Generally, when it comes to ICOs, the common case is that they are the ones doing the scamming and taking people’s money, but in this article you will see how just the opposite is happening — ICOs are getting ripped off by a certain type of “influencers” due to incompetence and lack of marketing experience.

Now, we all already know that there is a massive amount of corruption and dishonesty among the so-called “experts”, selling ratings and reviews in the popular ICO listing sites and how easy it is to buy ICO ratings.

I guess most of you are also aware that buying YouTube reviews are even easier — if you do an ICO, the YouTube guys are coming at you in hordes, making you offers, constantly.

As my job is to follow and monitor specific ICOs, I watch and observe what is happening in their Telegram groups, Twitter accounts, and other media channels 24/7 because I work as a contractor for a new platform designed to help ordinary, non-professional individuals mitigate the risks of ICO investments — ICO-Refund.com, so I’m dealing with a massive amount of spam, shady proposals, and interactions in the ICO ecosystem, basically all day long.

It’s not uncommon to see how more than half of the messages in the Telegram group of a project are YouTubers telling ICO owners that they have big YouTube channels, that are very influential and they offer them a way to promote the ICO in a positive light in the form of a review.

Below is what the chat looks like in the Telegram group of one of the ICOs taking place at the moment — basically 2 out of every 3 messages are YouTubers selling their reviews:

I decided to conduct a little experiment. I wrote to two of the YouTubers that offer a review for this ICO and claim to be “very influential” on Youtube. I started with that we are conducting an ICO and we want to use their service as influencers to popularize our project. The outcome was more than interesting. I will start with the ‘guy’ case.

Case #1 — The “Guy”

The initial message of the YouTuber in the ICO’s Telegram group:

This is the answer I received from the ‘guy’ — I will call him the ‘guy’ because that is basically every other word in his YouTube ICO ‘reviews’… :)

So far, nothing new, just another Youtube selling his “honest” opinion and helping his unsuspecting followers to make good life choices, but here is where the interesting part begins, so bear with me here.

As you can see, the service isn’t cheap — $2000 for a short video is quite a pay, although having in mind the millions that some of these ICOs collect it’s NOT much of a big deal for them. Except that they are throwing it in vain.

But since for the purpose of my experiment I’m pretending to be an ICO owner, I have to check what I will get for my money and see how much ‘influence’ the ‘guy’ really has on Youtube, as a marketing channel. And things got really weird, really fast.

The first thing that caught my attention was unusual ’likes‘ to ‘dislikes’ ratio of his videos — on 90% of them it was 100% (if the voting is not turned off as a whole) — for example, 150 likes and 0 dislikes — that is a worrying factor and very suspicious, especially in emotional space like crypto and ICOs. In the example below the ‘guy’ has 319 likes, 0 dislikes and only 2 comments for a video with over 5 000 views.

I continued browsing his clips only to find more and more strange things. For example:

On this video, the ‘guy’ doesn’t have hundreds of likes and 0 dislikes, but he has 13.5k views and only 5 likes, one or two (at least) maybe from his other accounts. In a normal YouTube video, with legit (real) views this could NEVER happen.

The ‘guy’ made a mistake — he has forgotten to buy the likes for this one. It is at this moment that I knew with certainty — the ‘guy’ has NO REAL followers, NO REAL likes and even NO REAL VIEWS.

The thing is — you can buy fake YouTube views, followers and likes VERY CHEAP — and ‘smart’ people like the ‘guy’ obviously have thought of the opportunity to leverage these fake numbers in order to take a bite off the ICOs’ money, part of which the owners are spending recklessly on trying to get even more funds into the ICO.

To get an idea how cheap it is to buy views, likes, and followers, I will give you an example with the prices of one of the most famous companies delivering this service — To buy 10 000 views is $15, 10 000 followers are $120, and 1 000 likes are around $10.

Having in mind the amount of money that the “guy” is asking for a review — this fake views, followers, and likes are basically free for him. It is important to note that you can buy dislikes too if you want, in order for your video activity to look less suspicious, but most of the guys like our ‘guy’ are obviously not smart enough to do that.

Looking at the comments under his videos is also intriguing — almost all of them are from fake profiles — accounts with no activity on Youtube at all, or from people that have nothing in common with the crypto area, for example — Indian choir singers.

So, in short, the ‘guy’ is straight up scamming the ICOS with false, pretended influence and knowing that I decide to continue with my experiment. I wanted to know if there is another way to get an ICO review or the only option possible is to pay the ‘guy’ directly. The other thing that I was curious about is how much he is willing to reduce the price, here’s the rest of my conversation with him.

As we can see, no, he will NOT ‘review’ our imaginary ICO for nothing different than direct payment, no matter how good it could be, no matter how it will change the world and even no matter of the referral program’s terms that he would get, well, the last one is understandable, since he has no real following, views or influence whatsoever to make any money through referrals.

I decided to make him a ridiculously smaller offer than the initially announced rate — exactly half of the money that he was asking for an 8 to 9-minute video — he was not pleased, as $850 seemed to be to low for him, though $900 was fine… :)

Anyway, my best guess is that the most of the ICOs are actually paying him money much closer (if not equal) to his ‘official rate’, than what I offered because they have no idea they’re dealing with a fraud, otherwise they would not even bother ‘buying’ anything from him at all.

If you wonder how much money is making the ‘guy’ on a monthly basis, here is a simple calculation:

As many of the trending ICOs at the moment have bought a ‘review’ from him, for the past month he has made 114 (yes, 114…) “ICO reviews”. Let’s say he was taking for them $200 less than his average fee of $1700, so 114 x $1500 — that’s $171 000.

Yes, 171 thousand dollars earned in a month from a YouTube channel with no real following, fake views, and fake likes. All from contributors and investors of the projects that the ‘guy’ is ‘reviewing’.

In some instances, he has made 2 and even 3 reviews a day. Now, this is funny, because it hardly takes a genius to grasp the fact that no one can truly review so many projects for that period of time, at least not legitimately, and have a worthy following along with that. Research and evaluation take time. I really wonder how no one from all the ICOs which have bought reviews from the ‘guy’ has spotted that and I have only one answer coming to mind — incompetence and lack of real marketing experience.

I followed his channel for about a week and there was exactly the same phenomenon every time a new video has been uploaded — no views for the first 1 to 2 hours, then the view count goes up to between 5k to 10k in a matter of another few hours and after that does NOT increase in time.

Basically, the ‘guy’ is following the same routine every time. He never discloses that he’s getting paid for the review or that it is actually a paid promotion and always tells his “viewers” that ‘this is just his honest opinion’, intentionally misleading and lying to the few occasional real visitors of his ICO videos. But enough for the ‘guy’.

Notice. By the time you read this, there could be changes in some of the video statistics mentioned above. It is even quite possible a lot of videos and even the whole channel to be deleted as a result of this experiment going public.

Case #2 — The “Guru”

Let’s see the what’s up with the second self-advertised YouTube promoter from the Telegram group — CryptoGuru.

The conversation basically goes the exact same way as in the first case.

The YouTuber, we will call him the ‘guru’, tells me how much is going to cost our ICO to be promoted by him and the rate minute/price is about as the same as with the ‘guy’. He also never discloses publicly in his videos that he is being paid to promote and labels it as a ‘review’.

The “Guru” is also inclined to accept two times less money than initially announced, in the form of a flat fee, but doesn’t want to hear about anything else as a remuneration method. He wants an upfront payment, but as you can see that is also negotiable.

The victims

Although, as shown above, the organizations that have been conducting ICOs are sometimes tricked into paying a part of their collected funds to fraudulent individuals in their hunger for more exposure and money, the regular, non-professional, small time investor is the main loser from the shit hole of a state that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is currently in.

Many of them are inexperienced and new in this space and because of that, they are the ones that are most easily manipulated and misled into actions they might regret later.

This is also one of the reasons why if you are an average individual looking for a good project to invest in, you might want to check what are the projects covered on ICO-Refund.com, even if you are not planning to protect your contribution with a refund option.

They never take any kind of material remuneration for a listing, it’s independent third-party service, not affiliated with any of the ICOs covered on the platform and they also do extensive research and assessment of the projects before inclusion. But no matter what you do, always, always conduct your own research as detailed as you can.

“Even the smallest light defeats the thickest darkness”

Note: Although YouTubers are in my opinion the plague of the crypto at the moment because a huge number of them are paid to promote pyramid schemes that will lose the money of most of their viewers, or are being corrupted by ICOs, there are guys among them that have integrity and are doing a great job.

Content creators like Crypto Daily, Ivan on Tech, DataDash, even Doug Polk are mixing entertaining with informative content and although they are also getting paid through various different initiatives (courses, own projects, reviews — but real ones and with disclosed sponsorship) they are always doing the right way and care for the people that they have influence upon.

Going to the moon? Nope. 1984

It’s sad to see what the blockchain concept is being used for, as opposed to what it could be used for. You see, this idea comes in a time when it’s very needed. A time when the centralized control, mass surveillance and the censorship are getting more and more pronounced as the amount of money and power is concentrating in fewer and fewer people and technology is developing further.

As we witness human rights being reduced and freedom being more and more limited, the blockchain idea is truly meant to be used as a tool of the Resistance, as a mean to empower the regular person. Too bad the number of people paying attention to persons who actually understand that, like Andreas Antonopoulos and John McFee, is still too small.

To be honest, I can very well see a future where the final words of George Orwell are becoming a reality, and we have to change a lot of things for that not to happen. But there is a long, long way home.

- Rebel with a Cause

Editorial:

They say that the first step, before anybody else in the world believes it is you have to believe it. But people and actions like the ones described in this article are undermining trust in the entire industry, making a lot of valuable individuals, organization and projects struggling to make way, because of the built public perception that everything new related to cryptocurrencies is illegitimate.

We, the ICO-Refund.com team, fully support the opinion and the vision of our associate expressed in the article above. Because of the enormous amount of corruption and dishonesty among the reviewers, “influencers” and so-called “experts”, we are restricting our affiliate program and from now on we will only work with approved referral partners.

We have faith in the community and believe that in time we can solve many of the problems we have now by and acting together, being more mature, and responsible.