And you should probably stay away.

Due to a request, I’m reformatting this story for medium, both for a larger audience and to be more shareable. This also makes for my first story to be published on Medium (in any capacity) so if anything comes off as amature-ish or poorly edited, I apologize in advance and please let me know what I should fix.

For those in the cryptocurrency circles, you’ve probably heard of Ethereum and possibly Neo. One can’t deny that Ethereum has probably jumped in price due to ICOs, and when I found out that Neo was going to have its second one starting on November 15th, I was understandably excited: My biggest investment is currently Neo, and who doesn’t like seeing their investments grow?

(For disclosure purposes: I’m heavily invested in Neo. You probably guessed that by now.)

However, I’ve gotten burned enough times. “I’m going to do my due diligence this time, dammit.”

And as I got deeper and deeper, my heart sank a little as more and more red flags started to show up. While admittedly nothing I could find was direct evidence of it being a scam, I felt like there were some valid concerns, such as

Neither of the two listed as founders on the web page have any experience with blockchain technology prior to this ICO. None. Zilch.

of the two listed as founders on the web page have experience with blockchain technology prior to this ICO. None. Zilch. Of the 15 people listed as their ‘team’ 13 of them are advisors .

people listed as their ‘team’ . For a token with zero github commits or working code of any kind, the were requesting a monstrous sum of money: 28 to 35 million dollars.

So with my concerns, I went to Aphelion’s Subreddit and asked a few questions. When Aphelion answered my questions, my fears only got worse, and I responded in kind to them in the Neo subreddit. I responded there because I felt like my concerns were valid and I could encourage more questions to be asked by other members and give them a chance to get a more full picture.

If you’d like to see the original threads yourself, you can click here and here for the second half. I’ve recreated the questions, answers, and my response below to the best of my ability in the following format:

My question

Their answer

My response.

Stick around after the break. It gets better.

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Hi there!

I have to admit, I’m pretty apprehensive about this project, so I have a few questions I think would go a long way in relieving my concerns. I care quite a bit about Neo, and your fundraising goals at the moment amount to over 1% of the total supply of Neo.

1: Why the timing of your ico? Literally the day before bitcoins largest hardfork is the day you decide to start your ICO?

We wrote a blog post a few days ago clarifying that Bitcoin’s hard fork does not affect us: https://aphelion.org/blog/segwit2x-ico.html

They did a great job of side stepping the question by answering it without answering it. Personally, I’d hold an ICO before a bitcoin fork too, if I knew that the price of everything was probably going to skyrocket right after the fork.

2: Could you please clarify the role of the ‘advisors’ on your team? In my experience, advisor could mean quite a bit or almost nothing.

We consider all advisors to be part of our team. Some of those advisors are working more than full time on Aphelion and some are available to lend advice where they have expertise.

3: You appear to be asking for quite a bit of money. Between 27 and 35 million dollars at today’s prices. That’s quite a bit of money. Can you explain the history of your team, and their roles in managing that sum of money? Perhaps A breakdown of costs, salaries, anticipated expenses, ect.

We have a use of proceeds outlined in our white paper. Each of our founders have experience operating multi-million dollar operations. Key players in Aphelion at the moment are not on salary.

To be clear, these people are trying to raise THIRTY. MILLION. DOLLARS. That’s more than two million dollars a person if you include all their advisors, or 15 million dollars each if you only count the two founders. To put that in perspective, they’re trying to raise Ten million dollars more than Ethereums original ICO and twenty million dollars more than Neo itself raised.

For an exchange.

4: Can you give details on who in your team has experience in blockchain programming and will be the primary party responsible for heading the program? From what I see, you have two founders, neither of whom have given evidence that they have the ability to take on this sort of task.

Joel, noted on our homepage, has extensive blockchain programming experience and manages a robust team. We also have Adi as an advisor from Applied Blockchain. We are fully confident in our team’s ability and we are excited to grow our team in the future.

Ya know, after I got this answer, I went ahead and looked at Joel. (Who is listed as an adviser still, by the way) From what I can tell, ‘Extensive blockchain programming experience’ means almost none really. Here’s the facebook page of the company he represents:

https://www.facebook.com/allcodecom/

Only until the most recent few months has there ever even been a mention of blockchain technology. Going back and back, at no point is bitcoin, ethereum, or really anything to do with Crypto technology even mentioned before very recently. According to the linkedin page, allcode has a team of…5. Including Joel. I’m not blown away or really convinced.

5: In a similar vein, could you please be breakdown the details of how you plan to exchange neo? In terms of selling them at market cost, when, ect.

There are simply too many variables to give you an answer on this. We do not have control over market pricing.

Also, fair enough.

6. You say on your website that you plan on being based in St. Kitts. Why the switch to there from Barcelona like had been previously stated?

We have never sated that Aphelion is based in Barcelona. Aphelion has always been based in Nevis.

PURE. BULLSHIT. At various points, the location changed from Barcelona to Catalonia,and now to now St. Kitts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to archive any of these, but there are various news sites where Aphelion and Barcelona are mentioned. Let’s give them the benefit of a doubt though: Good ol’ Tech capital St. Kitts and Nevis: a tiny island in the Caribbean with a booming population of 54,000, where a quality internet connection would cost upward of 300 USD a month, and Definetly not known for anything shady.

It’s okay though, as we can all tell that this is the place I’d go to get some high quality, cutting edge programming done, and definitely not a way to get the internet to crowdfund my ticket to a tropical paradise.

7: You state in your road map that you both retained legal counsel and came up with the concept by Q2 of this year. Would you be willing to provide evidence for this via email if requested?

Our legal counsel has advised us not to disclose any legal communications with unknown third parties.

Yeah, I wouldn’t either, considering. I’ll tell ya what aphelion Token: PM me for an email address. If you can you provide any evidence that you came up with the concept and/or research of a decentralized cryptocurrency market before March 31st of 2017 with a time dated email, I’ll put in 50 neo into the ICO.

8: It appears that you’ve taken some time to contact the neo team in any capacity. Considering neo has only had one (mostly) successful ICO so far, it’s pretty surprising to some members of CoZ that your certain to correctly pull it off without a hitch with zero help. Do you still remain as confident as before?

Does this question have a typo? We have taken the time to outreach both NEO and CoZ and have had conversations with both. We are not working directly with NEO or CoZ, but they have been kind and helpful to answer questions for us. We are highly confident that we will have a successful venture.

Yeah, I’ve reached out to Neo and CoZ too. CoZ was pretty surprised that you took as long as you did to contact them in regards to how your ICO would work. That Aphelion only began communicating in the last month or so is quite surprising.

9: Your whitepaper and roadmap do not state a minimum funding goal. Should you only manage to reach the paltry sum of 25 million dollars, will you be refunding your investors?

Let’s first clarify that $25M is not a paltry sum. We have a minimum funding goal of $2M and are confident we will far surpass that goal. In the event of unsold tokens, they will be burned

Yeah…it still doesn’t mention the minimum funding goal in the whitepaper, nor if you fail to reach the minimum if you’ll be refunding your investors. (Editorial note: I realize now how dick-ish this question came out. Don’t ask the internet for 30 million dollars and not expect some flack.)

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I finished the post in the Neo sub with this:

Summary: I’ve seen a lot of youtubers and Twitter users shilling this. A remarkable amount of them aren’t including any disclosure that they’re doing it for their social media bounty, unfortunately. Shilling at this level throws me off a lot, especially when it’s from that suppoman turd.

If you’ve reached this far, you’ve read most of my concerns, but I have another I’d like to add: What they are asking for amounts to about 1.2 million neo at current prices. Remember what the ultimate usage of what the Neo token represents: Voting power for consensus nodes and future blockchain decisions. If they reach their goal, they will have enough to represent 1.8 percent of the total voting rights for today’s circulating Neo.That’s sort of like giving one american the right to vote five million times in one election.

Based on everything you’ve seen so far, do you feel as though these are the people you trust with that much power?

Caveat emptor.

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After posting this in the subreddit, I’d say I got a mostly positive response. lots of upvotes, and responses saying I had good questions along with a few angry responses from investors in the pre-ICO. I figured that would have been the end of it and if people felt I had a point, they’d ask Aphelion to respond.

If you’ve made it this far and haven’t muttered anything like “This guy is a paranoid lunatic” under your breath yet, good for you!

The saga shall continue in Aphelion 2: IRRELEVANT