It's really alarming to see that there are actually people out there who pay $400 (!) for this obvious scam. They might have bought some of the 6 million premined coins from Jaap Turlouw.
I've even seen some "trading experts" on youtube and twitter who told people to sell their altcoins for bitcoin in order to get these "free coins". Is it really that easy to manipulate the market by some criminals from the Ukraine?
What did they do? (Template for future scammers)
- Set up a nice website and upload a video with a rocket to the moon. Add some random people to your "team"
- Write prepaid articles in press, such as lenta.ru, forklog, forbes, and so on, imposting themself as an original segwit2x.
- Ignore or delete any technical questions about the coin. (You can't answer them anyway because you don't have someone in your "team" who knows much about blockchain technology)
- Set up a github repo with code you copied from another repo
- Add some scam code that gives you free premined coins. Additionally you can add a few lines of irrelevant code such as changing some names. (Most people won't verify what's in the repo anyway. It would take too much time for them as they are here for the quick money.)
- Ask some exchanges to add your scam coin. They won't say no as they will also earn money with your scam.
- Finally: Make a lot of money by selling your premined coins
I never expected defrauding people will be that easy. This will definitely not be the last fake fork. A lot of other "teams" will try the same thing and I'm sure it will work.