Ok, here is what I think about the whole thing.
Record has been existing for a few years already.
They wanted to be on the blockchain and in order to do so they launched a reverse ICO.
The hard cap was $15 millions. No soft cap was mentioned anywhere ever.
I checked the French translation and there was no mention of a condition to be met for payment.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bountypre-venteicorecord-foundationplateforme-musicale-avec-recompense-3340176The only reference to a successful ICO concerns the length of the campaign (in the 1st sentence). If I translate it back in English, basically it says :
- that the campaign will last until the 30th of June, or until the ICO is successfully completed.
- that the token distribution will happen immediately after the end of the campaign.
- that the contributions of the participants will be tracked so that they can receive tokens at the end of the campaign.
That's all.
This is from their whitepaper :
Conditions aren't clear and there is no mention of any cap. The hard cap thing was only added to the bounty thread at the end of campaign... I guess in case there would be complaints. It never says that if the ICO isn't successful (what is successful btw ?) they won't pay anything.
They got listed before the end of the ICO.
Hard cap wasn't reached and investors didn't get reimbursed. The rest of the tokens were burned. Why burn them when you can use them to pay bounty hunters ? I guess they thought the tokens would be dumped by hunters which would lower the value of the coin. Instead, by burning the tokens, you make sure the value of the coin will rise.
Apparently, they only got 4% of what they expected (the hard cap ?). That's what their telegram manager told me.
So the way I see it, those guys thought they could sell a few tokens with this reverse ico thing. They knew they would never reach a hard cap of 15 millions so they found people to promote their project for free, knowing quite well they would never have to pay them.
They made a few hundred thousand dollars, used some of it to get listed and got some people to work for them for free. Well done.
I call it a scam, an elaborate scam, but still a scam.