Sophisticated Discord ICO Scam

[Nekojeeta]

Heads-up so others don't get scammed.  I'm fairly active in a number of Discord ICO groups that pool via prima block and I often post my list of 'hidden gem' ICOs that I find... Story below...

Recently, I had a person reach out to me and ask me to join their team as a researcher.  They were a small pool of ~20 users and the group was supposedly able to negotiate private investor deals with ICOs.  It started with a discord voice interview where 3 members of their team (all Americans based on accents) interviewed me for ~30 minutes before accepting me as a researcher...

I started researching projects and gave them my analysis on a few. Their security was fairly tight and hardly anything was written down in channels - instead most of the communication was done either via DM or voice chat.  Occasionally they would gather all of the investors into a voice chat, the leader of the group "William," go over details of the private sale along with minimum ETH contribution.  We would all pledge how much ETH we wanted to contribute and then he would send a private address, we send the ETH, and then things would go quiet for a week before this cycle continued.

The pools involved ~20 ppl and the majority of the other investors would engage in some light conversation in the chat and there were even a few girls with valley girl accents.  I did a small contribution in the first pool and the second pool required a much higher minimum so I initially got cold feet... but William had me chat to a few members etc. and everything seemed on the up and up although I told him that I wouldn't be participating in any more pools until I received coins just to make sure everything was legit...  Heck, some of the ppl I chatted to in the channel even had twitter profiles...

We chatted for a few days and everything seemed cool... but then I was suddenly removed from the server / channels and blocked so its clear it was a scam. Things like the twitter profiles were also deleted.

Below is info on the group / users just in case:
Server Name: "CE Pooling"
Main User running the Scam: "William#0148"
Other Admin users: "Felix O#8508" and "Send#4941" ("Josh")
Other users participating in pool that were obviously in on the scam:
- henryjohevas2#1702
- Nathaniel87#9656
- Crypto_Jon#7670
- Gary#8125
- Laura#6374
- Scott Rotman#9948 (found this guys real linkedin w/ same pic as used on discord and emailed him a few times with no reply.. assume it was someone faking his identity)
- Vee (didn't capture full username) - she had a real twitter @NickiSenpai on her profile.  She had me add her bf's twitter which was @spenny42_ which had her twitter name in their profile (@spenny42_ is now deleted and @nickisenpai is private)
- Moe (didn't capture full username)
- Crypto King (didn't capture full username)
- Sebastian (didn't capture full username)
- Sharmarke (didn't capture full username)
- NathanielSmith87 (didn't capture full username)
- Hedgefund Alex (didn't capture full username)

I knew I was taking a risk... but searched everywhere and didn't find anyone mentioning a similar scam.  Also, as you can see they went to a lot of effort to pull off this scam (I also messaged with the guy and took up a lot of his time trying to validate if they were legit or not).

A few pics of the group:
- Channels in group (you can see mostly voice) https://ibb.co/nzcNQ8
- Admins of Group https://ibb.co/iW4fCo
- Members of Group https://ibb.co/dq1hQ8

Be careful out there ;-)

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[Joel_Jantsen]

Why would you trust random strangers on the internet who communicate with you through the channels which are not enough to find their real information ? I'm pretty sure Cyber Security can help you in this case.Since you have noticed a few tinder profiles which seemed legit, IP addresses could be traced.Also did you converse with them over a discord call or a mobile ? If your potential loss is worth recovering, you should definitely hit the nearest cyber cell.

Thanks for sharing it anyway!

[Nekojeeta]

I'll take this as a lesson learned. I knew it could be a scam and I was taking a risk, but like I said... first time I've heard of anything this sophisticated (I've searched the interwebs and no mention of a similar scam being run)

I'm fairly cautious and this is the first time I've been scammed in my many years of crypto trading... They are good.

[lunasea89]

Hi Nekojeeta,

I also fell prey to their scam. Took part in a few of their "pools" as well and now they just deleted, removed and blocked me from their channel.
Never got any tokens from them. Being pooling for quite awhile have always been quite smooth.
Finally now a hard lesson learnt.

[Nekojeeta]

Hi Nekojeeta,

I also fell prey to their scam. Took part in a few of their "pools" as well and now they just deleted, removed and blocked me from their channel.
Never got any tokens from them. Being pooling for quite awhile have always been quite smooth.
Finally now a hard lesson learnt.

Sucks - add me on telegram {removed} as I have a few questions for you..

[Nekojeeta]

A few more details...

Confirmed myself and another person were scammed concurrently by this group... even though the Discord server name and users were all named the same, myself and the other person scammed were never actually on the same server.

[lunasea89]

i believed the syndicated targeted just one individual each time they "pooled" so as not to arouse any suspicions.
Everyone else was their own people playing along

[magneto]

Very sophisticated scam indeed. Rarely do we see this level of complexity in these types of ICO scams. Sorry for your loss, but at least you were able to pull out of the second investment deal, right?

It must take a lot of manpower and time for these guys to organise this group and make everything look legit, especially with voice chat. Them doing so probably means that it's very profitable for them to pursue this venture, which makes me worry about how many people actually got scammed in total by this.

Anyways, I would never invest into anything with an intermediary, when I am able to do so directly. A bit of common sense in regards to how they're able to get the so called "discounts" from ICOs would have definitely helped avoid this from happening.

[Nekojeeta]

Very sophisticated scam indeed. Rarely do we see this level of complexity in these types of ICO scams. Sorry for your loss, but at least you were able to pull out of the second investment deal, right?

It must take a lot of manpower and time for these guys to organise this group and make everything look legit, especially with voice chat. Them doing so probably means that it's very profitable for them to pursue this venture, which makes me worry about how many people actually got scammed in total by this.

Anyways, I would never invest into anything with an intermediary, when I am able to do so directly. A bit of common sense in regards to how they're able to get the so called "discounts" from ICOs would have definitely helped avoid this from happening.

If you've played around much in the well known Discord ICO pool groups you'll see that discounts / bonuses are not uncommon and many allocations are lost due to someone leaking details... so the voice chat / secrecy and bonuses were not really a tipoff.

I still have a few of the ppl from their scam group showing-up in my discord friends list and it looks like they are expectedly switching all of the usernames (Vee is now 'Touka').  My assumption is the basic structure of the scam will remain the same...

[lunasea89]

Very sophisticated scam indeed. Rarely do we see this level of complexity in these types of ICO scams. Sorry for your loss, but at least you were able to pull out of the second investment deal, right?

It must take a lot of manpower and time for these guys to organise this group and make everything look legit, especially with voice chat. Them doing so probably means that it's very profitable for them to pursue this venture, which makes me worry about how many people actually got scammed in total by this.

Anyways, I would never invest into anything with an intermediary, when I am able to do so directly. A bit of common sense in regards to how they're able to get the so called "discounts" from ICOs would have definitely helped avoid this from happening.

neko was luckier but not me i pooled like 6 deals with them unfortunately. it's the manner they talk to you personally that makes you let your guard down especially since so many discord pools have proven to be truthful.
probably i got too complacent and took too big of a risks in believing that they could get those next to impossible to get in deals like Quarkchain, NOS, NEX. they didn't offer great discounts like just your usual 20-30%. it just the temptation of not wanting to miss out on these too good of an ICO.

Glad for you to be able to deal directly with any team. unfortunately most of us do not have the privilege or the contacts to get personal access. but anyway just hope that we can spread the word around so in future people won't get scammed. as for us we, have moved on and will slowly try to recover whatever losses this round by being more cautious and selective.

[ICOpools.io]

Why would you trust random strangers on the internet who communicate with you through the channels which are not enough to find their real information ? I'm pretty sure Cyber Security can help you in this case.Since you have noticed a few tinder profiles which seemed legit, IP addresses could be traced.Also did you converse with them over a discord call or a mobile ? If your potential loss is worth recovering, you should definitely hit the nearest cyber cell.

Thanks for sharing it anyway!

Woking with pools could be really beneficial for ico investor. But you need to be very smart choosing the right pool. We created our service near 3 months ago to help investors to solve namely this task. To give them tool to choose pools and deals wisely, being on objective stats. Just DO NOT trust any new groups, communities or whatever without any history of success, any token distribution rounds and so on. There are many reliable pools. So just be careful.

[Nekojeeta]

Why would you trust random strangers on the internet who communicate with you through the channels which are not enough to find their real information ? I'm pretty sure Cyber Security can help you in this case.Since you have noticed a few tinder profiles which seemed legit, IP addresses could be traced.Also did you converse with them over a discord call or a mobile ? If your potential loss is worth recovering, you should definitely hit the nearest cyber cell.

Thanks for sharing it anyway!

Woking with pools could be really beneficial for ico investor. But you need to be very smart choosing the right pool. We created our service near 3 months ago to help investors to solve namely this task. To give them tool to choose pools and deals wisely, being on objective stats. Just DO NOT trust any new groups, communities or whatever without any history of success, any token distribution rounds and so on. There are many reliable pools. So just be careful.

I agree and have used many of these more established pools with success.  However, it sounds like some of these pools have even fallen victim to similar sophisticated scams based on some feedback I'm getting after posting this... Wild Wild West at the moment.

[Cenylus]

Why would you trust random strangers on the internet who communicate with you through the channels which are not enough to find their real information ? I'm pretty sure Cyber Security can help you in this case.Since you have noticed a few tinder profiles which seemed legit, IP addresses could be traced.Also did you converse with them over a discord call or a mobile ? If your potential loss is worth recovering, you should definitely hit the nearest cyber cell.

Thanks for sharing it anyway!

Woking with pools could be really beneficial for ico investor. But you need to be very smart choosing the right pool. We created our service near 3 months ago to help investors to solve namely this task. To give them tool to choose pools and deals wisely, being on objective stats. Just DO NOT trust any new groups, communities or whatever without any history of success, any token distribution rounds and so on. There are many reliable pools. So just be careful.

Reliable ico pools are now on the MyWish platform, where a pool manager cannot steal my investment.