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Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

> [The SEC] obtained an emergency asset freeze to halt a fast-moving Initial Coin Offering (ICO) fraud that raised up to $15 million from thousands of investors since August by falsely promising a 13-fold profit in less than a month.

To me, the PlexCoin homepage [1] is indistinguishable from all the other ICO homepages I've seen.

- bootstrap homepage: check

- beautiful graphics with actors and coins: check

- unclear statement what the company is or will do: check

[1] https://www.plexcoin.com/

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I tend to agree. Every ICO page mainly struggles with number 3. I never get what they are selling, probably because they're not selling anything other than the idea of buying in to their ICO.

Let's take a (somewhat snarky and definitely superficial) look at a few of the "top gainers" & market cap from https://coinmarketcap.com/gainers-losers/ (as of Dec 2nd)

Gainers:

1. Petrodollar.. Website isn't even an owned domain.

2. BTCMoon - Well their website works, but it speaks just heavily of the token offering not what it does. Personally I like the first question in the FAQ: "Q: Why BTCMoon are there? " Which is as close to the pseudo-philosophical question of "why is the moon" as we can get.

3.iQuant - Nearest I can tell, a blockchain trading platform. They're the closest to actually telling me something, but their ICO ended so maybe thats why.

Market cap.

1. EOS - Just talks about the ICO offering over and over. No idea

2. OmiseGo - "OmiseGO is a public Ethereum-based financial technology for use in mainstream digital wallets, that enables real-time, peer-to-peer ...." I'm sorry we've reached our buzzword quota for the day.

3. Tether.. Well we'll leave that one where it lands.

Ok so its super snarky and highly superficial, but in all cases, the basic question of "What are you selling" isn't answered clearly and concisely. I just don't get it but if the requirement is either;

A. Drink the ICO cool-aid and you'll get it

B. "You have to think beyond how they'll sell to consumers, these are like platforms with boundless potential"

Then I don't want to get it, because ambiguity is definitely something investors should avoid.

To be fair about EOS, there is a technical whitepaper, very active github, and a development blog.

https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/Technical...

https://github.com/EOSIO

https://steemit.com/eos/@eosio/eos-io-dawn-2-0-released-and-...

The test network just went live.

Tether is not an ICO and quite clear what it does. It is supposed to be a token that pegged to USD to facilitate the moving of USD via the blockchain instead of having to bother with the pain and fees of banks.

Its market cap rises as more USD is deposited into their banks.

Sadly there is a lot of red flags indicating that this is not the case, they haven't had banking since April so there are no way to deposit funds to them for regular users at least.

Also, one employee from Bitfinex suggested on reddit that Tether is funded by crypto deposit to them and not USD...

The tether scandal is highly concerning. Essentially Bitfinex and Tether are owned by the same people, the Tethers issued do not appear to be backed by USD, and there are almost a billion tethers issued - which many believe is responsible for the increase in BitCoin.

They've claimed they are ready to release audit details for 2+ years (no audit), and the founding team has also gone on the record about wash trading and other fraudulent financial activity.

Additionally, Bitfinex had some 'flash crashes' that wiped out people's margin accounts. Some believe the flash crash was caused by Bitfinex themselves on purpose to accomplish this exact goal.

Stay up to date at https://www.twitter.com/bitfinxed & https://reddit.com/r/bitfinex

Wow, really? I don't know how you can phrase that objective without admitting to money laundering (or some ancillary financial crime).

It's almost like we told an entire generation of people "write code, get rich" and then created the means for the most unscrupulous people to do so.

I know a lot of talented folks working in blockchain tech and I can only count two that I know for certain aren't in the space chasing 'fabulous wealth'.

> PlexCoin is the next decentralized worldwide cryptocurrency, based on the Ethereum structure. Its mission is to broaden the possibilities of uses and to increase the number of users by simplifying the process of managing cryptocurrency to the maximum.

But they're going to simplify the process of managing cryptocurrency to the maximum!

needs moar synergies!!

At first they were even using Visa logo, promising a Visa card that would use Plexcoins. They never even contacted Visa.

A redditor eventually warned Visa about this and they required Plexcorp / DL Innov / Dominic Lacroix to remove all mention of Visa.

Its pretty low hanging fruit, the issuer was someone they had previously sancitoned and was probably prohibited from issuing Securities-like things for several years

That and promising a particular return, no ambiguity on the expectation of profit, directly from the issuer!

This is indistinguishable... really? This is so obviously a scam it hurts. The first sentence doesn't even make sense, let alone have proper grammar.

Maybe they adopted the same strategy as those Nigerian 419 scams. The tortured grammar drives away rational punters, leaving only the patsies.

>The first sentence doesn't even make sense, let alone have proper grammar.

Sadly this is the case for many "legitimate" ICOs. Understand legitimate as non-fraudulent.

It sounds like the key difference from the typical ICO page is the promise of a 13 fold return.

I'm curious to see how they managed to phrase the promise, but it seem to have been removed from the page.

Some more checks done: - Roadmap: check

They're missing the Whitepaper and Telegram group though. I assume the later would be used to pump the ICO.

Their slogan is pretty funny: "The next cryptocurrency." Like the last one, only newer.

Zhang should really update the page for the 'block-chain-coins' era: http://tiffzhang.com/startup/?s=785536181453

Seems like a 419-style thing -- it's designed to scare sophisticated investors away, and attract only rubes.

It looks like the site is down. Here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20171204230017/https://www.plexc...

Lots of subtle issues with grammar and voice too...

This kind of says more about your ability to judge businesses (and specifically ICOs). Not a big surprise, considering that judging businesses and valuating them is a a profession in itself, and it takes people many years to become proficient in it.

If you cannot get even a glimpse from this webpage, that this specific ICO is likely a scam, you should not invest in ICOs. You will likely not be able to tell which ones (the 1 out of 100) are likely legit, have serious people behind them, and on top of that have an actual sound idea that has a good chance of working. But it's kinda the same with stocks.

No it isn't. You can create an ICO with a github account and dodgy php. To create a company and list it, it is a wee bit more complex.

You don't have to list it in order to scam people with it. They can buy stocks even in non-listed companies. At least not listed on major exchanges. While it might be easier to make a compelling ICO, registering a scammy company is also relatively easy (1k-2k USD). Or perhaps a bit more if you want to come up with some questionable tech and defraud some VCs with experience. It has been done, it is still being done. Up to this point it has been somewhat harder to get away with it though. Now hopefully it will be harder to get away with a scam ICO too.

The point is, if you are out there trying to invest your money, and you don't have any idea about how to judge people, how to judge business models, how to judge the underlying tech - you will loose money. Whether it's an ICO or a regular company selling it's equity using traditional methods.

And that is why securities are regulated.

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