It all started back in December of 2018, the 22nd to be exact. That was the day I noticed an ad on Facebook telling the world about a fascinating technology which would soon be disrupting the multi-billion dollar GPS industry. Fast forward to today, and this idea makes me laugh. Instead of changing the world for the better, they are scamming investors out of their hard earned money. Bait and switch at it’s finest. Over the course of this article, my goal is to inform you of my experience investing and learning, so that you can make your own decision and hopefully prevail in this emerging Crytpo-market.

The first package I purchased included 120 shares in XY, exclusive access to drone firmware as soon as it was released, some other (now apparent) empty promises, plus a hat and T-shirt.

Next package up, 375 shares and a Geomining kit.

After that, I went big with 625 shares and I got another sweet snap-back hat, T-shirt, and commemorative gold and silver-plated coin. At this point, I was all aboard the XYO express! I was so blindly ambitious, I even made custom XYO Popsockets and sent them to members of the awesome community for free! 100 individual shipments and I ate the shipping. Another 25 of them were sent to XY headquarters for the team to enjoy. We were in this together! (so I thought)

After the investments listed above, combined with all the time and effort I was putting into promoting the project, I starting to gain some popularity in the community and with the company. I started doing giveaways on twitter and for one I received a sweet graphic from XY for my 100K XYO giveaway.

Around this time, I even was getting shout-outs from Scott on the live feeds, encouraging others to follow me and/or request free XYO Swag from me, since I was handing it out left and right. By mid March, I had shelled out roughly $11K investing, supporting, and sharing the XYO message. Sadly, I was only looking for more opportunities to help the project succeed. Then the Dataist Black Box was introduced…

The Black Box is where things slowly started to deteriorate. It was a promise of many things: Geomining Kit, Swag, a summary of the state of the future address in neatly printed little pamphlets, a Dataist Master Class, Coin starter and success pamphlets, a subscription to the Dataist Tribe forum, a personal VIP concierge*, a Dataist Founder token (NFT), and $250 worth of XYO! All for only $1597! (In case you were wondering, that was 88% off the normal price) The best part was that Scott personally guaranteed everyone who purchased this package would make their money back within 12 months, or he would refund everyone their money. When you ordered, you received a box with most of the tangible items included. At the time it seemed like the only thing missing was the NFT (Non-Fungible Token). However, if we fast-forward 2 months, you come to realize that the Dataist Tribe forum has been shut down, the Dataist Masterclass has been re-branded and resold to customer as the Geohacker Video Masterclass, and no one has a personal concierge due to the fact that they fired those employees and eliminated that program all together.

I digress… After the Black Box came the Game Changer Package. This was one of the Crypto-economic packages which basically allowed you to purchase XYO directly from the company, and you also got a CoolWallet S Crytpo-wallet, more shirts and hats, and another NFT. The only catch here is that you have to stake the XYO to the network for 6 months before you could transfer it to your wallet or exchange. I opted for $5425 worth of XYO which at the time was roughly 3 million tokens. Since they had not yet cleaned house, they had a particular “head of customer obsession” who was awesome and helped me work through the staking process. They fired her shortly there after.

Despite more and more flags popping up, I continued purchasing XY Findables, and Geomining Kits. In all, I had 6 bridges and close to 100 sentinels. Of those, I didn’t keep many and instead gave away 4 of the bridges and many of the sentinels (again for free). The twitter giveaways were exciting, but ultimately I was just hemorrhaging money left and right.

Just to keep us on track, by May 1st of 2019 I had invested roughly $18K. Still waiting on some NFTs, don’t have a concierge, and the forums I visited to stay informed are one by one being closed down. As the signs start getting clearer, I begin to voice concerns about undelivered products and the focus of where the project is going on less public avenues. Keep in mind the idea that I loved and led me to invest in shares, was all about the network and creating something new. Where we are now in the evolution is we have thrown the network on the back burner and poured all available resources into Coin. Cool App, but that is not what led me to invest in XY/XYO. Another fun fact is Coin runs on Wifi/GPS. Yep! The same GPS XYO set out to overthrow. Irony.

Next stop on the trail of broken dreams was the infamous Coin GeoHacker Bundle. This offered you a slew of subscriptions (Coin Plus, GeoHacker Video Masterclass, and Coin Crate) and some more t-shirts and hat for $83.33 a month for a year. This was advertised as a value of $15K for only $999.96 ($83.33 x 12 months). Of the subscriptions, I was most excited about the Coin Crate. This promised $250 worth of Crypto & digital assets delivered monthly. My excitement about this didn’t last long, as they didn’t even honor the first month’s Coin Crate. No digital assets, no crypto, no $250-worth of anything.

With all this swirling in my mind, I first reached out on the Dataist Tribe forum and was able to connect with Scott about the over-promising and under-delivering nature of how things were going with XYO. At that point, he sympathized and agreed that things were not perfect. I tried to voice my concerns in a respectful manner, simply asking how the issues would be addressed. Not long after that, Scott moved everyone from the Dataist Forum to the GeoHacker forum and closed the Dataist site for good. Interestingly, only a few weeks after the Dataist forum closed, they axed the GeoHacker forum also. At this point I am noticing a trend.

Since XY/XYO does not control twitter, I take my concerns there. They may want to remove all negative press, so people only see the positive, but we live in a world where people are free to read between the lines and determine their own opinion. While I continue to like comments and retweet posts to support the community, I also keep up with my points of concerns, which ultimately did not end well. What was Scott’s response? He called me names and berated me as if he was a 7 year old child who just had his toy stolen. As it turns out, one of the co-founders of this project has incredible marketing ability, and he also behaves like a child in public. His final response was to give me back all my money so that I would just go away.

Lets take a moment to think about this, as it’s important. XY, speaking through Scott, would rather pay me all the money I had invested up to this point, if I would simply disappear. They would rather give me my money back instead of fixing the problems they created.

I was delighted to hear Scott’s offer. I immediately jumped at the opportunity. After some back and forth behind the scenes, I was presented with an offer: Send us back the material you purchased from us and we will refund you everything (except the shares). Problem: I gave away more than half of the bridges, sentinels, hats and other stuff via giveaways. The response to me presenting this issue caught me off guard. They said given your loyal support, we will not require you to return the purchased goods, but you need to sign this document. What document? Oh, the 9 page legal document that clearly states you will not initiate, support, or participate in any future lawsuits against us. WHAT?! You will only refund me the money if I legally promise I will not sue you? That spoke to me. I politely declined the offer. (Funny/not funny aside, they addressed the document to some other Ryan Bergh😳)

Do you agree that when people speak up about being lied to, misled, or wronged by a company, the platform which they are speaking from should be taken away? I certainly don’t. If you’re only getting one side of the story, wouldn’t you want to know there is another side worth hearing? At that point it is up to you how you choose to proceed. You can stick with your feelings that XY is a long-term investment and worth sticking around for. Or, you can choose to do your own research and determine the validity of the “rumors.” The choice is yours, and I wish you all the best as you proceed.

For the loyal and passionate XYO community: I wish you nothing but the best. I still hope the original idea of the Network gets more attention and develops into something special.

Unfortunately, XYO will not reach mainstream adoption unless two things happen: 1) Scott leaves and they replace him with an excellent business mind. Someone who can actually allow the company to execute its’ promises is what is needed. Not Scott, who runs his mouth too much and wastes money on things like Dennis Rodman masturbating to their app. Scott, you’re killing your company from the inside. 2) You give Arie and the Network the developers and attention they need to do big things, and in a hurry. Your technology is no longer new, and plenty other projects are soon to beat you at your own game.

*The idea of this VIP Concierge was not original, and actually was stolen from a friend of mine (Tim with Bits and Tokens). Tim has been offering an on-demand crypto-help service for years.

PS- If your not familiar with this article on doing your own due diligence prior to investing, please review the notes on XY/XYO