April 2018: The Philippines debacle

Arcade City had largely become a comedic afterthought in the United States, so Chris resorted to the only thing he know how to do: cause regulatory trouble to stir up press — but this time in other countries:

In early April of 2018, Uber exited the Southeast Asian market due to its merger with Grab. Christopher David,thinking he could replicate his “success” in Austin when Uber pulled out decided to foment anti regulatory populism to serve his own means. His target soon became the Philippines Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB), which regulates the licensing and operations of TNCs in the Philippines. When the LTFRB issued a cease and desist letter to Arcade City, Christopher David got everything he wanted: controversy.

The Arcade City Twitter account was foaming at their mouths over Philippines press coverage

However, the Philippines English speaking press was not as easily duped as Christopher David thought they would be (unlike the crypto press in the Unites States). When the app did another late launch (as he always does) on April 16th, multiple Philippines outlets called him on his bluff. I personally have to have give extra special recognition to the Vulcan Post, who copied sections from this Medium post word for word in their article. Hey, whatever gets the word out.

After all the controversy, promotion, and hot air, one would assume (not knowing the history of Arcade City of course) that their app would be life changing and worthy of coverage right?:

Fooled, once again…

The Philippines network has since dissolved into nothingness, and the LTFRB has prudently chosen to ignore Christopher David’s antics.

August 2018 : SCAM Onwards!

With no success in any of his international PR tantrums, Chris could have buckled down and made a working app. Instead, he chose to buy Facebook ads to promote an Arcade City “launch” in New York (spoiler alert, it didn’t work):

Arcade City Facebook advertisements hyping their NY launch

The subsequent (and predictable) response.

No success in NY? None in the Philippines? Considered a joke by American press? No more avenues to promote a scam? What else could be done? How about constructing a working app? Nah, that’s too much work lets do another Christopher David Re-brand:

Arcade City’s Xth rebrand (sorry, I’ve lost count)

This time, Christopher David promises “Peer to Peer EVERYTHING”. Evolving his scam, I couldn’t wait to see the capabilities that Peer to Peer Everything could bring to its users. Something truly revolutionary, I hope:

Until this moment, people in cities have never been able to chat with each other online. Truly revolutionary.

Stay tuned for more comedy brought to you by the ever relenting scamming of Christopher David. At this point, Arcade City is truly the gift that keeps on giving:

Ecstatic reviews from the Google Play store for the “app”. Its 2019, and the Arcade City App is still a dud.

#WherestheApp

Original Story Published in March 2016:

Hello everyone,

I’m writing this to warn the Ethereum community…again… about Arcade City. If you need some background info on Arcade City, check out this article.

Recently Arcade City released their app in the Apple and Google Stores. The App, does nothing other than scroll users through a series of texts claiming that ridesharing capabilities will be “unlocked” once users gather enough “Karma” in each one of their cities. Understandably, drivers are frustrated and angry that the app was released with a “game” forcing them to work for free before any of them can start making money.

Many believe that the app was released with no ridesharing capability in it at all, and that Christopher David is simply using the karma points as a stall tactic. Several people opened up the app via an APK decompiler and confirmed this suspicion:

The app has no GPS, mapping, location and/or any functionality that would allow it to have ridesharing “unlock” after a certain number of “Karma” is collected.

Christopher David claimed that he had ridesharing functionality programmed into the original app released in February of 2016. However, that app only allowed riders to set up pre-scheduled rides. Moreso, the app did not have payment processing so Arcade City made no money from their previous app. As a result, Christopher was unable to pay vendors. Below is a snippet on how Christopher handled the payment of vendors — specifically the server supporting the app. This is very likely the reason why the original app went offline: Christopher David had no money to pay the servers.

On 09/07/2016 Christopher David called in to a local radio show in Austin, TX and the host, Mike Allen was willing to ask the hard questions that every Bitcoin/Ethereum/crypto journalist has failed to do. Skip to the 160 minute mark for when it gets good:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/mikeallen/on-the-air-with-mike-allen_5

Just today, I received from a former Arcade City employee the following chat message from the Arcade City CTO Mark Burggraf (who has not heard from Chris in 5 months):

This confirms our worst suspicions:

1. The app in stores right now is incomplete and was intentionally released to stall users while Chris completes the rideshare coding himself.

2. Chris blew through all $270,000 from investor Roger Ver (https://twitter.com/rogerkver) and others and still has no app to show for it.

3. Chris is broke, and is heading to DevCon 2 in hopes of finding “deep pocket Ethereum folks” to fund his continued fraud.

Please share this with as many Ethereum publications and DevCon 2 organizers you can. I don’t want to see any other investors/drivers/people hurt by Christopher David

Update: 11/9/16

The current Arcade City Development team (lead by Bernd Lapp)has been very gracious in reaching out to me hoping to address my concerns. They have actively distanced themselves from former CEO Christopher David. I cannot vouch for their current performance now, but I can see that they have tried their best to limit Chris’ managerial capability

I have also requested that in lieu of Chris receiving compensation that the 1% from ICO sales be diverted to a victims fund to make whole the victims of Christopher David’s past frauds. Victims detailed in my article here:

As of this writing, that fund has not been set up.