Everybody who thinks about investing in this project, please bear in mind my observations during the last weeks:
- I was very interested in the project (esp. because McAfee) and signed up for the newsletter on 25 September. Besides some news about "Meet our Founders in Dubai", I quickly received two e-mails stating that "BitIndia ICO is Live" with an Ethereum address in the e-mail - in contrast to that "only 200 ETH Minimum investments, please first register on our website"-mentality. I do not know whether BitIndia was hacked during that time, all I know is that all e-mails came from the same e-mail address
ico@bitindia.co. --> E-Mails and Newsletter are either not aligned with overall strategy, or it is fraud and they hope to get some more tokens besides that "minimum 200 ETH" thing, or they are just incompetent to identify hacks and to clarify the danger in public
- In the e-mails, always a minimum of 200 ETH is stated, on the website it is 150 ETH --> incompetency
- When I first read into the project (must be 25. September) there were links to a Slack channel everywhere: bitindiaofficial.slack.com As I see Slack as the best communication tool I registered to find out, that it seems to be the second slack channel (as "BitIndia Official" stated that due to spam they opened a new one). However, it was completely empty, and only a few questions (the easiest ones) were answered by "Bitcoin Official". I asked them on Telegram whether they have a Slack channel and they said "No". I sent them the address and asked them to clarify whether this slack channel is official or not - they never did that. They also did not answer my questions about BitIndia on Telegram
- While Telegram is only a one-way communication channel with the developer alone (well, it was apparently, now they changed it and have 30 members) and the before-mentioned Slack channel is either official and empty or fake (and empty), they have a very big Facebook and Twitter community... think about that what you want.
Last but not least a list of questions of a Slack user, which I found quite interesting. I also sent these questions to BitIndia in their telegram channel, but they never answered:
1) What is the USP of BitIndia? What can BitIndia do better than other exchanges? At least, Poloniex, Bittrex etc. already have their exchanges built up and it is easier for them to „do marketing“ in India with what they already have and they do not have to start from scratch on
(2) How does it come that every news article on the webpage is the same? Is it paid advertisement?
(3) What is your explanation for this really, really low user involvement, more specifically how does it come that nobody is participating in bitcointalk or Slack channels? Only on Facebook you have a lot of followers (but we all know you could have also bought them). It is just very surprising, that, given this promising ICO, nobody really talks about it (and if they do, only negatively).
(4) What is your plan to prevent a huge dump between token distribution and start of the exchange? Will the coins be available on other exchanges (unlike BNB)? There are many ICOs, e.g. Primalbase, that saw a huge decrease in value as necessary infrastructure were not built up until months after the ICO. I fear that could be the same here, but maybe you can prove me wrong.
(5) Are you involved in governmental discussions about cryptocurrency or must you fear a change in regulation that might destroy your use case after all?
(6) How exactly do you plan to „reach 20%“ of all Indians? Marketing (if yes, paid with what)? Why couldn’t e.g. Poloniex just use its capital (and I am sure it has something) to make marketing in India and get all the customers?
I do not want to believe this is fraud (esp. with McAfee involved in it). However, the inconsistencies in communication, the lack of any fanbase on Slack / Telegram / Bitcointalk and the intransparent ICO details make me think that it is indeed either fraud (and McAfee fell for it) or a very, very incompetent team - both is very bad for any investments.
