The Most Gutsy ICO Marketing Scheme in History

[cryptobroseph]

Yassin Hankir Exit Scam of Savedroid Was a Despicable PR Stunt

Like many crypto-based websites, Crypto Disrupt published the story about Yassin Hankir doing an exit scam with the proceeds of the Savedroid ICO. Estimates of the amount of money he had plundered ranged from $4 million to $50 million and a worldwide hunt for the conman was quickly put in place by the tech-savvy crypto community.

In the Crypto Disrupt article, and across the whole crypto ecosystem, questions were being asked how Yassin Hankir and Savedroid managed to fool the rating system of ICObench. The answer appeared to be that ICObench were not up to the task or the panel of “experts” were paid to give false ratings. Meanwhile, stories were spreading across the internet of investors that were now suicidal as they had lost their life savings. How could this scam happen for an ICO registered in Germany since they have quite strict crypto controls?

As time progressed, the manhunt for Yassin Hankir was closing in as the Twitter images he posted had given enough clues to pinpoint his location at a beach in Egypt. It was only a matter of time before law enforcement officers arrested him, or so the community thought. The day after the news of the scam broke, Savedroid posted on YouTube that the scam was actually an elaborate PR stunt. In the video, Hankir justified the hoax with two reasons:

He argued that investors don’t research ICOs in sufficient depth to know if they can trust the team behind the project. Hankir points out that some ICOs were scams and others have simply failed, so he was attempting to help investors by staging this prank. This is a fair point, and standards do need to improve as they have over hundreds of years for traditional securities. ICOs raise millions of dollars, and in the real world, withdrawing a few thousand dollars from a bank account requires more than one signature. It’s very rare for ICOs to provide details of who these signatories are, and in this hoax, it was assumed Hankir was the sole signatory.

His second point was that it was intended to promote a new venture for Savedroid, which included appraising ICOs and offering an advisory service to businesses considering an ICO. Most investors and many businesses will not want to be involved with Savedroid as this is not the way to highlight the weaknesses in ICOs. The Savedroid ICO has a strong German bias with most of the posts in their Telegram channel being in German. Following this despicable hoax the channel now has posts from all over the world including death threats against the Savedroid team and many soft porn images.

Ironically, a few days before the hoax, Savedroid tweeted an offer of a “Job of the week: Social Media Marketing Intern.” If you think you will enjoy looking at soft porn images and reading death threats for the next few months, an internship with Savedroid will be your perfect job of the week.


Originally published at cryptodisrupt.com

[sorrysteve1]

I had not heard of this story. My immediate thought is that it's a lie he's now telling to try and get out of law enforcement charges but I guess that would be easily provable one way or another depending on if the money actually moved. If it is a PR stunt then it looks like it rightfully backfired. All it has highlighted is that it's near impossible to identify scams with near 100% certainty, this isn't an indication that their model will help, it just shows that it's easy to break laws and steal peoples money. This will continue to happen until there are safeguards put in place instead of ICO ratings and such.

[cryptothief]

Yep, publicity stunt that got a huge amount of exposure. Whether that is a good thing in the long run remains to be seen. The saying 'All publicity is good publicity' is not such a winning strategy anymore, but I think in this case, they may have got it right. Not so much an ICO marketing scheme as the ICO had already finished, but definitely gutsy.

[alhaji142]

This stunt is good at the same time very bad. Most investors don't do proper research before investing in ICOs. I hope this will be an eye opener for those who invest in ICOs.

[caisa88]

This marketing campaign was very effective for sure in getting the company known by most crypto investitors.
To be honest i didn't hear about Savedroid before they did this marketing stunt, however now that i know about them i wouldn't really invest money into their coins.
Only time will tell if they made a good decision by doing this.