Topic: TOP ICO Scams of 2017 (Read 162 times)

The Biggest ICO Scams of 2018


Biggest ICO Scams of 2018
Here are the various types of ICO scams that users should watch out for:

• Malware scams
• Fake exchanges
• ICO scams
• Pump and Dump scam
• Ponzi schemes
• Fake Bitcoin scam

Now that we know about the types of ICO scams, Let’s take a look at some of the biggest cryptocurrency and ICO scams in recent times:

OneCoin
OneCoin was one of the worst scams to have surfaced in the market. The whole idea turned out to be a classic Ponzi scheme. The details on its coin are sketchy, many people believe that the coin was never created. There was no working prototype and several of the team members had been part of previous ICO scams. The founder and COO of the company, Dr. Ruja Ignatov is supected of posting false qualifications on the official site.

The website was poorly designed with plenty of typos in place. It also faced technical problems on a regular basis. Even after repeated warnings from several governments, people still invested their money into the project. In fact, OneCoin scammed investors by a whopping amount of $350 million. Back in April, the Indian authorities had raided a OneCoin meeting, arresting 18 people.

Centratech
No one suspected Centratech to be a scam. Especially because it was being endorsed by celebrities DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather. The move attracted substantial attention from investors and users. The company also proposed a service that would allow users to spend cryptocurrencies as fiat money. The company had said that it is looking to partner with Visa or Mastercard but none of this happened.

Once the company raised $32 million during the ICO sale, the founders were arrested by the SEC and put in jail. The SEC said that the founders took extreme measures to make sure that their truth would not be discovered. The company even went as far as creating make-believe biography of their team. The celebrity endorsements was simply a way to bring investor confidence while protecting the reality of the situation.

One of the few instances where the fraud was caught on time and the amount was returned to the investors with interest. The founders were also barred from participating as directors or officers in future security offerings.

Pincoin
One of the more recent scams in the crypto space, in fact, there is a lot of anger related to this particular ICO among investors and the general population. Their initial ICO was monumentally successful. The ICO raised $660 million dollars from 32,000 investors. The company further honored their promise of returns and cash rewards motivated the existing users to bring in their friends and family to put in more funds into the project.

Following the success of the ICO, Pincoin announced that a token called iFan would be developed. This token would be used to compensate the investors. But as soon as the token was issued, the Pincoin team disappeared from the office leaving a less-than-useful website and a lengthy whitepaper behind.

Had the investors taken time to research the project, they would have found that none of the information about the team or the company was verified. This scam serves as a reminder to investors to always research thoroughly before making a decision.

Bitconnect ICO Scams
The company was accused of a Ponzi scheme for a very long time. Bitconnect officially stopped all its operations in January. This move was as a result of a cease and desist order from American financial regulators.

The users of Bitconnect were encouraged to trade Bitcoins in favor of Bitconnect Coin (BCC) on the company’s platform. The users were assured substantial returns for their investment.

The company also started a lending feature that allowed users to lend BCC to other users and earn interest as a result. It further publicized this feature in a typical Ponzi-scheme fashion. Since the company shut down its operations, multiple users have filed a class-action lawsuit against Bitconnect. The claims amount up to $700,000.

Plexcoin
This company was shut down in December 2017 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after being discovered as an elaborate Return on Investment (ROI) Ponzi scheme. Plexcoin had offered its users and investors more than 1300 percent return. According to the SEC, the company was able to raise $15 million from thousands of investors before the government agency intervened.

As the aftermath of the SEC ruling, all funds of the company were frozen and the founder of Plexcoin Dominic Lacroix was put behind bars.

This was the first incident in which SEC diligently took action against an ICO via the Cyber Crime Unit. Since the Plexcoin’s services were classified as a security, SEC was well under its rights to press charges.

Read full story: https://listofico.com/blog/biggest-ico-scams-2018/

You are talking about really popular scammers that have been fooled by a lot of people. I am very pleased that I did not participate in these projects and did not fall into the hands of scammers. You need to be very careful when choosing a project for investment!

Denaro was so big. They have collected a lot of money and they are lost in an instant. Many people have invested, some people have joined the bounty campaign for a very long time, but the denaro team has collected millions of money and fled

In list must be added The Finshi capital one of huge scams when was inflow scammers. Many ICO's calculating that their fraud will don't open in a long period.

I'm from vietnam.  ifan is a project that vietnamese people created to hurt vietnamese people.  This is a sad thing for the development of ICO in vietnam.  I have witnessed how miserable ifan sufferers are.

ICO is an area that cannot be supervised. There are many fraudsters there. Those ICOs have only one website and several pages of white papers. These Faker are very clever, they carefully arrange each scam so that everyone is difficult to distinguish. I think there will be more scams exposed, which is very detrimental to the entire cryptocurrency market.

Did you know according to research by New York-based Satis Group LLC in March 2018 "81% of ICOs were Scam nearly 6% failed 5% lost and only 8% continued to trade.  on the market ".

Don't forget about this ICO
Centra - 30 mln$
Denaro - 8mln$

This teaches us to always be cautious, because the Scams has become widespread, so we must investigate the accuracy of information about companies so as not to fall into scam

Wow you are so vigilant with these scam ICO's. This is not really good for the investors who are willing to invest in an ICO and then get scam. This people could destroy the environment of cryptocurrency and other ICO as well will be affected  by their wrong doings. And sad to say still 2018 has failed also in their project and will be labeled as scam later on and I know few of those ICO that I have been joining. I regret to give my time on them where they will just scam the investors and bounty hunters.

It is yet to see but one of the biggest scams might be Envion mining project. The ICO started in December and finished in January where the team collected 100 mill. USD. We are now 5 months after the end of the ICO with very vague updates from the team and there is no evidence that the mining is actually happening.

And i think, there are more ico, which got over 10 millions are scam. They play for time,  and we believe and wait.

In Vietnam, there was a big scam too: Ifan. You can search it on Google.

So many scams. Lucky I didnt take part in any of these.

Do you know that 2017 was a year when the largest number of ICO happened during all the history of ICO? The most popular among them were Mybtgwallet.com, BitCard, Confido, ToTheMoon, Karbon, and others.

Mybtgwallet.com was founded by the member of the community Bitcoin Gold. Users of the website have lost more than $ 3, 3 million. Scammers have got an access to their wallets and diverted money into a different Bitcoin address.

The next scam ICO was BitCard having raised $5 million. Their scam idea was to redesign the structure of the modern business, trading, and government. Anything they were promising wasn’t put into life. After the ICO finish, the team disappeared without the product launch.

One more scam ICO in 2017 was Confido. Scammers raised more than $375,000 million. They announced themselves as a "smart contracts" startup. But after the ICO, the team deleted all their accounts from the social media and website.

Another scam ICO was held by ToTheMoon. They raised more than $27 million. These guys promised “full-service mining solution”, and improving maintenance, hosting, repair, and blockchain servicing. Nothing of these plans was put into life. In fact, they copy pasted word by word another project’s whitepaper including the idea, mission, product implementation, schemes, and graphics.

The last one is named Karbon. This project has to become a decentralized social marketplace but hasn’t. The team proposed a unique ecosystem where users, merchants, and advertisers got an opportunity to communicate with each other in a very convenient way. But nothing of the promises has come true.   

This is the list of the most popular scams of  2017. I think 2018 will become a year with not less number of ICO scams, so that let’s be vigilant!