How is this different then Bitconnect or any of the other 100's of ICO scams that have happened in the last year?
Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
141–150 of 170 posts
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#142I'm old enough to remember StockGeneration.com [1].
Different decade, different suckers.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#143There's no way they raised $660M. Even $66M would be pushing it. I hope TechCrunch edits this article with a more accurate number.
Filecoin and Tezos both raised about $200M and were considered massive ICOs, not to mention they happened in the wealthiest countries on earth and were heavily backed by institutional investors. It's simply impossible that an obviously scammy ICO in a relatively poor country raised $660M.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one thing most people don't understand. If someone is selling you a financial instrument with >6-7% annual returns, it's as ridiculous as someone selling you a time machine or the cure to death. The top 500 companies by market cap don't do much better than 6-7% annually on average.
> This is one thing most people don't understand. If someone is selling you a financial instrument with >6-7% annual returns, it's as ridiculous as someone selling you a time machine or the cure to death. That's actually pretty achievable using market neutral strategies. Considerably higher is also achievable, you just can't really access them unless you have a lot of capital. However, 6-7% per month would be much mo…
In my industry (e-commerce, sell on Amazon FBA) my biggest bottleneck is funding and I'm able to generate triple digit yearly returns on capital. It's gotten to the point I sometimes carry a balance on credit cards at 20% rates just to get more inventory.
But of course it's not quite comparable, it's extremely time / labor / logistics intensive, it's hard to put large amounts of money to work, and risk is high (can diversify across different products and categories but will always be some risk).
If you make 20% ROI and turn inventory every 2 months, that's a 120% return per year and very doable. A popular factoring company in the space, Payability, is charging an effective ~200% APR on funds (2% of gross sales for an average of one week to advance 80% of net, simple factoring math). That should give you an idea of the kind of returns people are making on capital, if the companies that finance them can ask for and get triple digit effective interest rates.
But it's not something you can put $100 million into. If you look at the bigger companies doing this, they have much lower returns (e.g. etailz sells ~150 million a year, profit of 3 million, they carry inventory in the 15-20 million range - so something like 20% net ROI per year).
If someone told me they were making 6-7% per month selling inventory direct to consumer, I'd consider it average, probably room for improvement.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#145I like that we’ve just come to accept daily occurences of billion dollar ponzi schemes as a cost of doing business. This is great. You crypto people should be proud of yourselves.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#146I don’t understand how we have all this information on the internet and people still get sucked into these scams. 48%...that is not a realistic guaranteed return! :/
10-15 years ago, I was certain that "bullshitting" people was going to disappear in the near future. It seemed inevitable that people would just pull out their phone and fact check any scam or lie. In a bizarre twist, it appears the opposite has happened.
Yeah... with 1000 conflicting versions of any event, it's more difficult than ever to sift through the misinformation. Then one brilliant soul will say "aha, I know the solution, I will hire experts and engineers to efficiently sift through information sources and present people with a version of truth we can be confident about!", behold the birth of the 1001st version of events.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#147> "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." There's your red flags right there.
This is one thing most people don't understand. If someone is selling you a financial instrument with >6-7% annual returns, it's as ridiculous as someone selling you a time machine or the cure to death. The top 500 companies by market cap don't do much better than 6-7% annually on average.
>This is one thing most people don't understand. If someone is selling you a financial instrument with >6-7% annual returns, it's as ridiculous as someone selling you a time machine or the cure to death.
A 2X leverage ETF would have double that rate of return, minus the overhead and interest on the leverage. Of course, it would also have double the losses in down years. With enough leverage, you can "easily" create arbitrary levels of annual returns, just by increasing risk.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> >6-7% annual returns I wouldn't say quite that low, even S&P averages are often higher than that. But 48% monthly is going to be something like a >1000% yearly interest rate. You really don't get much more of a dead giveaway than that, at that point you're either a fool or you're gambling and hoping you get out before a greater fool does.
Willfully participating in a Ponzi scheme is a crime.
> Willfully participating in a Ponzi scheme is a crime.
Really? Which crime exactly?
Take something like this, for instance:
What is the crime?
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#149It's not that ICOs are bad, it's that there are people naive enough to believe this kind of shit.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#150> "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." There's your red flags right there.
This is one thing most people don't understand. If someone is selling you a financial instrument with >6-7% annual returns, it's as ridiculous as someone selling you a time machine or the cure to death. The top 500 companies by market cap don't do much better than 6-7% annually on average.
Here we call it "condo". It's somewhat insane that people base their futures on their home gaining 20+ percent per annum