Before I start this, let me give the context on why I wrote this post.

This post is partly a warning to stay away from Coinzoom, and partly a warning to never trust random accounts on social media.

The tactics employed by Coinzoom go much further than your average shiller, and is backed by millions of USD from angel investors.

Coinzoom also deployed this tactic on Twitter, but for this article we highlight Reddit because the shilling was much more sophisticated on that platform.

But lets get into the details

(You can skip to the next part if you are familiar with Reddit).

If you are anything like me, you are an avid user of social media, especially when investing in cryptocurrency. It is an easy way to stay up to date on the latest news, read commentary from other people that invest in cryptocurrency and read criticism.

One of my favourite platforms to read some news on is Reddit. Reddit is a massive forum with millions of users, and those users can make subforums for different subjects. If you like cars you go to reddit.com/r/cars, if you like Bitcoin you go to reddit.com/r/bitcoin. You probably get the gist.

Reddit also has a dedicated forum for cryptocurrency which can be found on reddit.com/r/cryptocurrency. This subforum is visited by hundreds of thousands every day and has more than 950K subscribers.

A lot of new people visit this place to learn more about cryptocurrency and find nifty ways to use their cryptocurrency.

As you may have guessed, this is basically the jackpot for every scummy marketer or scammer. Successfully gaming crypto Reddit means that you gamed a large place full of people with money to invest.

Someone at the marketing department of Coinzoom also realized that there is money to made from Reddit.

There are a lot of shills, trolls, fudders and other people trying to mislead people, but Coinzoom takes the cake. They have successfully gamed multiple Reddit forums. Affected subreddits are /r/cryptocurrency, /r/altcoins, /r/tronix, /r/NEO, /r/dapps and the list goes on and on.

We were quite shocked that Coinzoom took the approach to use dirty tactics because of what they did is against the rules of the FTC (Federal trade Commission).

I also included an example to show you the similarities with how Coinzoom practices shilling on Reddit.

From FTC:

255.5 Disclosure of material connections. Example 8: An online message board designated for discussions of new music download

technology is frequented by MP3 player enthusiasts. They exchange information about

new products, utilities, and the functionality of numerous playback devices. Unbeknownst

to the message board community, an employee of a leading playback device manufacturer

has been posting messages on the discussion board promoting the manufacturer’s product.

Knowledge of this poster’s employment likely would affect the weight or credibility of her

endorsement. Therefore, the poster should clearly and conspicuously disclose her

relationship to the manufacturer to members and readers of the message board.

Other companies such as Gracinia Cambogia have been fined up to 12.8 million dollars for breaking this rule. This shows you how important this rule is. Without this rule shilling from massive companies would run rampant.

What or who is Coinzoom?

Coinzoom is a registered US company that provides credit cards to cryptocurrency investors. They are supposed to have a live exchange somewhere in the future too. The product isn’t live yet, but you can preorder your card for $10 right now. Coinzoom claims that a small group of 100 people have access to the card already. This is crucial information.

So how did Coinzoom game Reddit and fool users?

Whoever was in charge took a lot of time to set this up in advance.

Churning out 100s of accounts to infiltrate Reddit threads and derail them into Coinzoom discussions. Loads of accounts karmafarmed on popular subreddits. It must have taken months to prepare in advance.

All the accounts have a clear goal, and it shows.

Discussion is steered into a positive direction, which is pretty odd for people who most likely haven’t even received their cards yet.

Take a look at one of the accounts used for shilling Coinzoom and you can see how said account keeps derailing conversations into Coinzoom promotion.

The account feigns ignorance and recommends Coinzoom. This is a repeated pattern. It works extremely well because a lot of users don’t suspect newbies to promote sites for monetary compensation. The accounts also claim the cards are working right now, and that they are using it to pay in stores. (Which is impossible, because the card is not launched yet!)

Click the image to open it in a new tab. These screenshots are taken with a third party app called Reddit Is Fun.

I’m 99% sure that an average Reddit user does not talk like the account in the screenshot. Other similarities we found were using the same hand emojis (finger pointing up “👆”).

I inquired with the CEO of Coinzoom, Todd Crosland, but we never got a message back.

We are unsure if he actually knows what is happening because it seems like he outsourced his marketing department according to our very short chat after reaching out to him.

We tried to capture more accounts that were shilling Coinzoom, but all accounts are banned by Reddit for breaking rules. Our Discord group reported each one so far to Reddit, and most are banned because of these actions.

If you search /r/all for “Coinzoom” you will find plenty of accounts shilling Coinzoom and getting banned a few days after.

A couple of examples would be u/69musical, u/coinChekz, u/mikeg737 and u/Dredd1019.

Stay safe out there people and don’t trust random Reddit users on financial products. Do your diligent research before giving information to a company. Especially ones that use dirty tactics like this.

I got banned from their Telegram channel for asking about getting a response on our article and what the CEO would do to stop this situation. Take that as an example of how Coinzoom treats their customers.

On a side note, even their Telegram channel has botted accounts to prop up the group subscribers. The complete list is even longer but im not going to bother you with hundreds of screenshots.

What do you think about marketing tactics like these?