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LoopX Startup Pulls ICO Exit Scam and Disappears with $4.5 Million (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: A cryptocurrency startup named LoopX has pulled an exit scam after collecting around $4.5 million from users during an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) held in the recent weeks. The LoopX team disappeared out of the blue at the start of the week when it took down its website and deleted its Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube channels without any explanation. People who invested in the startup are now tracking funds move from account to account in a BitcoinTalk forum thread, and banding together in the hopes of filing a class action lawsuit.
HA, HA!!
>> People who invested in the startup are now tracking funds move from account to account in a BitcoinTalk forum thread, and banding together in the hopes of filing a class action lawsuit
Would it be possible to get a list of the rubes who invested into this "initial coin offering"? (Because I have a few more things I'd like to sell them, starting with the Brooklyn Bridge.)
This is bad. I bought into the offering. Is it possible to get my money back? I want to get in the lawsuit too.
Those of us with brains warned them about the scam. They didn't listen. Perhaps I could sour their lawsuit by demonstrating that they were given fair warning to NOT invest.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Here's the link to the BitcoinTalk forum our useless editors failed to provide:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2521307.0
I have to admit: it IS pretty funny!
Stupidity should be painful
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
Every single ICO is a scam. You're investing money into a a shitty alt coin or a shitty fake coin running on a shitty alt coin (Ethereum), with the promise that you can take the shitty alt coin or shitty fake coin and resell it to some other investor later down the line, exchange it for a decent coin, and then exchange it for regular currency.
There's not even the pretense of investing in an actual platform or currency, you're investing on a do-nothing proxy built on top of one, and you're subject to the dangers of both.
If the person running the ICO bolts, you're screwed.
If the person running the ICO somehow isn't an outright scammer, but nonetheless fails to get their honest attempt at a project off the ground and into profitability, you're screwed.
If the crypto currency the ICO is pegged to declines in value, the ICO itself has just declined in value (they keep their coins in the blockchain as a sign of good faith to potential investors - until they abscond / quit).
If the crypto currency the ICO is pegged to increases in value, you've lost out on that increase since you traded one type of coin for a proxy running on top of it.
If the ICO's coin never gets picked up by a major exchange, you won't every be able to profit from it even if you're way up on paper.
If the ICO's coin or the crypto currency the ICO is pegged to get banned by governments, exchanges, or payment processors, you're screwed.
Now this will of course push some activity back towards Bitcoin, but that 'coin' is completely useless for its stated purpose and is doomed to fail long term.
Why would a class action lawsuit be preferable to reporting the crime to the police?
Realistically, what can the police do if you tell them you gave a ton of money to some guy on the internet and he disappeared with it? The best you can hope for is that he'll say "I'll just type that up on my invisible typewriter" in an Edward G. Robinson voice.
There is a reason the SEC exists...not that companies haven't pulled equally dishonest things under their watchful eye.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Things typically *appear* out of the blue. It would be more appropriate to say they disappeared into the black, if an idiom of that sort were necessary.
At least the summary doesn't state that investors are "back at ground zero"!
Why would a class action lawsuit be preferable to reporting the crime to the police?
Why would the two be mutually exclusive?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is getting hilarious.
You wanted an unregulated currency, you got one.
The things people have always said in support of cryptocurrency always rang like "we totally want an environment where people can rip you off because it's free from interference from the gummint".
This is what that looks like.
This is why regulations in the first place, because people are lying, cheating bastards and someone will always do this kind of stuff.
Hell, that financial meltdown in 2008? Companies knowingly packaged together junk debt, got someone in on the scam to give it a AAA rating, and then sold it to other people who took that rating as real. The actual banking industry is full of crooks and thieves, the unregulated digital currency market even more so.
The LoopX Team was formed in September 2016 of a core group of high performance professionals to build a new kind of trading software based on our own Loop-Algorithm. After testing our algorithm thoroughly over half a year with great profits continuously every month, we can now finally bring all this advantages of our LoopX – Trading Software to the public. We are here to help you make money in the emerging market of cryptocurrencies which is projected to grow up to 10 times the size of now until the next year. The LoopX System gives you guaranteed profits every week thanks to the most advanced Trading Software out there to date! We do not make daily payments since we consider that the margins are smaller. For us the priority is the safety of your investment. It took us little bit over a year to bring you the final product so you can benefit from the most advanced technology too.
This is from Bing's cached page of their website.
So honestly, if you read After testing our algorithm thoroughly over half a year with great profits continuously every month and didn't fall over laughing at the obvious Ponzi nature of the scheme, you kind of deserved what happened to you.
Given my experience, local police would throw their hands up in the air and say they couldn't do anything. I had my identity stolen and a credit card opened in my name. The police outright told me they didn't want to investigate because they'd likely track the criminal to another jurisdiction and some other department would get the arrest. I pushed and they did some investigations. They reached a "dead end" when they showed me the online credit card application the criminal filled out. I pointed out that they had the person's IP address and the date/time it was submitted. The officer looked at me blankly as I explained that you could use those to find the ISP and get the name of the person who owned that account. Sure, it might be a hacked system, but it would be something. Despite this, though, they didn't follow up on this and I eventually stopped pestering the police for updates. For all I know, the people who stole my identity are still doing it to other people.
I tried contacting the FBI but since I didn't lose a ton of money, they weren't interested in my case at all. Maybe this would rise to their level and they could track these scammers down. Local police, though, would be all but useless.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The whole point of crypto currency is to evade the law. Being able to buy things online is just coincidental.
All the people freaking out who lost a bunch of real, actual money and whining about it now were trying to MAKE money through speculation, meaning they wanted to GET more money than they had, without doing any actual work, for having loaned the crypto currency issuer some cash. This is really no different from putting it in a bank, except in this case the bank was promising return rates higher than (or at least different from and irrespective of the performance of) the rest of the market. They might accomplish this through lack of regulation of the nascent market, or by offering takers the additional perk of not having to report gains, facilitating the avoidance of taxes, judgements, liens, fines, etc. The downside to doing business with such a bank is the high risk that theyâ(TM)re not legitimate.
I feel no pity for the crooks and would-be crooks, trying to get to have more money than they should by exploiting some thing or some one, who then in turn got exploited themselves, who got ripped off by other crooks it sounds like, in this case.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?