specified securities-law violations and from marketing arrangements rewarding participants solely or primarily for recruitment. It barred Mufareh for eight years from officer or director roles at issuers with SEC-registered securities or reporting obligations. The scope matters: describing it as a ban on every executive job would go beyond what the order says.
OnPassive was ordered to pay $26,220,364 in disgorgement, $1,218,528.40 in prejudgment interest and its own $4 million penalty. Mufareh’s separate penalty was $4 million. The combined amount ordered was $35,438,892.40. These figures describe obligations imposed, rather than proof that the money has been collected or returned to investors. The claim against Asmahan Mufareh was dismissed with prejudice.
The order also required good-faith efforts to collect or help collect and repatriate OnPassive funds overseas. Any distribution of a fund required court approval. Behind the precision of the amounts lay the unfinished practical business of money: locating it, collecting it and deciding where it could go. The courtroom ending did not automatically put a cheque in each participant’s hand.
The name after the name
Mufareh’s public-facing story continued beyond the judgment. A community website called Victory With Ash presents him through leadership, learning, integrity and service. Those are the organisation’s descriptions of his mission, rather than independent findings about his character. They show how he wished to be introduced: as someone whose work concerned people’s prospects as much as business systems.
That personal emphasis has been consistent across his promotional presence. Whether the subject was a software suite, an office opening or a community, the language invited people into a collective future with Ash near its centre. It is possible to describe that invitation without deciding what was in his mind. The public acts, claims and consequences supply enough material.
On September 7, 2026, Dubai’s transport authority announced a new ten-year agreement giving Garmin the naming rights to the station previously known as OnPassive. Updates to signs, apps and announcements were scheduled from September through November. The announcement established a replacement brand; it did not explain the contractual reasons OnPassive’s earlier arrangement ended.
The change offers a fitting final image for this chapter of Mufareh’s career. Once, his company’s name helped passengers navigate a city. Now another name is taking its place. The larger record remains: a marketer’s invitation to get in early, an audience assembled across borders, a set of promised products and income, and a judgment that attached exact terms to the aftermath. For a story sold in the future tense, the dates have become unusually important.