This is at least twice as convoluted a process as is necessary to separate people from millions and millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies if the site stays up for a week. People don't bother spinning up stuff like this when the easy stuff works just fine.
The sad thing is that the legitimate ones look just like the illegitimate ones
My first top exchange listing was through a DM
I’ve done partnerships with no name exchanges that turned out fine, also initiated over unsolicited DM
been scammed a few times by people that didnt deliver, and had no intention to
both the legit and illegit ones have no references because their clients are all other token projects whose community needs to feel everything happened organically
scammers take advantage of this desire for secrecy
it’s really just all about niche and specialization
I realize that you probably have no clue how this sounds, so I'm going to translate this sentence into how it sounds to those of us outside the crypto world:
> Both the scammers-of-normal-people and the scammers-of-the-scammers have no references because their clients are all scammers who don't want their marks to know that it's a scam
Please do correct me if I'm somehow misinterpreting the reason why it is so important to these "legit" contacts that secrecy be maintained lest their "community" find out.
In the mean time there are a separate category of people that take advantage of that structure, resulting in a high cost low trust environment, where people are willing to take gambles anyway, as the upside is always additional liquidity
What that says to me is that you're in a community of scammers, so it's hard to tell the difference between someone who's out to scam you and someone who's just out to scam some plebs.
There is more nuance to it than that. The exchanges themselves will revoke a listing if it leaks in advance, turning the entire community against the founders for failing to get a listing and the door to that exchange being closed forever. The founders dont want it to leak that they paid or merely engaged a consultant, as a well done marketing campaign and “organic” results are what attracts people. The consultants therefore wont reveal who they worked with. and even if they did the founders will deny.
Many immature economies and sectors are like this. Crypto consultancy scams are not different enough for me to treat it differently.
It's not about semantics, it's about the facts of what you're describing:
> The founders dont want it to leak that they paid or merely engaged a consultant, as a well done marketing campaign and “organic” results are what attracts people.
This is fraud. It's probably fraud in the legal sense, but it's absolutely fraud in the ethical sense.
"Organic" results attract people to a crypto project not just as some kind of personal preference, they attract people because a truly organic result is evidence of a project that isn't going to just be a money sink. Faking results in order to attract people is fraud (ask Elizabeth Holmes) and individuals who can persuade themselves that it's not will tend to be dishonest.
You can't distinguish between the scammers and the "legit" consultants because you exist in a world where dishonesty is the norm. They're all behaving dishonestly, it's just difficult to tell which ones are out to get you.
regardless, purchasers should be more discerning as the technology provides the necessary transparency. many are discerning. many arent and those purchasers and the people they are influenced by have created a culture of strange metrics to judge a project by - such as growth of members in a chat channel, or mentions, or exchange listings. Playing along with that isn't fraudulent unless saying something happened for a reason it didnt. What you are describing to me is analogous to suggesting an organization directly tell all the technical analysis traders that their charts had nothing to do with anything, and if the organization didn't say that then its fraud.
In any case, crypto assets would work just as well if their creators said “they’re connected to this consultant” but for now thats just an omission thats necessary because the consultants tend to be in a position to harm the projects and its not clear they’ve delivered until the separate exchange moves forward with the listing.
I wouldn't consider that fraud on the project’s side in any sense, but I can see why you think that is - where either Ive created a protective layer of rationale for myself or the entire ecosystem is fraudulent and any individual’s way of navigating that is irrelevant. I don’t agree with that assessment, my contribution is to point out that there is a niche of scammers that absolutely will do meticulous, convoluted fraudulent things reminiscent of what the article has shown. And if you want to know about that niche, then I’ve detailed it. If you dont, this isnt really the thread for generalized crypto sentiment but I’m sure there will eventually be others on hackernews and you’ll find someone to entertain what you actually want to talk about.
This isn't generalized crypto sentiment. I actually find the rehashed arguments about crypto on HN rather exhausting and don't tend to participate much.
What this is is a thread about crypto scams, in particular a crypto scam that preys on dishonest people by taking advantage of their dishonesty. You provided a great illustration of a similar type of scam by mentioning how you've seen how many scammers take advantage of the widespread secrecy in the crypto token world, which secrecy you say exists in order to better attract buyers by not letting on the various ways in which the creator is manipulating things behind the scenes with the aid of a paid consultant.
It seems to me that a discussion of pervasive dishonesty creating a hotbed for scammers is totally relevant to TFA and to your original comment.
Unfortunately, I have no services to provide for the recovery of the resources. After seeing an increase in these kinds of scams in my social circle, I have compiled that book to share my professional knowledge to spread knowledge with everyone.
One of my readers has recently reached out to me about the examples and this has motivated me to start writing these articles for reaching out to more people.
I have no issues to get contacted and I would like to help as much as I can.
That particular scam sounds like the old "binary option" scams out of Israel. Those involved large numbers of people, typically recent immigrants to Israel, working in call centers to con people. The scam binary options brokers were not only rigged, cashing out was next to impossible. Those were finally shut down, after the Times of Israel published a many-part expose, "Predators work at night"[1] Also, one of the big operations tried spamming Wikipedia really hard, which resulted in so much pushback that it attracted significant negative attention to the scams. The people behind those scams were not punished much, and pivoted to crypto, "contracts for difference", and other related scams.
For the simple scams, see r/metaverse-blockchain. This is currently full of pump and dump memecoin scams, promoted as such. Get in and out before the dump is the pitch. Of course, the issuers of the coin are guaranteed a gain, while, collectively, everybody else loses.
There is no "metaverse" component to these coins any more. There used to be claims that the money being raised was going to develop a 3D virtual world. A very few of the "metaverse" coins actually got something going, but most just took the money and ran. Even the ones that got something going didn't do a very good job. The result either looked awful or was so expensive to run server side that they could only run it for special events.
There's several new crap memecoins each week. The promotions look like they come from a template. This looks like a low-effort operation.
Where's the SEC when you need them? (Mostly dealing with higher-dollar scams, actually. They bring the hammer down on one or two crypto scams per month, but there are so many.)
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/tel-aviv-binary-options-firm-a...
Most of the time they do get removed - sometimes successfully before the QRcode is displayed. They even bot the streams so it appears like 30-40k people are watching creating 'social proof'
Another option is a Kafkaesque reporting mechanism in which a scammer took down their own videos before they could be reviewed by moderators. This is rarer but possible.