There's this new "Ploutos Coin" circulating in the Philippines claiming to be a new cryptocurrency. I
won't say it's a scam but here are all the red flags:
- Last January they
"ICO'd" without a whitepaper to solicit money from investors with the promise of unrealistic returns. They even had referral bonuses for a short time too.
- At the time they aren't running on the Ethereum blockchain and are not enlisted on any exchange at the time. Investors can buy/sell their Ploutos coins by sending/receiving money to/from the owners via bank transfer. All the investor's imaginary coins are just stored on their website's database and
the price is just artificially manipulated from $1 to $1.5 to $3 to $5 until around August.
- At first, they claimed that their coin's price depends on forex trading and supply & demand (even though they aren't enlisted yet on any exchange). Here's
one of their early informational videos. In reality
they are only using hype and promises of unrealistic ROIs to recruit more investors.
-
They plagiarized Nexo's whitepaper. When they received a lot of heat from government agencies in the Philippines like SEC (
link) and CEZA (
link) for their fraudulent activities, they rushed to come up with a whitepaper which is an almost 1:1 copy to Nexo's (
link). (
see screenshots here) . As stated also on their plagiarized whitepaper, they suddenly shifted from "forex trading-based" to a crypto loan platform. What kind of company would suddenly shift to a completely different direction without even consulting/announcing it to their investors? Everything is just so vague and sketchy.
-
No team members transparency nor any mentions of the technology they're building on their website/whitepaper. They only stated one official member on their whitepaper, their CEO,
Mark Freeman. Guy has no background on software engineering/technology, he does forex trading though but that's about it. He and his friends (who we suspect are running this whole Ploutos scam) also has a lot of history with Ponzi schemes in the Philippines. He even has a
promotional video showing off his "luxurious lifestyle".
-
They never talk about blockchain technology or the platform they're developing. All they tell their investors is that the token's price will skyrocket because more people will want to buy it because, well, the price will skyrocket. They don't even have a developer/engineering team. All they talk about is investing on the tokens because it's price will go up, claiming it will go as high as $500, $10,000, $20,000 a piece.
Since last August, 8 months after their "ICO", they are enlisted on Bitexlive and Stocks.Exchange. They started "migrating" the coins to the investors by sending them the amount of PLTS tokens they currently own (as recorded in their database), but not before wash trading the coins first to make it appear that the coin is priced at $10-50. When the migration started and the holders started trading in the market, the coin's price is now floating at below $1 in the said markets.
I could go on but I think we all know where this is headed. All this just screams BitConnect and OneCoin to me.
Links:
- Old website:
http://ploutos-coin.com- New website:
https://www.ploutoschain.org- Whitepaper:
https://www.ploutoschain.org/Ploutos%20Whitepaper.pdf- Facebook page 1:
https://www.facebook.com/PloutosCoins/?ref=br_rs- Facebook page 2:
https://www.facebook.com/ploutoscoin/?ref=br_rs- Video of their "grand launching":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKDRMGmOKrE. As you can see it has that same cultish, high-energy, hype vibe similar to BitConnect
- Screenshots as evidence of all the stuff I talked about:
https://imgur.com/a/UCjzckx. You can search "Ploutos Coin" on Facebook and YouTube too
