A good friend of mine recently stumbled upon an interesting project called BriskPass and advised me that their project looks very solid.

The Team

I had a quick look myself and not bad at all; one of the best-looking websites I have ever seen for an ICO. A very accomplished team from Germany with more than 75-years combined industry experience. Looks like a winner to me.

And then, the first warning. None of the top industry professionals have LinkedIn?

They all have an account on Xing.com, which is kind of German version of LinkedIn. Okay then, let’s have a look there.

I have to have an account to see other profiles; I will overcome this hurdle and I’m ready to start the project (counterintelligence background, so I can’t help myself to dig in deep).

Let’s have a look at the “dream team”. Frank is a University of Stuttgart graduate with 20 years experience in technology sector accompanied by 8 years focus on transportation. Frank has 10 contacts on xing.com and his profile was created on September 10th 2017 – kind of a poor performance from a top industry leader I’m thinking. Ok, let’s dig further.

Marcus has an appearance of a perfect man; a role model for “German Engineering” I would say. He also transformed potential clients into strategic business partners – wait, what?

Not suspicious yet, but let’s see what Marcus has been up to on Xing – 6 contacts, profile created on September 10th 2017.

I’m running their names through Google using all the search tricks I know, and absolutely nothing comes up. How come they have never been involved in anything worth mentioning? Considering the background they supposed to have?

It’s bizarre. In addition, they both have zero experience listed on Xing before BriskPass.

It’s absolutely possible that they just aren’t Xing or LinkedIn type of guys, a bit old fashion if you may. This, however, should already ring your alarm bells and it doesn’t take you more than 5 min to find this.

On a side note, notice how the captains are not very specific on their achievements.

Screenshots from Xing profiles

What about the others in this highly accomplished team?

They all have created their accounts around September 10th 2017.

They all have less than 10 contacts in their network.

None of them have done anything worth mentioning – you can’t find them on Google. But just look at the caliber of the team here…

You would think Julia definitely has LinkedIn account considering her 12 years international PR & Marketing (social media) experience? Think again.

What about Shah Qhan, who has helped to establish 180 companies, and raised capital all over the world – stealth mode is definitely on for this guy. Have a go, Google him. On Xing, he has exactly zero contacts and of course, he’s not on LinkedIn. They are very likely creating other social media accounts as we speak.

They are all fictional characters. All those people here are subject to identity theft.

Now Waleed Yousef is a guy who stands out from the crowd.

For some reason, he has decided to go against the common BriskPass practice and include his LinkedIn profile, which you can see here. He also stands out as he is painfully outclassed by his peers – makes you wonder, why on earth would you include a self-employed tech consultant who has no relation to transport industry?

Is this guy the architect behind the unfolding theater? Let’s find out.

The Idea Behind BriskPass

Just have a go and look at their white paper – it says absolutely nothing, it’s a brochure mixed with unrealistic ideas and some gibberish about carbon footprint. It’s a 28-page copy of the website, say-nothing-and-include-boxes-nice-colors white paper. A prime example of a scam.

In most cases, we have to use different transportation service providers for a single trip and use multiple modes of payments such as cash, prepaid cards, membership cards, etc. These methods are expensive, inefficient, outdated and carry large carbon footprint.

And the solution is Pay-As-You-Go…

Enabling Users To Spend For Their Commute On-Demand As And When They Need Too, Without Any Worries Of Prepaid Balance Limitations Or Losing The Balance In Case Of Expiry

What exactly is on the table here; just an alternative currency? They are also saying that BirskPass is a limitless solution as it could be used as a currency worldwide. Why on earth should this REPLACE the current giants? The solution continues to describe global access and how easy it would be to cover your transportation cost with a single solution.

That would be convenient, right? However, it would be extremely naive to buy into such unexplained ideas. Imagine the scale of the changes/integration that has to take place to even test the alpha/beta systems. There is not a single word about why blockchain is a viable technology to replace the current databases? As by nature, it’s far more complex than current traditional databases.

There is absolutely nothing more said about any of those tests or any SPECIFIC information about anything, to be honest. After all, what is the idea then, just another cryptocurrency?

Roadmap

The roadmap states that by now they should have gone through various testings/simulations and modifications with their unbelievable army of partners (Polish State Railways, Slovenian Railways, Argentina Ministry of Transport, Russia, Middle East… etc.) and the most presentable “user case” example are these guys…

These are 13-27 sec video clips (see their website for videos). The guy in the middle speaks English. He’s using “would” so he’s talking hypothetically about something that is possible but has not yet happened. And yet, they have gone through alpha/beta tests with government conglomerates and this is the best they could come up with?

Notice the location of the video, behind the shed, taking his own video. The clips on the left and right are just as bad as the one in the middle.

At this point, I don’t feel like I should really continue as it’s just ridiculous. It’s just so bad and obvious.

Read the roadmap or the sentences in general, they have no meaning behind them. Just a complex, vague vocabulary to stop you understanding what exactly is going on.

Their mobile UI design doesn’t make sense at all

Just a random logo screen? A Brisk location screen – what for? Balance 406 BSK would equal to $0.3 USD (ICO price) and the transactions, what is happening there? They should at least make those transactions somehow comprehensible. Right now it looks like I would be flying from Germany to the USA for $0.0000…

It’s just a small detail to notice, however, it’s important as it shows you that there is absolutely no connection with reality.

Token distribution. Not worth going into details. 100B tokens, 1 ETH=400,000 BSK.

5 days 100% bonus (this is exactly what people want to read and this is the only thing that people are going to read)

It’s all a fantasy, it’s completely fictional and it’s in EXTREMELY easy to find out and yet we decide to invest completely blind.

How to Spot an ICO Scam?

Start from the most basic, from the people behind the project. If that checks out, go more specific, find out about the company – when was it created, when did they create the website, on whose name is it etc. Where is the company registered, on which address, Google it.

Very basic and simple steps.

In our case, the website was created on October 13th, 2017 – considering the scale and road map of the project; taking it easy for sure.

Who is Patrick Streit? No idea, Google gives me nothing and it’s probably fictional.

What about the company address? Brisk Pass GmbH, Suite 603, Waldhofer Strasse, Heidelberg, Germany – It doesn’t exist. That’s just painfully stupid and easy to find out.

It’s not the first fraud ICO I’ve seen, however, it’s one of the nicest looking websites for an ICO I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the most obvious frauds I have ever seen and I want to make this as an example of how ridiculous the ICO scene has become.

EDIT 1:

I couldn’t help myself to find out more about the single guy who had a legitimate LinkedIn profile, a guy named Waleed Yousef. Maybe he is also subject to identity theft? Probably not, have a look at the BriskPass followers on Twitter

Here’s our Waleed, he wasn’t linked with BriskPass on LinkedIn, but he sure does follow them on Twitter.

He just couldn’t resist staying away from the spotlight!

She is somehow related to this as well: https://www.facebook.com/salkhoury85?lst=100000616352482%3A100002445014918%3A1508591122

EDIT 2:

Few websites/articles/post/videos mentioning BriskPass

https://steemit.com/bittrex/@cryptooffuture/why-brisk-pass-ico-is-a-giant-that-is-about-to-unleashed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB8iK0UmAV4 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2282340.0 (OP of this topic has to be linked to BriskPass)

What is frightnening is that there are several HERO, SENIOR and other members who are genuinely happy with his suggestions. He’s just masking and testing the perception of the forum. Look at the reverse psychology that follows; how smoothly he sails into promoting BriskPass. The following screenshot is he’s 2nd post after creating the topic.

Continuing…

Did you notice how the first sentence “How do noobs pick an ICO to invest and loose money” looks familiar? Look at Waleed’s first post on Twitter…

4. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1166147;sa=showPosts

There are other several ICO tracker, Coinclarity etc. sites that have listed BriskPass ICO. That is extremely sad as none of them has any filters whatsoever and this gives a straightforward fraud more publicity which in retrospect generates false sense of legitimacy.

https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

http://altsareback.com/ico.php

http://icoinfo.de/30141968/brisk-pass-decentralizing-transportation

https://coinspectator.com/news/67034/brisk-pass-decentralizing-transportation

https://www.coinjinja.com/detail/brisk-pass

http://www.coin-list.com/crowd_sales/V2DRRvDw

PLEASE READ

I have no idea if this catches any attention and if they will simply pull back their ICO and delete everything. If they do then hopefully I have saved few poor souls falling into this trap. And if they don’t pull back, I still hope that some of us will benefit from this and DO NOT INVEST into this ICO.

I also encourage you to follow the ICO and share the article to warn others about the plain obvious fraud.

This does raise another problem, if the ICO goes through and even if it rises a single ETH – who and how is going to be held responsible for this? Who are those people on the photos? Do we or the bad actors even realize the severity of this?