Confido, a small Initial Coin Offering (ICO), has vaporized. The site, Twitter acount and subbreddit is no more. This is a cautionary tale for anyone who may blindly invest in an ICO without doing proper due diligence as this one looks like it is on a fast-track to zero.
Ostensibly co-founded by Joost van Doorn and Max Kruger (but who really knows), the ICO raised a mere $347,477 in ETH following a pre-sale in October and a final round that closed last week. The offer was listed on TokenLot but little more remains of the crowdsale for a “trustless escrow payment solution using smart contracts.”
The web site Confido.io is no more.
The Twitter account has been removed.
The sub-Reddit has been set to private.
Joost van Doorn’s LinkedIn page is not available.
Even a blog post on Medium that was published, apparently by one of the founders, has been scrubbed from the site.
Joosted
As a casual observer the disappearance of the offer is disappointing. For the investors, its worse as the value of token has sunk to just $0.03 on CoinMarketCap. At one point in time, the token cap held a value of over $10 million.
So what went wrong? Is this a total pump and dump scam? Are the founders, whomever they are, enjoying a vacation on some distant island courtesy of the unsuspecting token purchasers? All very good questions to ask.
Yesterday, on Medium, the Confido team posted a fragile explanation claiming “legal trouble caused by a contract [they] signed.”
“We signed the contract with assurance from our legal advisor that there was minimal risk and it would not be an issue. I can’t and won’t go into details, but he was wrong. It is a problem.”
Unfortunately, the problem appears to be one the investors must endure.
Sam Guzik, a securities attorney and Crowdfund Insider Contributor, commented on the deed;
“Fraud is a fact of life in the investment world. But ICO offerings are more susceptible to fraudulent practices, as regulators around the world have observed. These investments, with the promise of quick, outsized returns, involve extremely complex business models, understood by few. Add to this the absence of meaningful disclosure, compounded by those who attempt to skirt existing regulatory schemes such as securities laws, the ICO offering is a virtual petri dish for fraudulent investment schemes. It is this environment that virtually guarantees that substantially all ICOs in the US will ultimately be subject to regulation – and many industry leaders are the ones taking the lead in calling for a regulated ICO marketplace – with meaningful protections for crypto investors.”
As the ICO campaign page aptly states; “the Confido ICO is over now.”
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