The Strange Case Of Richard Kastelein And His Declaration of War On FinTelegram

FinTelegram and its team are threatened almost every single day. We have received death threats several times already, threats of criminal charges are as common as the launch of fake websites to carry out smear campaigns. And also lots of DDoS attacks. For this reason, we work closely with authorities in various countries and always pass on these threats. We are always open to criticism and talk to the people and companies concerned, receive information and are also happy to publish dissenting opinions. The FinTelegram mission is to protect investors with all available and legal means. This means to fight against scammers, perpetrators, and fraudsters. And they fight back! Oh boy, they do!

EFRI Fights For Retail Investors

With the mission of investor protection, FinTelegram has co-founded the European Funds Recovery Initiative (EFRI). EFRI’s mission is to recover retail investors’ money from illegal and/or fraudulent schemes and scams. To this end, EFRI works with public authorities, lawyers and litigation funders. By pushing perpetrators and scammers to recover funds to their clients EFRI is also constantly exposed to threats from those sort of people.

Richard Kastelein Complains About FinTelegram

Today, EFRI co-founder and coordination Elfriede Sixt were contacted by the leading ICO advisor and BlockchainNews founder Richard Kastelein via LinkedIn. He obviously felt offended by an old FinTelegram article published in November 2018. Strangely, he did not address his complaint to FinTelegram, but to EFRI. He acted with insults and threats and finally announced a “media war” with Wired.com, Coindesk, and other media he has written for in the past. And he announced that he will take EFRI as a hostage (proxy) in this war. Well, that’s quite a serious threat, right?

He did so although Elfriede Sixt, the EFRI coordinator, suggested that she will be happy to check the legitimacy of the Kastelein ICOs again and then make this research available to the Fintelegram.

A further examination of the only FinTelegram article with reference to Richard Kastelein has shown that it’s accurate and hence FinTelegram can stand by it. Moreover, we couldn’t find any exaggerated criticism of Kastelein, let alone defamation. It is FinTelegram’s duty to be critical of the dozens of celebrity ICO advisors who have been supporting even scam ICOs and made good money with them. Even financial market supervision authorities like the U.S. SEC criticized their role and made clear that they will be held liable. FinTelegram sees itself as an antipole to the bullish statements of the operators and their consultants. Since Kastelein didn’t contact the FinTelegram, we couldn’t talk to him either. Nor about the more than 50 ICO projects in which he has been involved in as ICO advisor.

The deleted LinkedIn profile

Immediately after communicating with EFRI via LinkedIn, Richard Kastelein deleted his LinkedIn profile (www.linkedin.com/in/expathos) with thousands of friends. LinkedIn is an essential tool for the ICO advisors, professional speaker, and media entrepreneur Richard Kastelein. Hence, we find the deletion after such a critical conversation and the “declaration of war” a bit strange, isn’t it?

The fact is that FinTelegram has criticized Richard Kastelein like some other ICO advisors and made him and the other advisors responsible for the ICO hype. In particular, we pointed out that Kastelein was a member of CoinAnalyst‘s ICO team. CoinAnalyst, on the other hand, is directly related to the crypto-MLM scheme NEXUS GLOBAL by Christian Michel Scheibener and Christian Thomale. FinTelegram – like other reviewing platforms – is very critical of NEXUS GLOBAL and regards it as an MLM scam. https://fincrimeobserver.com/tag/christian-michel-scheibener/

We have also criticized the super-hyping announcement of the CoinAnalyst ICO as a “Mega-ICO”. CoinAnalyst, for example, was praised by Richard Kastelein as the “Bloomberg for cryptocurrencies and ICO’s“.

In fact, CoinAnalyst claims to be developing an AI-powered platform for crypto-trading. Richard Kastelein remains at liberty to support his clients with optimistic marketing statements. That’s what he’s paid for. You can criticize him for that. That’s our job!

Caution With AI And Algo-Trading

Richard Kastelein contacted EFRI with his complaint only a few hours after the opening of the BeAlgo-Algotechs campaign. While this most certainly is a coincidence, it needs to be said that these algo-trading scheme has also promoted itself with bullish and unrealistic statements and attracted thousands of retail investors who have ultimately been cheated. FinTelegram sees it as its task to warn investors of dangerous or fraudulent investments and be cautious with “algo-trading” or “AI-trading” schemes, in particular.

We’ll be threatened for that. We accept this when it serves to protect investors. It’s just a pity that Richard Kastelein refuses discussion and prefers to vanish from LinkedIn instead. Not without declaring a media war. We are pf course open for discussion with all media outlets that plan to follow Kastelein’s suggestion about a media war on FinTelegram and EFRI.