Topic: [SCAM] MASS.NETWORK - page 3. (Read 16797 times)

@Know-ledger: thanks for sharing your side of story.

I have few questions to you, which whould tremendously help understanding the pucture:

1. What is your name, first of all? Are you Alex Kontegna, or Alexey Oschepkov, or both?

2. Are you the one who was posting under the "massnetwork" account on Bitcointalk? If not, then who that was?

The issues you point out are worthy attention and I will do my best to help ease any fears that I am responsible for an abuse or fraud.

1)
Whitepaper creation being the responsibility.
First of all, I am proud of my work. Now, as I moved along researching the matter and a few months have passed, I would probably put some things in a different light, but generally, I still think that as long as programmatic ads are still there, ad-blocking will be growing, meaning that the ad industry will need to find ways around it.

2)
Intellectual involvement meaning ability to affect implementation.
I have to disagree with you here. There were no means for me to actually affect the implementation. As I have already mentioned, the core of my conflict with Mass CTO, Pankov, was that he was not making sense to me. At least I could not understand how exactly is he going to merge the service into the RTB framework. I mean who will pay who for what by what means. I have asked that question many times, with no answer. I still think Mass is a promising project with unique positioning. There’s just no reason for you to blame me as I have never envisioned or planned any pre-programmed failure.

3)
Russian issue.
Here I would agree with you. Russia has been a controversial place and international legal entity for decades, but in 2014, after invading Ukraine, it became illegitimate. As a matter of fact, it became illegitimate even earlier, with faked parliament and presidential elections, as it is obvious to anyone who believes Carl Friedrich Gauss more than Putin:
(http://politika.eizvestia.com/vybory-2012/full/matematicheskoe-dokazatelstvo-falsifikacij-na-vyborah-grafika
http://trv-science.ru/2011/12/20/matematika-vyborov-2011/
[Suspicious link removed]/@nikolayistomin/378008
…
…
there are tons of more evidence).

I am proud to say that I have officially left Russia and asked for EU residence right after the Crimean events, for that exact reason not to be associated with the massive crime. So you probably should at least consider the fact that I have to deal with my native state already being occupied by criminals, while you are only facing mere threat from occasional outside guests. And I support the point of view asking anyone with potentially legit intentions “what the hell are doing in Russia?”. That is exactly what I meant in my item #7 concerning giving to the Mass management.

Who could be more involved than the person that wrote the whitepaper which is the whole basis for the project? Surely the white paper would be written by someone intimately familiar with the end result and the strategy used to get there. By your own admission, you have been compensated for the work and have not been affected by the collapse of the project, other than becoming one of the fall guys. If it is true the project was based in Russia, it is unlikely anyone will see their "investment" again.

I think we should clear this case out and we need many experts in the investigation so that they can help us to catch the theft. Although Pianist has left the MASS NETWORK since december, I want to accuse him of not warning the people stay away from this project. If he showed up sooner, there would not be many investors around. Damn.

copying from the original ANN thread and my post there https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17935505. I do not wish to be implicated or have my reputation tarnished. I do not know if that ANN thread will be deleted/closed.


I just heard about this thanks to a Chinese wechat user who added me to ask what was going on after seeing my LinkedIn profile thanks to the slanderous post, implicating me as a "professional scammer", from tokyopotato. His wanton accusation of me are as incorrect as they are inflammatory. It is obvious from his post who he really meant to target.

Now for my relationship with mass.

I stopped working for Alexander Kuzmin and Mycelium in November of 2016 and have had zero communication since then.

I was Product Manager of another Mycelium team. I later quit Mycelium because our offices were moved to Moscow...I was asked to relocate, said no thanks, and quit.  

In August or Sept of 2016, Kuzmin asked me to help edit the website for MASS since I was the only native ENG speaker at his disposal at the time. I did that and only that. At no point was equity or profit sharing EVER discussed with me. I acted under orders from my boss at the time to edit some copy for the site and blog and setup some social media accounts. that is all. He asked to put my pic and name on the website and said I should have a title since I was technically "part of the team"... Seemed like free publicity for me, why not? That was my only mistake in this issue. For that I am sorry.

I do not stand to gain anything from the MASS ICO and never did...
I am not a scammer, never have been and never will be.

I have made MANY MANY requests to have my name removed from the site... to no avail. Kuzmin has ignored my requests.

Since I found out about this issue, which I have not paid attention to since leaving, I have since deleted MASS from my LinkedIn, since you all seem to think it is a scam and I do not want to be associated with it if it is. It was never a full-time job for me and I was never even paid to work on it!

But let me be clear: I do not stand to profit IN ANY WAY FROM MASS or its ICO... Please contact Mr. Kuzmin

I have ZERO relations with Mycelium or Mr. Kuzmin or MASS since November 2016. However, their "pm,community manager, accountant" contacted me in Jan of this year. Maybe he can answer your questions.

http://imgur.com/a/soYDb
Never heard from him again.


I am sorry for anyone who feels they have been harmed but I am not able to help you. I wish that I could. All I did was edit and write some copy for the website and various social media.

I hope this helps clear up my relationship with Kuzmin and Mass. I hope tokyopotato can remove the slanderous post about me and my current employer, thank you.

Hi, Mass Investors!


Here's my experience that I feel I need to contribute to the community since this doubt has arisen.

0) Neither me personally, nor my company (www.knowledger.consulting) have any affiliation with Mass Network or any of its founders/employees. I was just a contractor to Mass writing the white & blue papers and advising on general matters. Neither me, nor my company has ever received or managed in any way any funds directly from the crowdsale discussed.

1) I was first engaged in the project in early August of 2016 when I met Alexander Pankov (nick “pianist”) in Riga, Latvia, EU, in person. I assume, I was quite an obvious guy to get invited since I combine the knowledge of blockchain tech and ad-blocking as you can see in my blog (https://medium.com/@Knowledger).

2) Alexander Pankov has made an impression of having some deep knowledge of the subject, although I was unpleasantly amazed by him humiliating his wife more than twice publicly during an hour-long meeting. I should have probably withdrawn myself from there right away which I didn't, unfortunately.

3) Alexander Pankov initiated the crowdsale of Mass Network tokens by starting the ANN thread on Bitcointalk. I spent about 40 days communicating with Mass Network representatives while ~90% of messaging happened directly with Alexander Pankov / pianist.

4) I created the white and blue papers of the projects with Michael Malley being my proof-reader and Sam Cheng Hung being the webmaster. Those were the only contacts I had within Mass, besides Alexander Pankov (a lot) and Alexander Kuzmin, occasionally, on general topics. By that time, I assumed that Alexander Pankov has hired all the dev team members by himself.

5) Along the way, Alexander Pankov began to fill my inbox with tons of messages that were self-contradictory, controversial, and not making sense at all. I expressed doubt he could manage his way, in polite terms.

6) In mid-September 2016 I was kicked off the project by Alexander Pankov with the extremely rude wording "I don't need you in the project, being impertinent to me is your life-lesson". I can prove that to any entity and will insist that in any court should that take place.

7) Later, along the project development, Alexander Kuzmin accurately calculated my participation and let me off, fulfilling all obligations to me, after his purchase of the entire thing, with no objections from my side whatsoever. I also had relations with him in the Mycelium Card project (https://card.mycelium.com) years before, where he also behave himself as a gentleman. I have no grounds to suspect him in any wrongdoings. He was indeed an escrow of the funds, according to his own words. I have zero knowledge on how funds received during the crowdsale were used, though.

I have to mention that Alexander Kuzmin has received a number of suggestions from me that he has ignored. Specifically I have advised him to withdraw from specific partnerships that he has announced on the Mass Network website. Him not doing so does not lead me to the assumption he meant any harm to Mass Network investors, rather I suppose I have limited knowledge of the matter.

Alexander Pankov has "left the project" in December 2016, according to his own words. That happened RIGHT AFTER all the crowdfunding money were collected. We only have his word for that event, as a matter of fact.

9) In February 2017, Alexander Pankov (nicknamed "pianist") names me as a project "founder" while he well knows I am not and was not. That’s a blatant lie. It seems he is trying to blame me.

10) I have no grounds to suspect the project has let its investors down and stopped development. I don’t know why they have let this escalate or generate such a suspicious feeling in the community, I just felt I need to honestly express my view and what I know for sure.
______





Regards,

Alex
Knowledger.consulting

What role did you play in their team ? If you are not getting any response from the project managers/lead developers,you should open a scam accusation while you still have time.Try to archive as much information about your previous chats,links,etc as they would help in finding out the scammers if the decide to run away.

I'm in the same situation.

I don't understand why the did all that colu wallet thing, if they are simply gone away with ico funds?

This situation is very sad.

I have lost one month effort in signature campaign now I have over 200 million Mass Token sleeping in Colu,it's a useless token ,I don't know where we are heading now and what will be the action of investors but I would like to participate in any action that this group or the group that we are going to form .

It might have been better if you posted the actual scam accusation in here, instead of just linking to it. That said, it is stunning how much effort they have put into it and judging by the timeline at the bottom: Feb 2017 = Business software release and Mar 2017 = Mass browser release, it looks like when they need to show an original product it's all collapsed. Even so, it seems like an almost inevitability with altcoins that it all ends in tears.

See link below for evidence. Now all project staff have disappeared.

For those that arent aware:

1. mass.network ICO has completed but failed miserably to hit its target yet someone has retained all 320 BTC of investment.
2. the official site lists a team of people who are not working on the project. Some are mycelium staff unaware of mass.network. Some have never been involved with mass.network or mycelium (check social media profiles). https://mass.network/team.html
3. Original developers refused to publish escrow address, and escrow was controlled by CEO of mass.network.
4. There are no lines of communications with the project. No slack, facebook, twitter, or bitcointalk activity. The only email address provided isn't even a manned account as there is no reply to any emails.
5. A prototype was released in October but nothing has happened since. There is no updated roadmap, only the original now out-of-date whitepaper plan based on ico hitting 1000BTC.
6. The ICO rewards and bounties were never honored.
7. It would seem all the ico funds have been taken and are clearly not used for any development or marketing activities. Check github -Prototype done in October, minor comments added a few weeks ago.No other development. No marketing or social media presence. What are the funds being used for?
8. Nobody from mycelium or the original mass.network team will respond to any requests for information.

This looks like a scam, in which $200k of BTC has not been returned to investors and there is no clear intention to develop this project in any meaningful manner. Likely the project will be allowed to die slowly with the bulk of the ICO funds unspent. These projects are bad for crypto and are almost fraudulent in their behaviour.