Topic: Biz27B-6 on Bitfunder - 100% scam - page 2. (Read 4179 times)

You misunderstood my point.

There's PLENTY of reasons why YOU (or other businesses) would want to list on the exchange without disclosure.
My point was that there's no reason why the exchange should let you.  

Hence me saying "why the exchange shoud list you" rather than "why you should ask to be listed".

Two entirely different things.  Though I'll admit there IS one reason why an exchange would let you list - to increase short-term revenue/activity (at the expense of credibility).  So rather than saying "no conceivable" reason I should have said "no valid reason" or "no sensible reason".

EDIT: There would, of course, be absolutely nothing wrong with Ukyo allowing private companies  to use the exchange - with their shares only visible to those holding them.  Then the rest of us wouldn't have our screen-space and band-width wasted on meaningless stuff of no interest or value to us.  And you'd be spared the problems associated with people buying your shares in error, not realising they weren't for public consumption.  If you do it in private you can shuffle funds between your 'transparent' accounts all you want to simulate an actual business - and if your investors are happy with it then great.

So why did you sell 500 shares at 20% of your listed price to an anonymous buyer?  Or was that a pre-arranged sale to someone who knew what your business was (Ukyo can likely easily verify that if you claim it to be the case - so would be a brave bluff to lie)?

Why, for that matter, did you sell 1 share to ME at 1% of your listed price?

Why, for that matter, do you list shares for sale (of your own) at all?  You DO realise there's a transfer function?

Why, shortly after listing, did you immediately put up 100,000 shares for sale (you took it down within a day) whilst only have a few (from memory 17 - but was defnitely under 100) shares in the hands of investors?  Did you really have private investors lined up to buy 100K shares?  Weren't you at all concerned someone not knowing the business may accidentally buy them - not realising it was a private thing?

Why, do your (supposedly transparent) accounts have transfers from your Expenses account to an unidentified account, which then promptly sends the funds on to your Revenue account?

Why, if all your investors are obtained and contacted privately, did you post some fluff news post (about unidentified celebrities doing unidentified things with the unidentified product produced by your unidentifed company) to Bitfunder - in which you actually CLAIMED that most of your actual (alleged) investors hadn't even signed up yet?  Surely you sent an unexpurgated version to your actual (alleged) investors - making it only of use to attract investors who DIDN'T know what you're doing.  Which is what you claim is NOT your intent.

There's actually one more glaring thing that makes it all a mockery - but it'll be a few weeks before I can point it out without you being able to rectify it and claim it was just a mistake/late action on your part.  You don't mind me not disclosing it yet I hope - given your own love of non-disclosure.

There's a lot of conjecture here, but let's start with the most important one.

The claim is that the statementYou might not be capable of conceiving a reason, but that doesn't mean there can't be one. I have already given one, that we want to use the BitFunder site as a way to outsource share handling for our known investors. The reasons we need to remain anonymous are our own, but if you are using bitcoins and can't think of a reason why then you are clearly using the wrong alternative currency. Also, you must have some weird parents to have named you Deprived :-)

Our investors have seen our plans to take this business from not being anywhere near worth 50Kbtc to being worth far more than that. Our plan doesn't require as much as we're raising, but the higher amount would be useful in furthering our plans. It is also expected to take some time, as our description notes.

So let me say it again. Biz27B-6 is not intended to be traded by people who don't know what it is. We are signing up investors on our own, and they are trading their own shares as they will. Since we cannot see who is making bids and asks, we can only assume that they are legitimate investors. If he wants to, and he has apparently alluded to it earlier, Ukyo can confirm that most of the investors in Biz27B-6 are new accounts on BitFunder that were created specifically to receive the shares. And yes, most of the new investors had their shares transferred to them as they paid for the shares in cash or other ways outside of the BitFunder system.

We cannot and will not endanger our shareholders and our business merely because someone who has no business with us wants us to expose ourselves to unwanted scrutiny just to satisfy their own curiosity.

And as much as we can appreciate BitFunder desiring to be the bitcoin equivalent of NASDAQ, it can be so much more than that decrepit cesspit of regulatory capture and failed crony capitalism. We have a great opportunity here to allow small businesses to have access to the same tools as were previously only available to large corporations. Yes, the challenge of identifying and handling scammers needs to be dealt with, but the way to do that is to shine light on things and not to pass off the responsibility to some authority figure.

Thank you for allowing me to respond.

Sam Pryce (obviously not my real name)

Let's be clear on one thing.

I am only stating that business description was provided, not proven, or authenticated.

I have had some messages with the operator and I am seeing what can be agreed to.
If an agreement is not reach rather quickly, then I will have no choice but to start the delist process.

Its kinda like Gigamining giving pirate a +10 on bitcoin-otc....and also meeting him for dinner in vegas.

Problem here is that by listing it knowing all the secret details (and stating as much) you gave it credibility.  Essentially, you vouched for it.

Damage does seem to be minimal, call it a learning experience?

Although lets not kid ourselves the chance of any legal action happening with bitcoin securities pretty much approaches 0.

If you admit you are "vetting" assets and one turns out to be a scam it may cause  problems for the platform in future because if people cant go after the scammer they will look to the person who is responsible for allowing it to happen, and who admitted it on a public forum  

WWND?

(wut would NASDAQ do?)

/can't be arsed to GIFY   

Exactly.

The question is, what should the process be for delisting.
Just disabled trading, tell users that the issuer has the list of users and share counts. Good luck. and that's it?
Give an X day notice, so ppl can sell off and crash the market for the asset first?

It needs to be fair to the users still.

no need to reinvent the wheel, use criteria from IRL exchanges.

market cap.  Too small for too long?  Delisted!

volume.  Nobody wants equity after the IPO pump&dump?  Delisted.

transparency.  How you make money is a sekrit?  Delisted.

we want BF to be the NYSE, not the TSX venture graveyard of dead enterprises.   

If it was to happen.


Thoughts/suggestions on what a fair approach would be?

great job deprived.  You are hereby promoted to head of the Bitcoin Police.

ukyo, please take the garbage assets off BF ASAP (or change the name to ScamFunder).  The exchange loses credibility every hour such trash stays listed.

Agreed.

After this asset launched that was actually one of the new policy requirements. Assets will need to publicly show what it is, and where the funds are coming from.
The operator did contact me back, and also saw the posts here. I have advised him to post and make himself known.

Right - I see your responsibility as being to ensure those listing provide some "proof" that they operate the business and of any claims they make in respect of its past performance.

It's down to investors to check the "proof" out and determine just how strong it is as evidence.  But if you don't do your part (making the issuer provide the proof) it's impossible for investors to do theirs (assessing it).

It was the only buy order up.  I'd cancelled my .0001 one below it.

If a business needs to raise $X or values itself at $X then there's no way it can ever have a good reason for selling shares well below the price that would raise $X.  Aside from the impact on the business it dilutes other shares previously sold.  Plus it's classic scammer behaviour

One of key things all IPOs need to state is the pricing polciy of shares (be it in batches, in BTC/share or BTC equivalent of USD/share).  There's no reason why he couldn't have stated that in his contract even if he kept everything else quiet.

I'm NOT in favour of excessive requirements in terms of ID etc.  But there's a bunch of very basic stuff that absolutely needs to be in every contract.  And #1 on that list is disclosure of the business - without that it's impossible to assess anything as, even ignoring financial issues, the risks can't be determined without knowing what area the business operates in.

Similarly, I'm NOT in favour of the exchange being required to (or liable for) assessing the viability and legitimacy of businesses.  But the exchange SHOULD be responsible for ensuring that anything listed provides sufficient information for potential investors to make such determinations themselves.  That again means the business needs to be disclosed.  It also means that (as was NOT the case with the other scam one) if a business claims a record of past profits then they should be providing SOME kind of evidence of it that potential investors can investigate to make their own determination of whether those profits look real or not.

The single biggest deterrent to scammers (and way to avoid problems down the road for legitimate businesses) is to force them to publish their contract and answer questions here BEFORE they get to start trading.  It's pretty much at that stage on BTC.CO/LTC-GLobal now.  There WAS one that got approval on LTC-Global without a thread first,  At the time I posted about it calling whoever approved it idiots.  It paid one dividend then vanished.  Since then, no business without a discussion thread has made any significant progress on listing.  If someone refuses to handle criticism/questions over their business BEFORE selling shares then there's about ZERO chance that they'll satisfactorily handle issues that arise down the line due to unclear/incomplete/bad/not adhered to contracts.

Also, on that 500 share sell.

It was one big trade, that went to someone who was asking .002 (roughly 25% of the current rate)
There is always the possibility that the issuer was just trying to push shares out into the market.
It may have also been the only buy order.

I did look at the accounts that shares were transferred to. They are all reasonably legit looking.

Again, I can confirm from public record that the 500 shares was moved from the large holding account.
That does look questionable.

As for the business, I had a hard time debating on this one. This was actually one of the first assets that got approved that was not a GLBSE asset.
It just took a lot more time than expected to go live. My issue with this, is that I have been presented with all the details that really need to be public.
I made him aware that not listing those details would cause problems, and that I honestly did not expect people would invest into something so blindly.
Judging by the purchase history, it was mostly correct.

Since then, I have setup a lot of rules and standards that must be met now to be listed on BF. Only one other asset got by early on before hand, and has
already been locked down recently until they comply.

These things have evolved quite a bit from where they started. Someone wants to get funding for this or that, without much to go on. Some have surprisingly
turned into great investments, others have turned into, well, you get the idea.

I decided a bit ago to try to step things up a notch or two. With some big events in BitFunder's near future coming up, listing will become more interesting.

As for valuation, I have seen some pretty good ones recently with big numbers sought after while providing very little.
As of right now, I will not force my opinion on people as to a min or max price the can launch their asset at.

Besides, this brings up an interesting question. If fraud was ever decided on an asset, how should it be handled? I am always open to suggestions.
I would like to think that going forward it should be less likely, but you never know when someone will just.. disappear. Such is the nature of online/anon dealings.
That is, unless you want to get super strict, and somehow enforce real contracts on all issuers, and do full id verification on all users to make sure none are puppets.

In the 'free' world, there is always a high risk when people don't use their brain and think before handing out their money.

Oh - I wouldn't be surprised of he DOES have a website and some sort of fledgling business.  But it's still a scam as he's trying to obtain money based on false statements.

The main reason it shouldn't be listed (even without his rather dodgy accounts) is because there's no disclosure of the business.  That makes it a gamble rather than investment - and turns your site into a gambling site rather than an exchange.  His 'business' is Satoshi Dice without the odds being published or verifably fair - you send off some BTC and may get back none, a small amount or a large amount with nothing you can do to assess the likelihood of the various outcomes let alone influence them.

If someone won't disclose their business then there's no conceivable reason why an exchange should list them.

Of the shares transferred to other accounts, how many of those other accounts were his own (obviously you can't tell me the answer - but it's something you should look at)?  One of favourite tricks of scammers/ponzis etc is selling/transferring shares to other accounts of their own - to make it look like there's more activity than there is and to allow them to inflate apparent dividends whilst not actually paying out much.

When you say you've locked down his ability to issue more shares do you mean he can't sell shares or that he can only sell the 1 million he already has?  There's a big difference between "he can't sell anything" and "he can only sell 10k BTC ($400k) worth of shares".  If the former then I guess the 500 sale earlier would be one of his alt accounts dumping into the only open Bid as he realised he'd been caught.

I'm failing to see how you ever thought he had a company worth 50K BTC - the value it supposedly has with 5 million shares and sales being at 0.01 BTC each.