THE SMART TRADE COIN SCAM

The ongoing Token Sale of SMART TRADE COIN is a scam for several reasons. The project shows the low quality of the ICO-rating websites and the efficient marketing strategies of experienced MLM people.

According to the website of the SMART TRADE COIN ICO the  TRADE coin (STC) (ERC-20 Token) can be bought for another 5 hours at a 80% bonus (pre-sale). The public Token Sale is to start on December 15th and  is supposed to run until April 15th, 2019. 7.2 billion Tokens are for sale. The fundraising goal is set a 99 Mio USD with a soft cap of 3 Mio USD. According to the white paper the legal entity doing the token sale and selling the trading software is Smart Trade Solutions Ltd, a Maltese corporation. The project team is described in the white paper as a leader in crypto-currency trading with an in-depth knowledge and confidence in its own solutions.

The STC will be the payment token for the software provided as well as the tools which can be bought in addition from the Smart Trade Solutions Ltd. The software enables the participation in the SMART TRADE COIN PLATFORM and the active trading on multiple exchanges and hold the following promises:

Based on the current development progress, it can be positively stated that all users of our platform will be able to assess the situation in the most important markets almost effortlessly, carry out the most profitable transactions and achieve impressive profits.

SMART TRADE SOLUTIONS will have a major impact on the exchanges by creating a community of over 1,000,000 traders by the end of 2019 enabling the Smart Trade Solutions project to negotiate with the exchanges lower feeds and privileged APIs.

White paper promises

The white paper includes additional great promises for all people willing to buy STC:

Despite the ever-increasing growth complication of the blockchain industry, it is safe to assume that all users of the SMART TRADE COIN platform will not only be able to easily predict the market situation, but also influence the most profitable transactions and generate impressive profits.This means that the Smart Trade Coin community will become one of the most influential trading communities and we will be able to directly influence the entire crypto currency market. Under the current conditions, SMART TRADE COIN COMMUNITY needs its own crypto currency that allows traders to join the developing community.

Based on the current pace of growth and roadmap, SMART TRADE COIN will achieve a market share of approximately 3-5% of crypto currency trading over the next 3 years, increasing tokensales within the SMART TRADE COIN COMMUNITY to up to $1 billion and generating sales of $320 million by the end of 2019.

According to the white paper the STC is supposed to become an integral part of the financial system, can be exchanged to BTC, ETH,…. and is supposed to become widely used due to its high efficiency.

The SMART TRADE SOLUTIONS TRADING System is a unique software (the SMART TRADE COIN APPLICATION PLATFORM) that enables intelligent and fully automated trading.It is a newly developed software trading system that allows trading on the most important cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, e.g. Binance, OKEx, Huobi, Bifinex, Upbit, Bithumb, Coinbase, Kraken etc. and that allows the monitoring of BTC, BCC, LTC, ETH, DASH, XRP, XMR, NEO ZEC, XLM and EOS; more crypto currencies will follow very soon.

The white paper emphasizes that the STC is just used as a payment token and would qualify only as utility token and therefore does for sure not require any regulatory approval.

Is it a Scam?

The project is definitly a scam. Reasons for that are mainly

• evident overhyped marketing slogans (compare above).
• there are evidently no API agreements with any of the named exchanges (compare also the front page (we are contacting..)).
• there are a lot of open questions like what about the purchase price of the software package as well as the ongoing yearly fees to be paid for the software package and so on..
• and last but not least the project team is very well known in the Crypto MLM Scam world. Under their brand: We Go Crypto the very same team

  

  has been selling their SMARTARBITRAGE SOFTWARE to retail investors since 2017. The web is full with fraud warnings about their activities.

The ratings and the social media channels

But this ICO shows very well the quality of all these scammy ICO rating websites like ICObench, TrackICO, ICOmarks.com.

A quick due diligence on the project team would have shown their involvement with the shaddy Infinity Economics, ArbiTracoin and XIN-project. Probably this would have prevented them so show such favourable ratings for such a questionable project. We reported to ICO-bench about the history of the project team and the related warnings and will report how ICO-bench will react.

In addition it shows quite well how these scammers know to use the web: They succeeded to reach an Alexa ranking of 443. 497 within a few weeks. By the way the traffic mainly originates from Switzerland (33%), Austria (23%),  Germany (17%).

By now the Telegram channel already shows an impressive number of about 46.000 members (to be ripped off).

So they are doing an exzellent marketing job for a MLM system,  as the white paper foresees in its last chapter a generous trade referral payment system.

Our regulatory take on this:

The project emphasizes that the token qualifies as a utility token as not fixed or variable returns are promised. But of course the project team promises that the value of the token will increase by their efforts. So the SEC for sure would qualify this token as a security. So the fraudsters evidently do their homework..

We are again impressed how much shaddy Token projects are on the German market. But interestingly we realized that there are  quite similar projects on the US/Asian market like: The Trade Coin Club (more or less a copy/paste project of the Smart Token Coin but active mainly in Japan, Nigeria,…(according to Alexa) ).

Anyway we reported the project to the relevant regulatory authorities as we think that the structure of the tokens probably will qualify for the requirement of the license. In addition we reported the project to the enforcement agencies due to its evident relationship to ArbiTrACoin (a warning was already issued by the Austrian financial authorities) . We will also report on this issue.