TLDR; Kassado stole 2BTC (was hired to do work, did nothing, and won't return the 2BTC or respond to us).
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To anyone looking to hire Kassado or use one of this platforms (
lovecrypto.com /
rubycoin.org/lab)
The purpose behind this post is to hopefully help someone else down the road avoid making the same mistake we did. Prior to our launch, our main developer came to us and explained that he was not capable of building out a feature into our coin but that he highly recommended Kassado -- who is no doubt a well respected and fairly well known developer within the alt community.
So we reached out to Kassado right away and explained the predicament we were in. Hindsight is 20/20 (which you will become more evident as you keep reading), and we frankly should not have launched the coin -- but given the limited time (we were suppose to be live in about 48 hours), we decided to just keep going and roll that feature out shortly after launch.
The feature was pretty simple (to understand, harder to execute no doubt) -- create a donation feature that would take 0.1% of the coin movement and move it into a charity wallet that we would then use to help raise money for our charity water campaign (
https://my.charitywater.org/digital-drop-initiative-the-launch). He assured us that he was definitely the right man for the job, but given that a feature like this had never been done before -- he was understandably careful to not over promise us and under deliver (which we appreciated) -- especially given how close we were to the launch.
We definitely understand that when it comes to development, especially programming something brand new -- it is going to take as long as it is going to take... and we were ok with that. However, the only way he would begin work was for us to pay him 2BTC up front. Again, given the situation and his reputation -- we agreed to sell off some altcoins to come up with the first installment of 0.6BTC. We told him that we frankly did not have enough for the rest of the payment and that we would be good to pay him as soon as we could -- which we did a couple days later.
After nearly 2 months of no response and trying to give him every benefit of the doubt -- and trying to have 10+ other guys within our community try to reach out to him -- we finally decided to move on and hire a new developer... who by the way was able to complete the feature within a few days.
Below are screenshots documenting some of the chats with Kassado and the transactions that took place.
