Hello bitshares community,

By now most of you have heard about the AriseBank ICO and some of the controversies surrounding them.

I refer you to here:

https://medium.com/@aenigmacapital/investor-warning-arisebank-ico-strategic-partnership-with-bitshares-is-a-scam-96b8b473a61d

as well as here:

https://medium.com/@finmakler_sokol/arisebank-my-2-cents-based-on-the-chat-in-the-pivx-arisebank-channel-and-some-research-done-over-5305ff97f5bd

Following up on these, I also did my own research.

Apart from the findings above, all of the legal terms on their website are copied from other sites:

Specifically, most of the stuff is copied from BitPay

see:

https://www.arisebank.com/learn/legal/abank/account-agreement/

& https://www.arisebank.com/learn/legal/apay/merchant-agreement/

and compare with:

https://bitpay.com/about/terms

Specifically, they're such amateurs that here: https://www.arisebank.com/learn/legal/apay/new-york/

They've missed the search & replace and the text still references BitPay.

Here:

https://ariseos.org/branding-guidelines/

They've copied from:

https://www.openstack.org/brand/

On to the more key elements, their card holder agreement here:

https://www.arisebank.com/learn/legal/arisecard/cardholder-agreement/

is copied from:

https://www.shiftpayments.com/agreement

With that in mind, I contacted Metropolitan Bank and got the following response:

When Arise was confronted with this they responded with:

"We did have something in the works with them, yes. That was back in June.

Then we found Marqeta which truly allowed us to do what we wanted

In a decentralized way"

And tried to wiggle out of it claiming these were older terms that would soon be replaced.

May I also point out to you their post: https://www.facebook.com/arisebank/posts/357340811375082

announcing their "partnership" with marqeta.

So what to do but contact marqeta :)

Here is their response:

At this point...If you still think it's not a scam, I can't help you.