Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 170 posts

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#51

Post by akvadrako »

ashleyn wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #2

> "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.

7% is not ridiculous at all. twino.eu has been paying 10-13% backed by their own guarantees and a good income stream for several years.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#52

Post by justicezyx »

akvadrako wrote: post #51
ashleyn wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

7% is not ridiculous at all. twino.eu has been paying 10-13% backed by their own guarantees and a good income stream for several years.

Noooooooooo

Past performance is not an indication of future.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#53

Post by pibefision »

ashleyn wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #2

> "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.

Take look at Argentina's market. You can get 20% of return on yearly bonds in dollars. Yes, its a bubble but its more mature than any kids ICO

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#54

Post by NelsonMinar »

I'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/20180409/vietnamese-cry...

I have no doubt there was yet another ICO scam with someone walking away with the money, but I wonder how much money it was.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#56

Post by joshfraser »

trappist wrote: post #50
joshfraser wrote: post #47

Where's the smart contract that collected those funds? I'm really skeptical about that $660M number. Filecoin raised $257M and they had the support of a bunch of VCs, top crypto funds, smart crypto whales, and thousands of supporters around the world. $660M for a coin no one has heard of? Doesn't add up.

Haven't found the ICO contract, but the ERC20 contract says there are 1,912 token holders while OP says there were 32,000 investors. https://etherscan.io/token/0xC8a8D2A81cc86b95beb04E5a320D7E5...

Seems like Techcrunch may have regurgitated some alarmist articles without any fact-checking. I'm not finding the evidence either.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#57

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

pjc50 wrote: post #2

> "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.

I would have stopped at ”ICO”.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#58

Post by matthewdgreen »

jimrandomh wrote: post #20

Dollar 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…

Somebody should look for this. However, it's very easy to launder this money through an exchange to hide the obvious tracks.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#59

Post by simias »

ashleyn wrote: post #21
pjc50 wrote: post #2

> "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.

Cryptocurrencies did manage to have a ridiculous performance over the past few years, I think that's why those obvious scams manage to convince people. The fear of missing out is strong and many people want to exploit that it seems. There are so many obvious scams running in the cryptocurrency world right now that it's hard to keep track and some are more obvious than others. See for instance https://getcryptotab.com/en/ which is an other obvious pyramid scheme.

Re: Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings

#60

Post by ashleyn »

piracykills wrote: post #42
ashleyn wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

> >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.
Post reply on HN