DYOR before buying FREEX tokens or joining FreedomEX - LONG POST!

Elgeko said in the comments that my latest posts about @instructor2121 and his scams were missing context so let me give you some. Most of it was written already and not just by me so I will put mostly links and you can read it all.

@instructor2121 is probably mostly known from the steem-trails era. The most famous trail was a photo-trail that was taking huge rewards every day providing images from other steemians without any permissions - https://steemit.com/dailyphotoselection/@photo-trail/daily-photo-selection-june-18th-2017

People were exploited. Imagine making a post with your own art and making 3 STEEM in the post rewards. And now imagine that for example an art-trail steals your art, makes a post and because the trail is really big they rake over 100 STEEM in rewards and nothing from these rewards goes back to you even though you didn't give them any permission to use your image. This kind of crap was happening with all the -trail accounts.

Bernie made a post about it and it sparked a very nice conversation between all stemians. Even @dan intervened. It's a good read - https://steemit.com/steemit/@berniesanders/join-me-in-flagging-all-trail-accounts-run-by-instructor2121-and-his-scheme-team

Funny thing, trail ended 9 months ago with @instructor2121 making a power-down on all the accounts. Steemtrail discord server is now dead - https://steemit.com/instructor2121/@eirik/the-trail-scam-is-over-instructor2121

Now I am going to talk about VIVA. You guys are probably not up to reading the whole VIVA/TQ discord that is still possible to see as @instructor2121 is not a server admin. So in short, VIVA was a scam and @williambanks scammed the money - https://steemit.com/scam/@neoxian/scam-warning-williambanks-and-viva

Some funds were actually retrieved, mostly STEEM - more than 35000 STEEM to be exact. These assets were later transfered to @tqn account, where they stayed for safekeeping and waited here for some kind of "audit" from the VIVA team. These retrieved assets were obviously not enough to pay everyone back. There were intelligent ideas how everyone could get some of the money back little by little even if it would take a long time (via curation rewards and upvotes on STEEM)

And now the biggest lie of all. People thought that the @tqn account is secured and Joe is holding the keys because @instructor2121 said he is forwading the keys.

That never happened. Maybe that is why @instructor2121 was against all the ideas. He was against it because he wanted the account just for himself - https://steemit.com/steem/@eirik/reminder-that-the-retrieved-funds-from-tradeqwik-exchange-were-delegated-to-instructor2121

It started just as a simple delegation from @tqn to @instructor2121, but ended as a continuous power-down and transfers elsewhere leaving the whole TQ/VIVA community in shit.

This is just the latest big transfer, there were much bigger amounts transfered previously.

In the end even one guy saved from FreedomEX is a win. People are just forgetting too fast or they don't care enough. Maybe that is why for example Trevon is doing so good on STEEM even after the whole bitconnect shitshow.

Can FreedomEX become a good exchange? Maybe, why not, but if it will not succeed because of the people running it then don't cry that you were scammed.

This is exactly how they are trying to get you. The most popular post in trending? That must obviously be a good site then! Well not really.

It's not just @instructor2121 though. I don't know how many associates he has, but one of them is probably @jonny-clearwater that defended @freedomex comments after my little flags.

Maybe @instructor2121 will tell his own version of this whole story, but that's naive thinking. Why? Because back then if I remember correctly he wanted those steem-trail money to use for some kind of huge trail community site, but as we know that also never happened. So where did all the money exactly go?

I wouldn't even care about all of this anymore if @instructor2121 just apologized for his actions and maybe tried to fix the damages he did, but him not saying anything and just creating new projects is really concerning.