ICOAdm.in And CrowdWiz – Hijacking In Crypto Space

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In part 1 of this series, FinTelegram reported about the ongoing fights between two international group of people in the international broker and crypto scene. This fight provided the stage for the international enforcement actions of Bulgarian, German, and Austrian police which led to the arrest of several people. Among the arrested people are the Israeli Gal Barak and the German Uwe Lenhoff. On the list of suspects are also the Bulgarian Marina Andreeva and the Austrian Joachim Kalcher. Moreover, the Israeli Gery Shalon and the Russian Vladislav Smirnov are closely connected to these fraudulent schemes.

The Hijacked Crypto Company

In our last article on the ICOAdm.in case we reported that this ICO dashboard has been developed by the Russian NetPay is run by the Russian Krypton Moscow, a company beneficially owned by Vladislav Smirnov and Gery Shalon. They do so even though, Krypton Solutions Ltd, a company registered in the Marshall Islands claims that ICOAdm.in belongs to them. Sounds complicated? It is! It needs hours of research time to work through the papers but FinTelegram did. ICOAdm.in is a case in point for the new competitive environment in the crypto space.

As described in part 1, ICOAdm.in has been established amid the 2017 ICO hype by Krypton Solutions. For the development of the platform, Krypton Solutions placed an order with Smirnov’s Russian NetPay. So far all parties have a common view. At some point, Smirnov and Shalon started to fight with the owners of Krypton Solutions and sort of hijacked ICOAdm.in and took it as hostage in their fight.

Lesson learnt: In today’s digital industry, it is no longer important to hold the shares of a company but to have control of its digital assets and intellectual property rights (IPR). If you control the domain and the admin access you control the business. Even more so in crypto where don’t even need bank accounts anymore. According to the indictment filed by U.S. authorities against Gery Shalon, this guy is one of the leading cybercrime artists playing these new approaches of with great virtue. He already took over competitors using DDoS attacks to force them to surrender.

The CrowdWiz Case

Allegedly, Vladislav Smirnov and Gery Shalon first hijacked ICOAdm.in and consequently defrauded several clients. Purportedly, they and have stolen funds they raised for their clients via their respective ICOs through the ICOAdm.in dashboard. One such client was CrowdWiz, a blockchain venture which announced its token sale in October 2017.

During the token sale, which ran from October 2017 to January 2018, CrowdWiz reportedly managed to raise over $7M, all of which were controlled by ICOAdm.in and the founders of CrowdWiz never got access to the funds.

According to the CrowdWiz management, the ICOAdm.in team refused to release the funds and CrowdWiz founders were left with no choice but to fund the project from their personal resources.

Currently, even without access to the funds, the CrowdWiz founders and management around Micha Golod have continued with development and operations, thus showing responsibility towards their investors. Meanwhile, they have filed claims with Russian police and authorities and are preparing lawsuits and legal proceedings against ICOAdm.in and its parent companies.

Not only this, but CrowdWiz also faced other losses because of the ICOAdm.in actions. In particular, a large investment of over $3M committed by a crypto fund was pulled off after finding out how the CrowdWiz had lost control over the raised funds via ICOAdm.in.

Ironically, ICOAdm.in continues to show CrowdWiz in its portfolio, claiming to help the project raise $7.2M and using its name as a reference to attract other projects.

Unfortunately, even if CrowdWiz manages to claim the raised crypto via legal action, the valuation of these funds, held in wallets controlled by Vladislav Smirnov has dropped significantly since the ICO. CrowdWiz aims to claim the USD valuation from the date it requested access to the funds from ICOAdm.in.

FinTelegram has reached out to ICOAdm.in several times but has not yet received any feedback.

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