For roughly 24 hours, Savedroid’s CEO Yassin Hankir seemed to have access to the kind of money that most everyone reading this article will never see in their life.

With some calling it a “morbid publicity stunt”, Yassin Hankir pranked the 35,000 member community who participated in his company’s ICO by seemingly disappearing to a mysterious tropical location, thanking them for the generous donation.

Seemingly as quick as Yassin disappeared, he was back again. Releasing a video documenting how he aimed to teach the community a lesson on how easy it would be for a company as public and engaging as his, to run off with investors money.

Savedroid

Although his goal was education and enlightenment, the result was far more damaging.

The cryptocurrency community has been plagued by exit scams for some time, ranging from ponzi schemes such as Bitconnect to blatant theft, such as Confido. The cryptocurrency community does not need a reminder as to how easy it is to scam an investor. Yassin attempted to say that there is a greater need for regulation in the space, however he seemed to miss the fact that although regulation helps protect investors there is just as much fraudulent activity in the securities space. The ICO space is hot, securities fraud is not — this doesn’t mean that securities fraud doesn’t exist (even in a heavily regulated environment).

Yassin should realize that his stunt doesn’t prove that regulation is a good thing (In reality he would have been found and charged regardless of if he committed fraud and theft in a regulated or unregulated environment). The only result of this stunt shows his recklessness and lack of understanding of community sentiment. He has shown that as a leader he makes decisions which are haphazard in nature and invoke fear and negative sentiment in people just to drive home a message. He has effectively destroyed the trust of the community that he’s worked so hard to build, in under 24 hours.

The Savedroid ICO stunt does nothing more than confirm that leaders can make poor decisions in a regulated or irregulated environment and that not all publicity is good publicity. Creating a strong brand, acting with a conscious understanding of your environment and delivering value to the investors that trust you is the only way to improve the ICO space. Hopefully we can learn that creative PR should be accomplished in a way that gets people’s attention without invoking negative emotions, drawing interest without dissolving trust. We should take this as a leadership lesson ensuring that companies have to hold themselves to a higher standard, which will in turn garner respect from regulators for our industry.