The ICO community just was enriched with another parody of a fundraising project. The script for this scam could have been written by the Monty Python group. We are talking about the ICO block broker.
In the white paper and public communication around the ICO, Block Broker has sold itself as a kind of investor protection initiative and claimed to be building a platform to prevent investors from buying into crypto-scams. Well, they just pulled an exit scam of its own. The ICO accrued just over US$3 million in funding during its short lifespan.
Block broker team is scamming innocent people.
1. This is account that has almost all tokens 488M + 1.7M (forkdelta) https://t.co/Nrm3GtL5Bh
2. If you look at etherscan link, anyone, including noobs can see how all tokens were sent to forkdelta before sale ended. $bkbk #scam pic.twitter.com/g5ru3wpcy1
— DONNY BITCOIN (@DONNYBITCOIN) June 4, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The Block Broker guys noted that “fraud has become a major issue,” and claiming that Block Broker “has set out to provide a 100% safe environment for ICO investors.” The platform was claiming that it was setting out to be “the first decentralized ICO broker service to completely eliminate ICO fraud.”
This Tuesday, the project’s website went offline, greeting visitors with the following message: “The Block Broker Platform is undergoing maintenence [sic]. Please check back soon. Thanks.” They have also deleted their Twitter and Telegram accounts and, additionally, their white paper. Furthermore, they deleted their fake LinkedIn accounts. The subreddit page is still there https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockBroker/.
ICO review websites like trackICO gave it a 5-star rating without doing any background checks on the CEO, John JACOBS, who went under fire when a post emerged claiming that JACOBS was using Alex Amadeo’s photo, who is a Ukranian photographer.
The Block Broker scam-artists just finished their performance and vanished into the dark side of the ICO universe where they will perhaps meet many other scam artists and toast with them to the gullibility of crypto investors and irresponsibly acting ICO rating sites. With a little more care and some due diligence work, this ICO should not have been awarded a 5-stars rating. It’s time for a real investors protection initiative, we guess.
