Ethereum price probably won't dip for this mini-scam ($ETH $BTC)
A scam posing as an ICO startup company called Prodeum cut and run this weekend with a whole bunch of investor coins. They began their venture with what seemed to be good intentions. They wanted to put vegetables on the blockchain. Of course, when one realizes that doing this makes no sense whatsoever, one also starts to look at the finer details in the company's listing online – which is now deleted entirely.
The name of the company was Prodeum, and they've cut and run. At first, they replaced their webpage with a blank page with one word: "penis." Then they turned their webpage URL toward a relatively popular cryptocoin trader on Twitter. This unfairly implicates that user, so we won't be linking to them here.
The coin Prodeum was connected to – or was supposed to be connected to – was Ethereum. That's the second most popular cryptocurrency in the world, and a crypto whose market cap may well surpass Bitcoin sooner rather than later.
Ethereum is a real coin, a coin that's launched hundreds of startup companies. Ethereum is made in part to work with companies that want to make their own coin with $ETH as a base, and for that it works quite well. But occasionally there's a situation like this, and the process gets kinda muddled. In this case, it's as if the investors didn't look past the first page, and maybe never looked at the whitepaper before investing. If they had, they'd have noticed that it was mostly graphics, and that it had very little real, solid content inside.
Earlier this month, one intrepid potential investor actually did a bit of uncovering of this project. He looked at their homepage and somehow realized the "board" wasn't legit. The first of four members of this board of directors featured a photo of a man who, in reality, was someone completely different. Tap the image thumbnail below to see the image switch clues in large format.
Next, it was realized that a number of photos of people with Prodeum written on their body were hired to do so on Fiverr. As such, it should really have been no massive surprise that the company was made to scam the public. Unfortunately, some users did not realize the situation until it was too late.
lololololol it looks like Prodeum was paying people from Fiverr to write its name on their bodies pic.twitter.com/501JVdpKZM
— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) January 29, 2018
Thanks to a cached version of their webpage, the Prodeum user or users' Ethereum address can be tracked. You'll find the address listed on Etherscan.io. There you'll find a number of transactions for Erc20 (PIIT) tokens, which means they did, indeed sell their "coin," and did get some Ether for it. They might never have intended to actually create the coin they sold – meaning they sold the keys for purses of coins, but no purses will ever actually exist.
It also appears that they transferred at least 20k Ether out of this account, possibly through a different kind of coin which may exist in the future. As I suggested above, it's all a little muddled. As I'm sure they intended it to be.
Let us know if you were the victim of this cut-and-run scam, and remember – don't trust any ICO or cryptocurrency-related startup without first doing extensive investigation. Ask questions of the company's creators. If they're the real deal, they'll be GLAD to speak with you at length!