Sparkster Full Exposé. Ian Balina Condemns SPRK. CEO missing in Pakistan. SPRK Software from Appinventor 2.0?



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In 2018, a project called Sparkster raised over 25m US Dollars on the basis of a 10M Transaction per second claim. The project was highly hyped and was backed by strategic investors like Ian Balina.

Sparkster’s CEO has made numerous claims during the Initial Coin Offering Campaign in order to lure investors. At one point, Sajjad Daya, made claims that there would be a 300x Return on Investment for the utility coin in their public telegram. Many investors, seeing this, invested based on this promise. The message was deleted a few days ago during a clean up operation by Telegram Admins.

Furthermore, to Claims, liquidity is an important issue for investors. Many investors rightfully want to know about how long their investments will be locked up for, and how long TGE (Token Generation Events) take place. Once Again, Sajjad Daya made public claims and promises that TGE would occur 1 week after the ICO sale ended. This promise was broken, in what has resulted in over 10 months of waiting by investors of Sparkster.

The reasoning behind the discretionary powers exercise by Sparkster is that they have consulted market trading experts that have informed then to wait until the market has better conditions, however, we believe that it could potentially be an attempt by the project to drag the TGE so that the Team’s Tokens have a shorter lock-up period, this unlocking the tokens much closer the Team Tokens Distribution. Sparkster Admins, Sajjad Daya and Shabir have failed to respond to this point.

Over these 10 months, hundreds, if not up to 1000 investors have been banned from Sparkster’s main channel. People asking simply questions about when the Team might unlock the Tokens has resulted in being instantly banned. Sparkster has engaged in a campaign of cleansing any dissent and criticism of their ill-made decisions. A new telegram group for investors wanting to take action and have more transparency and democracy around Sparkster was setup, and rapidly grow from 0 to 500 investors in the first 4 hours, to 1700 investors in over 48 hours.

The group is pursuing a complaint to the FCA on the grounds that there has been severe misrepresentation by the company, and that there may be elements of fraud in the project. Furthermore, Independent reviews from ICO Analysts have showed that Sparkster’s development, for a team of 14 developments, does not match up to the product nor the amount of capital raised, raising significant questions about the true intention of the company.

Futhermore, the CEO, Sajjad Daya, went missing for two months. Investors questioning his disappearance were instantly banned. It was only after the new independent Sparkster telegram channel was setup, that Sajjad appeared for a few minutes on telegram. His comments are posted below.

The companies telegram admins, were challenged on the specific parroting of information that they were relaying to the community, and it was established that none of the telegram admins had directly spoken to Sajjad in weeks if not months.





Nikita Ndovin, Former Sparkster Telegram admin says he has not heard from Saj in weeks.+

Admin means nothing according to this TG Admin.

This led to huge backlash against the admins, in which they subsequently removed their main telegram accounts from having admin status and have started to moderate the telegram channel under new alt accounts so that they are not identified. At one stage, one of the admins feared that his own investment was at risk. Fearing legal action, many of the telegram admins have stepped down, leaving the entire companies telegram channel without admins or moderators.

Is Sparkster a security due to 300x returns claim?

Sajjad Daya made a fatal mistake when it publicly claimed that Sparkster would give retail investors a 300x (29900%) return on the utility token. In the US, this would automatically pass the Howey Test as a security. In the UK, the same stipulations are regulated by the FCA under securities law. Sparkster thus becomes an unregulated high yield investment scheme under UK Laws, posing significant liabilities for the CEO, which will undoubtedly become a legal minefield for the company over the coming months. Retail investors, with greater protections, may have some legal recourse for refunds due to this promise/claim by the CEO.

While we have screenshots of these public claims, the telegram admins of Sparkster deleted them after they became widely circulated. Scrubbing information and potential evidence like this is not seen favorably by courts of justice and will most likely be seen as an attempt to hide evidence by the company. While Sparkster Labs Ltd is a UK registered company, their ICO was held in Cayman Islands.

Unfortunately, many ICO’s believe that this offers them ultimate protections from investor legal recourse, because they are offshore, however this couldn’t be further from the truth. The offshore entity, known to investors would give investors a direct trace back to the offshore entity, as they have most likely not used ultimate structuring (were false nominees are public representatives of the company), if they have used ultimate structuring then this may present significant problems in court for sparkster. Furthermore, UK Courts are unlikely to look favorably at this complicated structuring for their ICO and moreover, may involve HMRC for tax avoidance purposes, HMRC has a specific division for offshore tax evasions which, if investors refer to, will look into the accounts and finances of all directors, employees, advisors and any associates of the company. HMRC has the ability, if discoveries are found and established, to look back 6 years into individual and company accounts.

Furthermore, additional claims by sparkster also included promises by CEO Sajjad Daya, that the utility token would be unlocked just 1 weeek after ICO, granted that they have finished their accounting of the ICO. This promise was broken in what became a 10-month period in which the Sparkster team holds investors tokens, and currently still does, citing that ‘fundamental and market technical experts’ have told them not to unlock the token.

Surely if investors trust you to invest 25m USD, that you should listen to your investors and not random ‘market experts’, none of which Sparkster has provided any public reference to.

During the period in which Sparkster was raising funds, the market conditions were already bad. We find it incredible that Saj then claims that due to market conditions they will not unlock the tokens despite promises during their ico.





Saj changes his mind shortly after the ICO, after making mountains of promises to investors who did not want their funds/liquidity locked for months and months. It is now approaching almost 1 year from the sale, with no sign of development in the product.





CryptoDiffer Review:

Early 2019, Crypto Differ underwent an in-depth review into the project. They noted a poignant issue with the copyrights Github for Sparker, among many issues, this one stood out. We investigated further and found a similar, if not almost identical application to the Sparkster Team’s product, from MIT called App Inventor, which was a no-code app program. The parallels between Sparkster and App Inventor are very similar. App Inventor is under creative commons, meaning that anyone can use it, but for another company to claim copy-write over their code would be fraudulent. This could be the reason why Sparkster has no copyright files within its Github, because it may not be the original developers for the coding they are using.

Here are the two programs in comparison.

App Inventor

AppInventor by MIT

Sparkster by Sajjad Daya

Basically, Sparkster's software looks almost identical to Appinventor 2.0. The software is largely used to teach school children in the US how to code or more code friendly methods of learning. Did sparkster raise 30m USD for someone else's open source code? http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/index-2.html

You can take a look at App of the month, developed by Teens. Can you build Sparkster faster than their Blind Core Developer? http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/app-month-gallery.html





Ian Balina joins Class Action Group and Publicly Denounces Sparkster. Calls on Investors to Take Action.

Ian Balina comes out publicly against Sparkster and becomes admin in the class action group.

Within a few hours of the dissident group forming, Ian Balina, strategic investor in Sparkster who’s syndicate put in a few million dollars, publicly came out against Sparkster in a series of comments. Outlining that he was siding with investors who were ready to take legal action against sparkster and that the team were not listening to their crypto advisors and have not been listening in a long time.

https://t.me/sparksterclassaction/2594

https://t.me/sparksterclassaction/4894

https://t.me/sparksterclassaction/12615





While Ian Balina is condemning Sparkster, Saj's 5 minute appearance after days of complaints, seems to be completely in denial about strategic investors ditching the company.

The inside discussions are that Ian Balina discussed with his syndicate whether they should ask for a bonus or a refund, the majority decided for a refund since Ian was no longer confident in the project. Ian Balina, strategic advisor, pushing for a refund is a huge admission of Sparkster's failings and loss of confidence in it's most closest investors. Sparkster is now challenged by the fact that refunding Ian will open them up to legal recourse from other investors.





TPS Claims.

The project has made several claims around TPS. At one point Sajjad Daya was publicly claiming 10 million TPS. At a conference event, a sparkster banned noted ’10 MILLION TPS’ behind the interviewee. The claim of 10 million TPS was used to hype the project and lead investors to suspecting that this was the next generation fastest blockchain project available. During a Failed AMA with Ian Balina, where the project froze and crashed after just 6 nodes, representing 6000 TPS, crashed within 5 seconds. Furthermore, during the independent review by InCodeWeTrust, Sparkster’s Team only claim that 1000 TPS as a validated and verified claim by the project, presenting a stark difference from the 10million TPS Claim.

Futhermore, Sajjad Daya, in a sparkster AMA on Youtube, dated June 2018, the title states ‘Sparkster Demonstrates 50,000 TPS! LIVE Demo and AMA‘.

In conclusion, Sparkster has put out numerous invalidated and unsubstantial claims to investors regarding transactions per second and the real capability of the product, misrepresenting sparkster as a scalable and viable blockchain to thousands of investors.

10m TPS Claim

10M TPS claim

Sparkster Roadmap

It seems the roadmap has been entirely abandoned, giving more weight behind claims that the true intentions behind the project are not what they seem.

Advisors?

These two gentleman, have been on the front of Sparkster’s website since inception, yet no one has seen them in over 1 year of the projects existence. Who are they and what is their relationship to Sparkster? One of them has removed their connection to Sparkster on their linkedin. Neither Professor Gary Leavens or Juan Albelo have ever been seen this year.

Saj Refund Promise Broken

Sajjad also promised to refund investors who were not happy that shortly after the ICO, Sparkster went back on their promise, arbitrarily locking up tokens.

Sajjad promised a refund of USD value investment to anyone who wished.

However, this was later removed and denied by his team.

The evidence is stacked against Sparkster, false claims run through the project like water with contradictions all over the place.

Sparkster even bans investors who mention the suggestion of a refund

Here is Dukatis T





Where's Wally?

Sparkster Labs Ltd registered at a residential address in London, surprisingly for investors which is not what they expected after a 25M USD raise. The address seems to be a new build villa in London with the public address listed on UK Companies House of 21, 150 Field End Road, Pinner.

Sparkster also has their company listed publicly online with wrong addresses, see here, an address with the postcode of the villa above, yet with a road name of a street in Central London.

Here is a conversation with Nikita, a telegram admin for Sparkster. Sparkster claims they will make an a statement on the situation, then no statement comes. Neeru, Shabir and Sajjad are all in the background but not replying to any investors.

Telegram Sparkster Admins make channel readonly, while they delete Sajjad’s claims of 300x return and other posts about the unlock of tokens just after ICO



