FAKE PRIVATE ICO GROUP SCAM EXPOSED

Dear CryptoMedics Investors,

Tens of new crypto projects launch each month, and alongside these new endeavours comes a series of ICOs. The interest for these opportunities has risen, even though cryptocurrencies have been struggling in 2018. All of these factors make ICOs the scammers’ playground. Consider this - if investors are willing to put their money into highly speculative cryptocurrencies, it is likely they would also invest in ICOs.

For the cryptocurrency investor looking to make most of ICOs while staying safe from conmen, fishy coins and tokens, the prospect can be challenging. Let us then present one way to scam investors. Oddly enough, it has just happened to us recently.

At first, we are going to show you exactly how those scams work and then tell you how to stay safe.

1. Fake/staged conversation: we did our Due Diligence on Hedera Hashgraph. You must know that they won’t have a public ICO, so the demand for private sale is huge and people keep trying to find the way in. We went to their official Telegram channel and were targeted to scam by some scoundrels. Look how those scammers wanted to pulled off their first trick:

Both individuals had real looking profile pictures (THEY ARE FAKE though) to make them look trustworthy. They lure you in and try to win your trust with this conversation so that you are feeling tempted to text them to get access to their private group (who doesn’t want to be part of a group that constantly gets access to private sales of the best ICOs?).

1. Exactly the same conversation with other profiles, same structure. A HUGE RED FLAG:

Is it evident yet?

1. First contact: We took the second step and texted them in private.

As you can realize, their conversation pattern is very clever — they don’t push you at this point you and give you the feeling that this is a very serious private group. After that, they gave us a team speak server ID so that we could talk to their leader. We will not provide the server address so that nobody accidentally entered the server and got scammed.

1. Team Speak: Once we became a part of the team speak chat room, we noticed it looked like a very well organized investment group. You might get tempted by the “great“ investments they have done in the past….This is how their team speak looks like:

1. Team speak conversation

After that, we had a real conversation with the scammers. Their “leader“ calls himself Jonathan Teroskyi. Altogether, there are at least four people doing this SCAM. They exactly know how to perform during this kind of conversation. They asked about our background, pretended that they had done this many times and that more than 1 million of allocation was nothing for them. It was great acting. The only contribution from me would have been ICO research and a minimum allocation of 50 ETH per ICO. They told me that they would invest it in an ICO called Starkware and they had to sent funds tonight. I told them 50 ETH was too much but I could go with 10 and they agreed…. Isn’t that weird? Going from 50ETH to 10 ETH in a second? A HUGE RED FLAG. Finally, everyone pledged (including me) their allocation.

I asked if I could get any proof that the money would go to the ICO. Their answer was “Isn’t that a lot to ask with 10 ETH allocation and being new to the group?“ Another HUGE RED FLAG. What kind of investor doesn’t need some kind of security when investing in something. They basically ask you to invest with your eyes blindfolded. However, I said that I didn’t feel it was a lot to ask for. They even had a plan for this. They sent me the (fake) SAFT contract (an agreement between token buyer and token issuer) of the ICO.

Here is the fake SAFT contract. At the moment, Starkware is clearly stating on their website that they do not conduct any ICO. We have informed them about this SAFT contract to get a final confirmation and this is fake.

When I questioned the scammers about authenticity of this contract, they said they would contact Starkware then so that they would confirm that the document was real. Obviously, I received an email just 10 minutes later sent via VPN that looked (judged by the sender) like it really was from Starkware. Of course, it was not. Again, a HUGE RED FLAG. Then, they started pushing me into this investment as I had already pledged. Typical scammy methods.

It is very likely that at this stage, many newbies would have already fallen for the scam.

Obviously, we did not pay them a dime and informed Hedera Hashgraph as well as Starkware. We will send this report to all ICOs we could find in their team speak to prevent people from losing their money.

So, how can you prevent yourself from such scams?

If you are in doubt, feel free to contact CryptoMedics admins for advise.
Channel link: https://t.me/cryptomedics

• Always be skeptical, don’t get excited, stay rational.
• If somebody is pushing you into an investment, abort!
• Do not trust anyone blindly in this industry.
• Interact with the ICO directly, contact them vial email and telegram
• ICO admins or their agents NEVER contact you first! Only scammers do!

We hope that at least some innocent money will be saved by this article.

Disclaimer: information provided by @cryptomedics does not constitute as investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice, and you should not treat any of the website’s content as such. Do conduct your own due diligence and always do your own research before investing. If you like our content, show us some love, upvote, resteeem it and join our Telegram Discussion or the Main CryptoMedics Channel.