I agree that does sound fishy and believable with out checking the topic myself.
Even though you say much of it was deleted.. YES a big red-flag.
When guys start a coin then delete their own comments or have it *vigorously* self-moderated
or have strange users popping up on day one as experts doing all the talking yeah be worried.
But i am curious since i never pay attention to ICO's
How does the ICO escrow work ?
Would users get their money back if the dev does not fulfill the starting plan ?
What kind of timing is involved ?
Back in my day (i am an old crypto coot now)
We had what was called "premines"
You all might have heard of them..
they were from back in the day when us old-timers used to do this this called "mining"
Anyway
We would have some coin for example that came out sometimes with a 1 or 2% premine etc.
Then the dev's would say they would use that for various bounties or services or maintenance / code work etc
And guess what happened ?
All of crypto screamed SCAM !
On ALL coins.. ALL the time (that had a premine)
So.. explain to me how the fuck a coin that has 100% of the coins premined is not 90x worse ?
I use to say with premines we needed to keep the dev's feet to the fire.
This rarely happened though and the dev's knew it.
Coins have always gone through a popularity cycle..
So these cloners knew damn well if they waited long enough or trickle dumped the coins
..no one would ever know.
And often they would just dump them and who cares if anyone seen it.
OR.. make up excuses.
But it's all about co-opting the majority.
As long as everyone gets a slice of the pie you can run around driving a sledge hammer in old ladies faces
or give kittens aid's.. or make "Rape Coin"
If Berni Madoff made a coin you would all buy it.
And since it would get popular all exchanges would add it to get their cut of the fee's etc.
What is the point ? Care ? Of course not.. but yes i will tell you anyway.
To make a coin that beats Bitcoin and takes over for where it left off.
So.. f the project / coin etc has no reasonable chance in doing that then..
SCAM
.