Million-Dollar Ether Heist

Hundreds of ICO contributors are wondering what happened to the Magos project, which then disappeared and became Aio.network, which then disappeared completely and is by this point is almost certainly a scam. Their websites Magos.io and Aio.network, as well as their Slack, Telegram, Bitcointalk, and Twitter have all disappeared. The several blog posts they wrote on Medium have all been deleted.

You can see the contribution period of the ICO which ended on September 30 and defunct links to the team mentioned here in a bounty post from https://steemit.com/magos/@heelzkinu/meet-the-team-let-us-know-more-about-the-brains-who-is-behind-successful-ico-magos-or-ico-is-live. To be fair this bounty poster probably did not know this project was a scam just like all the other contributors at the time.

Nobody can verify who these team members are:

There is no online identity for any of these members that I can find on Google or LinkedIn, including the so-called "Ante Magnusson". There are a few press releases published by Magos that list an address and phone number for him, posted below.

Their Bitcointalk went from this:

To this:

To this:

Bait-and-switch fraud

They locked their Slack account during the ICO so nobody could write anything on the channel, ostensibly to prevent scammers. Now in retrospect, it was to stop communication between ICO contributors to discover what was going on.

After the ICO, they deleted all of their accounts, claiming to have rebranded to "http://aio.network/" due to an "acquisition." They started a new twitter account: "twitter.com/AiO_token".

They have kept stringing along ICO contributors, all this time trying to erase their tracks. And of course, this new website has now been taken down, this new twitter account has been deleted, and now there is even less information on the project on the live web.

Still, that doesn't mean they fooled the hundreds of people who trusted the team with their money.

ICO contributors are angry

Despite the team's attempts to wipe their tracks, it shouldn't be too hard to catch these criminals if the authorities are notified, as there is a digital trail existing, which this post attempts to sum up.

How to catch a thief

You can see the original Magos.io ICO contribution address, where you can follow the trail of Ether contributions and transactions: https://etherscan.io/address/0xa8659f5af01796b39e0dfb3323acc00d8fe97ea2

What their Twitter used to look like:

The Bitcointalk user "TamiLee" associated with the project:

The team has published a few press releases with contact information of the "CEO" as follows:

The useless "AiO" token that contributors were sent and contract address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x717f0cc11366818ba350aba9e7c7515ded8f8474

If you have been affected by this scam

Feel free to post in the comments below, pool resources with other community members, and maybe create a Discord or Slack and try to catch these thieves and/or notify the appropriate authorities.

Good luck.

Further reading

https://medium.com/@acepka/magos-an-ico-scam-aftermath-de969109866a
Further analysis on this scam by another author

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2292964.0
0.2 BTC Finder's reward for information on Magos scammer

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2276917
Confirmation of the scam by ICO contributors