They abandoned the project because people were trading the coins and because some had more coins than others - what's the point of having them if you can't trade them? The dev had a disproportionate amount of coins to everyone else anyway - they were sitting on a few million coins themselves (free of charge). What a wrought; it was an absolutely pathetic excuse to can the project.
They issue a coin, keep a few for themselves, whack it on an exchange and dump their share after it gets pumped, then stop the 'project' using the excuse that people were trading them. It's just ludicrous!
I want the $5,000 I lost on the exchange back! Had they let it trade like a cryptocurrency is supposed to everything would have been fine!
I don't know how they can get away with stuff like this. It's people like this that will cause the next GFC.
I dont want to be 'that guy' but you're not going to get your $5k back and some might say you should never have invested that much into a currency with little to no history, planning or development.
In all honesty, if you really did invest 5K on it then you really need to rethink your strategy as you could have simply bought between 1 and 1.5 BTC which would have nearly doubled your money in the same amount of time.
Again, I dont want to seem like I am being heartless I just find it astounding that so many 'Newbies' have investe thousands of dollars into something with little to no real world application other than being a clone of a successful coin.
While it is one hell of an expesnive one, best thing for you to do is chalk it down as a loss and and take it as a lesson learned.