ICO Scam Advisory - Beer Token and Wounded Warrior Coin
Aside from doing your own research to identify potential ICO scams there are resources available for free, such as ICO tracker, that provide warnings concerning current ICOs and future ICOs.
This is a very useful website for viewing all of the current ICOs that are taking place and to keep an eye on up and coming ICOs just around the corner.
In this post, we’ll have a look at a handful of current ICOs that have been flagged by the website as potential scams.
A common denominator among these new tokens is the absence of information about the team behind the project. These examples are generally clear-cut cases but there also exist some very sophisticated scams that people have invested a significant amount of time into creating.
Simply because the website has issued Scam Alerts for these tokens doesn’t signal that all other tokens listed on the current ICO pages are SAFE! It simply indicates that these are the most obvious cases.
More sophisticated scams may create a completely fictional team and provide bios and titles for each member along with a list of qualifications. It’s still up to us as individuals to do our homework before investing in any token sales.
Beer Token
Wounded Warrior Coin
0x2x Exchange Protocol
Synthorn
Beer Token (Scam Advisory)
- ICO dates: September 7th to September 30th, 2017
- Website: https://www.beertoken.io/
- Whitepaper: Yes
- Team: No
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Not every token sound futuristic, the Beer Token ICO is proof of that. Right off the bat, there are no names associated with the ICO and that likely is the primary reason for ICO tracker’s Scam Alert label.
No development team.
No CEO.
No names associated with the Beer Token and the ICO.
The Beer Token website is a cluster fuck of red flags as well. Flags go up for vagueness and a glaring lack of detail in just about every department from the team, to Use Case, to contact information.
The first page shows a beaming blond waitress with an oversized Oktoberfest mug full of brew with "ICO" stamped across her chest.
Another page describes the Use case for the Crypto Beer in a laughably vague passage consisting of 2 sentences.
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The Whitepaper
Well the paper IS VERY WHITE...
The Whitepaper is an incredible 2 pages in length with the first page consisting of only a title and a promotional photograph. Page 2 sheds a little more light on the Use Case for Beer Tokens.
Your girlfriend cleaned your room?
Send her a BEER.
Your employee did a great Job?
Send him a BEER.
Someone wrote a great article or made an
interesting vlog?
Send them a BEER.
Not making this up, this is the from the actual Whitepaper.
If somehow you're still not convinced the Whitepaper includes an ETH (Ethereum) Hash and asks those interested in participating to simply "send your desired amount of ETH to this address" and...
CHILLED BEER TOKENS WILL BE ISSUED TO YOU IMMEDIATELY
Stunning, isn't it?
Thank god this ICO just ended on September 30th and I hope no one reading this was duped into sending any fraction of ETH to this obvious scam.
Conclusion: Dumb-money vortex
Wounded Warrior Coin (Scam Advisory)
- ICO period: September 10th to October 31, 2017
- Website: http://www.woundedwarriorcoin.org/index.php?wwwRedirect
- Whitepaper: Yes
- Team: No
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If you’re familiar with the world of questionable charities you might know that charities that purport to support military veterans and police officers are commonly used as props for charity scams.
These types of charities appeal to people’s sense of duty to their nation and to their patriotism and exploit it to their benefit.
“What? You don’t support our troops?”
I suspect that the same sentiments that are used to bilk people of their money in the charity world are employed in this token ICO.
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Similar to the Beer Token, Wounded Warrior coin asks people to make a donation to a BTC address and that WWC tokens will be sent to you within 24 hours.
Once again, no information of the team members are available on the website. However, they do have a link to a Discord channel where you are encouraged to talk with the developers. Also, apparently the Source Code is available for download from a .zip file.
As a precaution - Do NOT download any files from this site! The site does not have HTTPS.
Conclusion: I think the Scam Alert from ICOtracker.net is completely justified, multiple red flags here.
Disclaimer: I'm not a financial expert nor am I a crypto-currency expert. This is not financial advice, and I'm in no way affiliated with any crypto-currency developers. I'm simply stating my opinion based on the company websites and the Scam Alerts issued by ICOtracker.net.
Still to come... Synthorn and a sex industry token called LustCoin
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Related Post - https://steemit.com/scam-ico/@v4vapid/how-to-identify-ico-scams
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Great post!
But... but... Whitepapers are .. erm.. scientifical and.. white! lol
Reminds me of the authorship.com ico that I posted about a while ago where they just decided to not pay out their referral commissions - due to their own technical failures.
I will think long and hard before publishing anything for my ICO for my social network.
upped and resteemed!
Perhaps the greatest Whitepaper I've ever come across! A good laugh.
It's a tough call coming out with your own ICO, but we're also seeing Steemit come out with SMT. I think it might be useful to observe how people start to integrate SMTs before making any big decisions. Who knows, maybe using an SMT with your site might have more benefits. Will be interesting to see how this progresses, no doubt.
Appreciate the resteem and keep up the great work you're doing!
Thanks, you too!
I am not going to be rushing into anything, I don't have the resources available to do that anyway. I still have questions to be answered about it all. Most likely I will be helping others who want to create an SMT and will learn through that process before doing my own.
Haha!
Good post for an useful website. Personally I use https://tokenmarket.net/ myself. They are constantly updating and upgrading. It also serves as a great way to keep your tokens organized. I highly recommend checking the site out. It's easy to get your tokens in a cluster. Aside from review and assessment, organization and tracking become highly valuable traits when looking for a go to site regarding ICOs. Also, if you are looking for information on ICOs, https://www.icoalert.com/ is great too. They send me emails with free complete reports on new, ongoing and upcoming ICOs. The best part is, there has never been a sales pitch attached to any of their reports. Definitely my favorite.
Good to know, thanks for the links!
Only a fool would give money to a ICO that doesn't give any information about the team or people behind it. Unfortunately, there are way to many fools in this world. That is why these scams keep on popping up everywhere.
Now that government authorities have stepped in to stop these scams, I think it will dramatically decrease. No one wants to go to jail, not even these evil scammers.
Lol this BEER token is hilarious! Looks like a kid wrote the whitepaper.
Can't believe people actually fall for this.
Thanks for the heads up tho.
Cheers!
Okay, these take scamminess to a new level. I'd say that people who send money to them deserve to be robbed but really, no one does. Except those running scam ICOs perhaps.
Some scams are a lot less obvious. At least I figured out Ziber before getting too excited about it. I knew about that space so it just didn't smell right. Then I looked at the team and it stank. Just glad I never ran their beta software... It was probably full of spyware and keystroke loggers.
Take a look at Blasteroid - looks shady as f**k to me.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@o1o1o1o/is-boosteroid-ico-yet-another-ico-scam
Another cracking post V.
Thanks for the links and the well researched information.
It's amazing what people will try to get you to part with your hard earned cash. It's particularly insipid when an ICO is dressed up to look like a charity but sadly I guess this is to be expected. The old adage 'if it looks to good to be true' will serve people well when looking to invest in any ICO. I fear though many who are arriving late to the crypto space will fall for these scams as they try desperately to catch up to the early adopters. Hopefully folks will do their due diligence and read work like this to get a guide on what to do and look for before investing.
Thanks buddy.
Resteemed
"Flags go up for vagueness and a glaring lack of detail in just about every department from the team, to Use Case, to contact information."
Hit the nail on the head @v4vapid for a lot of new ICOs!!! Great post.
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on my latest episode of Crypto Nights, this week's topic is Monero, where you'd like to think they are focussed on genuine privacy!
Upvoted and followed.
Alex
There is also a platform call Cofound.it of which it is said that they preselect only viable ICOs.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/cofound-it/
https://cofound.it/en/
It's an interesting and promising idea. I've discovered it in a video made by @initforthemoney:
NINE SOLID REASONS TO BUY COFOUND.IT (CFI)
On the other hand, many of the projects that called "scam" were given very decent XXX in the aftermath (ARK, Monaco)