Bitoffer (and those that want get their btc back).
History Lesson
For those that don't know, Bitoffer created House of Coins (HOC). It was to be a coin that was backed financially by IPO. You had to buy at least .1 btc to be a "house member" and the IPO coin (HOC) was to be split up proportionally by amount of bitcoin invested. Everything was going fine until a couple hours into launch. The coin forked and it took a couple days to get it working again. By then, the damage was done. He did get the coin fixed after a few days. People were livid, the code was screwed up. It's believed he ended up paying someone to fix it. Then the forums were completely unorganized and ineffective. Polls were thrown out, few responded, Bitoffer was around but only mildly involved. After about 10 days, the coin had been floundering and ultimately dropped to where it sits now (5 sats on bittrex at the time of writing this). Bitoffer on the last day we heard from him, briefly logged into the HOC forum, then the site went dead and the
Announcement (ANN) Thread was locked. Email to the admin account was rerturned undeliverable. He ghosted on everyone. Repeated attempts for refunds have gone unanswered through PM here on btctalk. He is currently holding 18-19 BTC (~$10300USD) worth of IPO investments. Bitoffer never wrote with very good English, many in IRC believe he may not be American, but it's an unknown (this plays in later).
Here are the facts, IP addresses, and information that has been amassed. I provide it hear for any law enforcement or internet fraud agency that may be searching for him. Several people have already filed paperwork with different agencies. I only mean to assist their search.
First,
a Google doc showing all the people that invested.
In IRC chat his IP address was identified as: 24.217.34.92 which correlates to a St. Louis IP address. That IP was logged on 26APR14 at 0015 zulu (GMT). (
Geo locate it here)
This is the github page where the coins code is located:
https://github.com/HouseofCoins/HOCOnly a handful of people have committed (changed/uploaded) to that git repo: HouseofCoins / j5onrf / labuser / micryon (the last to touch it)
Doing a
whois on house of coins returned this information:
Registrant ID: F7F0DEA74A56CFEC
Registrant Name: Josh Davenport
Registrant Address1: 8764 Rosalie Ave
Registrant City: Saint Louis
Registrant State/Province: MO
Registrant Postal Code: 63144
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Phone Number: +1.3146694422
The address is to a Post Office in Saint Louis. The phone number goes to an answering service. No facebook or other social sites come back with a close candidate for the name, so it's believed the name is likely a fake. The post office would probably be the best place for a law enforcement agency to start looking, if he registered a PO Box there, he had to use an ID to get it.
Once the site was shutdown, bitoffer had it forwarded to
https://clubclassifieds.com/ (why that site is unknown)
Doing a whois for
https://clubclassifieds.com/ returns the following:
Registrant Name: Samuel Persaud
Registrant Organization: COUNTRY CLUB CLASSIFIEDS, LLC
Doing searches for Samuel Persaud leads to one interesting result.
Samuel Persaud on Twitter where he lists himself as a "developer" and most of his postings are in Spanish. Going back to my mention of him not writing in very good English earlier in this post, this could be a possible ID on bitoffer.
Twitter screenshot for archive.Of interest on the Twitter page, is the image of the mask. It was seen on (I/we believe) one of the github users profile images. The exact same mask image.
Going a little deeper...
That twitter account links to
Samuel Persaud on Google +On the Google Plus page, it says he works at Segutron CA, attends Harvard University, and lives in Brasil.
Google + screenshot for archive.If you go through his postings on the social media sites listed above, you will see several mentions or postings of what may be co-workers that would lead one to believe he may be a Ubuntu developer at
76 Systems Inc. in Denver. (but that wouldn't correlate to his St. Louis IP address)
Other possibilities...
j5onrf being one of the people listed as working on the coin, and had some kind of roll in the coin development. The only info found on that nick/username was a
link to flicker and a
chat history on trollbox.
This is all I have so far. If anyone has any additional information, please post it to this thread. If you're not comfortable posting here, PM me and I'll add it.
It's been weeks and it's clear he has no intention of refunding the bitcoins. Maybe he'll see the light if he reads this and refund all the IPO, in which case I'll remove this thread.
