This 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
Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
161–170 of 170 posts
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a "past performance isn't indicative of future performance" scenario in any reasonable sense. The loans you buy are already sold and it's fixed rate. You are calling the risk of the whole company defaulting "performance" and that's what I disagree with. Their highest rated loans (11-13%) are guaranteed by them; that's quite explicit. The end-borrower default-rate is pretty low which is why they can do it.
> The loans you buy are already sold and it's fixed rate Let's say you buy 100 $100 loans at 7%. You expect to earn back your $10,000 of principal plus $700 of interest. If 10% of your bonds default, you get back $9,000 of principal and $630 of interest. That's a 4% loss on principal. TWINO advertises it will buy back defaulting loans at face value; if they pay out, you earn $10,700 irrespectively. (I'll ignore that…
You are really making this too complicated. Nobody is looking at going after individual borrowers for a few hundred euro - you don't know anything about them except their country and rating.
The risk is not about "performance" but the company being fraudulent or defaulting, in which can you lose everything.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Offering bonuses for bringing other people into the program is a Pyramid Scheme tactic. Ponzi is specifically in cases where there's a portfolio manager or something controlling the entire operation and allocating returns to early investors through distributing the capital of the new investors.
That's what Pincoin did >The company first ran the Pincoin ICO, promising constant returns to investors >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.
Were they actually given that profit rate from the Pincoin team, or promised that the coin's value would increase?
This really seems like a mess of illegality either way haha.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#164Dollar 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…
I've always assumed that the majority of these shitcoins that come out of nowhere with a copied and pasted whitepaper, then suddenly receive $10M+ in "investment", are just schemes designed to launder cryptocurrency drug/gun/etc profits.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what Pincoin did >The company first ran the Pincoin ICO, promising constant returns to investors >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.
Were they actually given that profit rate from the Pincoin team, or promised that the coin's value would increase? This really seems like a mess of illegality either way haha.
From the article:
> Pincoin was particularly unique in that it offered bonuses for bringing other people into the program, a tactic that might sound familiar. The scammers paid out in cash until January when they began sending iFan tokens. Then, last month, the team vacated their fancy offices leaving only an oddly well-made – if incomplete – website in its wake.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think it takes a particularly high amount or sophistication to google "ico", see that most of them are scams, and stay away. People shouldn't invest in things they don't understand.
> I don't think it takes a particularly high amount or sophistication to google "ico", see that most of them are scams, and stay away
I did technical due diligence for several investors last summer for ICOs and their "whitepapers" as well as talk to founders of these ICOs themselves about their idea. I successfully steered many away from these frauds, I sadly watched as others didn't.
Hell, I watch one "founder" launch his token right in front of me, yet he "had to care for a sick relative in " not two weeks later. I haven't heard of it since, and they haven't updated any of the company marketing material since it's ICO.
> People shouldn't invest in things they don't understand.
I have a rule. Every time I catch myself about to say somebody "should/shouldn't" do something, I ask myself:
"Does my comment materially help prevent this situation from happening again or help the victim seek justice?"
Or,
"Does my comment only show contempt for the victim while not materially improving the situation nor helping the person victimized?"
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an interesting phenomenon in general.
It's something the major social network sites are going to have to wrangle with. Someone who expresses even a tiny interest in conspiracy theories or extremist views gets pushed progressively deeper into that rabbit hole over time.
Depends a bit on your susceptibility to believe such things in the first place. If you're a little sceptical of some foreign policy incident and YouTube keeps surfacing the works of Alex Jones and David Icke as possible answers to the questions you've just seen a compelling video ask, there's a good chance it'll make you less questioning of the mainstream in future.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#168I'm also skeptical about the $660M number. To put that in perspective, Vietnam's GDP is $232B, so this is about 0.3% of Vietnamese GDP. 0.3% of the US GDP would be about $50 billion. FWIW most articles I'm finding source the $660M number to the linked Tuoi Tre News story. Their quote is "The victims said the company had conned them out of VND15 trillion (US$660.79 million)." https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20180…
That is the legit number. And actually, the scammers built their profiles by leading a lot of winning ICO investing campaigns before that. People just had to follow their investing scheme, put money in their so-called portfolio, and made tons of money from it, so they trust these "experts". Then they claimed iFan and Pincoin were the biggest opportunity. People were so greedy to realise the truth tho.
Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#169Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: https://ponzischeme.io/ What is the crime?
Regarding your example, you're asking the wrong question. That's not a Ponzi scheme because it makes it clear what kind of returns to expect and that the returns simply come from other investors. A Ponzi scheme involves persuading investors to invest (and reinvest the returns) on a fraudulent basis.
What Charles Ponzi did, and what has come to characterize Ponzi schemes today, is fraud. He made investors think that they were investing in something tradable (stamp coupons) when he actually only ever paid the returns using other investors' money, and it was able to go on for so long because most people simply reinvested their returns on the basis that they thought it was a sustainable investment.
This dynamic doesn't exist without fraud. No one is going to invest in ponzischeme.io on any other basis than exactly what it is, betting to get in early and to cash in their returns before everyone else does.
That said, if I was the world dictator, the ponzischeme.io guys would be in a labor camp, where they would be forced to do meaningful work.