Ponzi schemes evolving
Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
31–40 of 170 posts
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#32This is super sad & bad for the space and for those of us that work in the industry and just want to build real stuff.
$600m is a ton for anywhere, but especially for Vietnam! I hope there is an international manhunt ongoing.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#33At this point you really can feel no sympathy towards anyone who gets suckered into these types of scams. Same thing with facebook scams or instagram/snapchat pyramid schemes. If you really are that nice word for lacking intelligence or any ability to think for yourself , then you deserve what you get in terms of financial loss or social backlash. There isn't even a target demographic for this, people from all over t…
You didn't read it all; this was also a pyramid scheme, only it had a token associated with it.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#34This is super sad & bad for the space and for those of us that work in the industry and just want to build real stuff. $600m is a ton for anywhere, but especially for Vietnam! I hope there is an international manhunt ongoing.
Man if only we had regulation! Oh wait
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#35At this point you really can feel no sympathy towards anyone who gets suckered into these types of scams. Same thing with facebook scams or instagram/snapchat pyramid schemes. If you really are that nice word for lacking intelligence or any ability to think for yourself , then you deserve what you get in terms of financial loss or social backlash. There isn't even a target demographic for this, people from all over t…
This would be true if it was the same person falling for these ICOs each time... But we're talking about people that haven't seen dozens of scammy ICOs, or even ever heard of pyramid schemes (from other than... pyramid schemes, like Amway does to discredit their critics).
I still feel sympathy for people in this situation. I have met a couple that joined Amway (actually even invited me to one of their "seminars"), and tried very hard to show them how this did not make any economic sense, was a waste of their money and time (that could have been spent building an actual business), and that they were using manipulative techniques to lure people in... to no avail. Brainwashing is hard to counter.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#36At this point you really can feel no sympathy towards anyone who gets suckered into these types of scams. Same thing with facebook scams or instagram/snapchat pyramid schemes. If you really are that nice word for lacking intelligence or any ability to think for yourself , then you deserve what you get in terms of financial loss or social backlash. There isn't even a target demographic for this, people from all over t…
Actually, normal people do deserve protection from financial scams; and they don't deserve what they get just because they are not as sophisticated as a HN reader.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#37I'm especially dismayed that they brought the Ethereum name into it.
Ethereum already gets a bad rap because it's easy to write insecure smart contracts, if someone uses the platform to pull off a scam that's even worse.
I doubt they even created a dapp or wrote any code though.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#38Did it actually raise 660m or was that the size of the "market cap" when it collapsed? if I sell 100 tokens for a dollar then convince someone to buy 1 token for 10 dollars, if I run off with the money I've not run off with $1000 even if it feels like it for the people left with tokens.
This is an ICO. The scammers got paid in cold hard cash.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#39Dollar figures in cases like this shouldn't be trusted. ICO scammers have an incentive to make it look like they're getting more investment than they really are, since that gets them more attention. They can easily achieve this through self-dealing--taking their own money and giving it to themselves under another identity. They can even reuse the same money to do this multiple times; that would leave evidence on the…
And article authors have an incentive to make the numbers as big as possible to attract the most attention. They happily use the highest wild estimate in the title.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#40 >> "Investors have been told that they would enjoy a profit rate of 48 percent a month from their initial investment, and recoup all investments after four months. People would also be rewarded with an eight percent commission for every new member they have introduced to the network."
Scammers don't deserve the money but fools and their money...