Tron CEO, Justin Sun has incurred a slew of negative publicity after announcing a competition to win a Tesla car and then refusing to honour the pledge.

Justin Sun is currently facing a huge mass of criticism following his mismanagement of a competition he launched on twitter which promised the winner a free Tesla. The winner had already been announced when Sun announced he was reneging on the deal – many have criticised Sun for this and accused him of running a scam.



Just Follow and Retweet

The competition, which was billed as part of a “Global Appreciation Campaign” announced to celebrate the success of BitTorrent, Tether and Tron, was simple enough to enter; all you had to do was follow Sun on Twitter and retweet his post announcing the giveaway. In the post, Sun announced that he was going to airdrop $20 million – although it was not really made clear in what form this would be – as well as give away a Tesla.

To celebrate #BTT & #USDT–#TRON success, I am planning a $20m free cash airdrop. Good news-it's coming, bad news-I may decide to give away more! First, I will randomly pick 1 winner for a #Tesla up until 3/27! To apply, follow me and RT this tweet! Simple! #Blockchain pic.twitter.com/wFyzwtB3ur — Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) March 12, 2019

Subsequently however, Sun appears to have removed the original tweet which saw the winner announced.



Scam?

A number of strange details have come to light in the wake of this announcement which call into question the legitimacy of this competition altogether.

Crypto analyst John Galt has posted a series of tweets explaining some suspicious attributes of the entire draw process. The draws were conducted live on a feed from the official Tron Foundation twitter account. Galt, after taking a look at the IP hashes of the accounts of the winners, identified that the first winner drawn was in fact a bot account. The subsequent 88 other drawn winners were drawn anonymously but Galt states that the time stamps and IP hashes show that it was in fact the same person.

1/ So @justinsuntron did 88 draws using the Tesla giveaway tweet



– 1st draw (from @Tronfoundation acct) was on March 26th at 12:44am. Winner from that draw was @kozmenko2017, a bot



– Draws 2 – 88 were done anonymously but from ip hashes/time stamps were clearly the same person pic.twitter.com/nV6gXgYQSQ — John Galt (@CryptoJohnGalt) March 28, 2019

Further to this, strangely during the video of the draw, the profile of twitter user Uziel Garcia who uses the twitter handle @uzgaroth, is shown for a split second before the actual draw has taken place. Sun attributes this to a problem with the file compression which took place during the upload. Garcia was later announced as the winner of the Tesla in a post which later disappeared.

Following the announcement of Mexico-based Garcia’s win, Sun contacted him and asked for his details so that he could receive his prize. However Garcia subsequently heard nothing more and the tweet in which he was announced as winner was taken down by Sun. Suspicious of what was going on, Garcia tweeted publicly asking his followers if they thought he was being scammed.

“I was officially the winner since he had mentioned that there was no problem with the video and then they just made another draw and they forgot me, do you think @justinsuntron and @Tronfoundation scam me?”

Ben Miller, an analyst at Shark CIA a cryptocurrency intelligence and research agency has stated to Bloomberg that these raise some serious questions about the legitimacy of the whole competition.

“To delete the first draw video and winner announcement, provide no explanation, then under the guise of ’transparency’ do another draw with new rules, a misrepresentation of how many entrants Twitter allows, and a new draw site that leaves no record of the actual draw conditions — it’s questionable,”



Renege on the Renege

Initally, Sun ignored all of the negative comments twitter was throwing at him from observers and deleted all of the tweets which mentioned @uzgaroth. However, presumably bowing to the weight of pressure coming from the internet, he issued a statement, describing the situation as “unfortunate” and instead offering Garcia free tickets to the next niTRON summit in 2020.

However, I do recognize that this is an unfortunate situation, and would like to extend my warmest welcome to the next #niTROn summit in 2020, including a fully paid round-trip ticket to the event location. We are very grateful for your continued support. #TRON — Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) March 29, 2019

Needless to say, the internet was not impressed. Following the mass of negative publicity this whole debacle has accrued over the last few days, Justin Sun has, according to Bloomberg, now pledged again to actually give Garcia as well as another winner from Vietnam Teslas. This is in an effort to provide “transparency” according to Sun .

Whatever has gone on here, it is clearly something fishy and Sun has clearly only damaged his brand and made himself look like a fool. There is an irony in this story that the creator of the 11th biggest coin by market cap should exemplify a use case for blockchain so perfectly – when you can’t trust people you’re transacting with, blockchain can be an indispensable tool for transparency.