Blackmail in the Blockchain
Our area has become some kind of wild territory as in the days of the Far West when it was common to ask payment for a task that had not been completed.
I want to talk here about my own experience because I am sure that there are a lot of CEO's out there who paid to keep silence but I will not.
When you are running your IPCO or your ICO you need good PR and sometimes you use the services of external so-called experts, because even if your PR strategy is not to connect with big media outlets, you would still prefer to have a few good articles published in magazines such as Forbes
Here are some articles that they have written for my company so you can judge for yourself their quality and moreover if they are worth the 15K+ USD that I paid for them.
-https://cryptona.co/analysts-explain-the-reasons-behind-bitcoins-downtrend/
-https://www.forbes.com/sites/cbovaird/2018/04/13/will-bitcoin-reach-25000-this-year/#6473e1962667
Even if a contract has been signed, it may not be a good contract if you have been misled and if it disregards your PR strategy.
When we first met these people in Los Angeles we shared our story with them and they told us that they wanted to write something about it, but also that they wanted to be paid before producing a single word. I must say that when I read what they had written I seriously wondered if it was really necessary to pay $19K monthly for this kind of content. Would their articles help us raise funds? The answer is no, and in the end we raised the money thanks to our network and affiliation program.
There will always be people around you asking you to calm down and telling you to just pay to buy peace, simply because even if they are wrong we do not want to risk bad publicity. So first you kindly try to find a solution although just because you have raised millions doesn't mean that you should spend money for services you did not get.
The agreement was that part of the payment was to be made with our company's own cryptocurrency and the rest was supposed to be paid in BTC or ETH. The problem is that because of the volatility of these currencies, there might be a huge gap between how much you collect them and how much they are valued later, at the expense of the company, which means that you might want to wait a little bit longer until the cryptocurrency rises again. For example if you collect 4 BTC for 14K each, you do not want to pay your collaborators when they fall down to 6K, this would be a loss of 32K for the company and this would be completely unacceptable and even worst if the work is not done, add at this situation a down period on the crypto market and you will understand my position.
At this point even if you explain this and ask them to wait until the currency value rises you are in trouble because these companies are in such a bad situation financially that blockchain compagnies running ICO such ours are like a lottery ticket for them.
I am not going to let my company get rinsed, nor blackmailed, nothing will change my mind, even articles based on words of employees who were fired or who ended their contract for good reason.
We are not fools. Funds have been collected for a purpose. Our company should use them wisely and not waste them every time a PR service provider company tries to be paid for a job they have never done. They will argue that it is our company's fault because we did not solicit them and give them direction. Let me tell you this, what kind of company needs so much guidance and help with their work? Are they not supposed to be professionals, do they not know how to implement a PR strategy? Morevover articles they wrote are just edit of what we send them!
So I will end this opening letter here. Our company will not pay or buy silence, because almost nothing has been done and the work that they had been hired to do has certainly not been completed, and by contacting my business partners or publishing lies will not change anything. I would rather pay a law firm to prove that we are right, to demonstrate the lack of efficiency of some dishonest companies, how misleading they have been and to sue them for trying to blackmail and difame us.
They will ask questions such as 'where is the money, where is the gold, how come some employees are not getting paid' and so on.
We will respond to that by delivering our solution and by simply auditing the asset that backs our token.
We will not play with them, we are right in the post ICO period and we are very busy.
I keep thinking of how much they could have achieved if they had spent as much energy when they were supposed to be be working for us...
Let's keep in mind that the reputation of a company is built when the audited accounts are published at the end of the financial year, only the facts will matter!
To Conclude they will try to take advantage of your success (look at my LinkedIn profile) and pretend like they are the key to it. Some companies that look really good at first can turn into evil monsters if they do not get what they want. I guess that this is a basic issue that can easily be handle in Court!
Every Post ICO companies know what i am writing here ! Serious company who did their job have been paid ! others willing to "milk" us suddenly after heard about our success can directly contact our lawyer or come visit us at our head office we are not hiding and we are based in one of the most beautiful town in Europe , LISBON.