Scammers ran off with more than $2 million in cryptocurrency after carrying out a fake initial coin offering (ICO). Giza was a project that planned to launch an innovative hardware wallet utilizing browser extensions (Mozilla and Chrome). According to their whitepaper it would have been super secure and compatible with almost all major cryptocurrencies. Giza carried out an ICO in January, and at the beginning of February they had already raised more than 2100 ETH which was worth that time around $2.4 million.

First red flags came when the company that was supposed to develop their device announced that Giza has cut ties and seems to be a scam. It did not take long till Giza’s website was deleted (but an archived version can be found here). Soon ater several users got banned from their Telegram group, which was rapidly renamed to ’Name’ and all admins have vanished.

Where did the money go? That’s what the investors would love to know. Well, most of them were sent to various other wallets, but thanks to etherscan some ETH was tracked down at ShapeShift crypto swap exchange. ShapeShift claims they blacklisted the wallet associated with Giza, but they cannot reveal the person who has registered the wallet as they do not collect user data.

Another interesting part is that one of the several addresses, where the stolen funds were sent to, was also involved in another scam. Bee Token was another ICO where the things didn’t go as smooth as they planned. Even though they did a successful public coin offering, and the project itself seems legit, there was a glitch resulting in some of the funds going lost. During the ICO, scammers obtained investors emails and they pretended to be the founders of Bee Token while sending out fake addresses ICO addresses to dupe the potential investors. Now after evaluating, it turned out that the address sent out is the same address where some of the stolen Giza funds were sent. Meaning the same people who scammed Bee investors have been involved with the Gaza scam.

ICOs could be highly rewarding as we have seen a few times in the past, but there are a lot of risks involved with the token sales and investors need to step up with their research game to not to get scammed. Always double check project and addresses you trust your money with.