On 29 August 1997, Skynet wakes up at a secret military complex in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The artificial intelligence system instantly determines that people are nasty, evil and dangerous beings. A nuclear strike on Russia follows. So began the uprising of the machines that gave world culture Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sharp leather jacket, Robert Patrick’s cold stare and Edward Furlong’s apocalyptic tears. The latter, incidentally, hit the bottle and never did become the saviour of mankind.

In the same year of 1997, Artem Chestnov enrolled at the Baltic State Technical University in Saint-Petersburg. He took inspiration from Terminator 2: Judgement Day and decided to create his own Skynet. So began the career of a scammer who 20 years later would become a talking head for two fraudulent projects at the same time – LAToken and UBEX.

A single reasonably close look at the Ubex website is enough to make you feel like you’ve seen it all before. Not in James Cameron’s films, but right here.

The same field – advertising. Only the first one is performance marketing and the second is programmatic advertising.

The same problems – unscrupulous advertisers, cunning service providers and stupid marketing managers.

The same solution – blockchain.

The only difference is that Ubex has gone a step further and promised to create some artificial intelligence that will forever change the advertising world. Well why the fuck not? Hoqu raised nearly $20 million without even breaking a sweat, then blew off their project and started to spend other people’s investments on their own precious selves. Is Ubex really any worse?

It’s surprising that the creators of a Skynet for advertisers only want 28,800 ETH. The boys have made sizable investments in their website, conferences, social media presence and paid reviews. Their Telegram alone is as pimped as Xzibit’s sickest ride.

It looks like the project is geared towards the Asian market. This is confirmed by the conferences they’ve attended:

And the team members:

By the way, they’re already the subject of memes on the crypto scene.

There’s a serious suspicion that the relatively small (compared to the level of pretentiousness) hardcap is bait… You know, our tokens have been snapped up like hot cakes, so we decided we could make the product even more powerful and profitable by launching another ICO round. This time for about 30 million.

Look how it started:

How it continued:

And what it’s like now:

That’s how serious Ubex is about conducting its business. The community was even more outraged by the fact that the tokens were listed and traded on exchanges before the ICO had even finished! With x5 too. Bitconneeeeeeeeeeeect!

What is the Ubex product all about? As is often the case with scam projects (if you happened to miss the Shitcoinoffering bingo, find it and bookmark it), this is some blah-blah-blah cool stuff on blockchain. In this case, a global exchange for programmatic advertising based on neural networks.

Artificial intelligence analyses the interests of website users, assesses the probability that they will carry out the desired action and chooses the most appropriate advertising. In other words, no spam or trickery, just global savings and profit.

Here’s how the market looks now:



And here’s how it will look with Ubex:

Ubex offers to reduce the complexity of buying advertising, the cost of attracting a lead and the risk of fraud, as well as increasing the efficiency of targeting. In addition, it will be possible to pay exclusively for the attained result by means of a smart contract.

When moving onto the details, the team predictably limits itself to generalised soundbites. On the lines of, we’ll sniff out a car lover based on their cookies because they’re always on that sort of website and without any middlemen we’ll suggest that they buy a Lambo. Don’t worry, it’s all legal. We’ll find the right people with 100% accuracy. Other services can do that too, but they don’t have neural networks and blockchain, so they’re shit. And we’re geniuses.

This is how the sales funnel will look in this brave new world. Oh, fuck me, they managed to widen the bottom of the funnel? What is this?! Could it be the magic of Photoshop?

Here’s the principle behind the platform’s operation. ADAM CORE is the very heart of Skynet that will quickly gather all the necessary data about users and advertising spaces.

The rationale for using the Ubex token is something that goes beyond good and evil. Other cryptocurrencies aren’t suitable because only our token will help to create a smart contract. Then it can be exchanged for ETH, BTC or fiat currency later. Everything will run on the Ethereum blockchain. What is this fucking bullshit?

The alpha version of the app doesn’t look like Skynet at all yet. Well, maybe just the one from the first Terminator. The detailed targeting is far behind Facebook, not to mention Google AdWords. The program itself looks like it was written by a junior dev and not Miles Dyson. Surely it can’t be so easy to make all the money in the world?

According to the roadmap, everything will be ready in January next year. Which looks all too strange. After all, the ICO is only finishing at the end of September. It would be logical to assume that no work was done on the project before the sale started. After all, a lot of money was spent on advertising, conferences and the community. Github confirms this theory.

So 8 million dollars and 4 months are enough to create a revolutionary solution in a highly profitable field and program a fan-fucking-tastic artificial intelligence system? Did you hear that, Elon Musk?

It’s hard to disagree with Eddie. There isn’t a single word in the whitepaper about how the tokens can be used, where the hell they came from or why they’re going to grow in price. There’s no “use of funds” either. It looks like our guys got so carried away with science fiction that they forgot about it.

The token distribution is completely fucked up. Over here some good guys had a good dig around in the scammers’ smart contract.

This did not spook the corrupt pseudovloggers on YouTube – pecunia non olet.

Although the notorious Balina did resist. Or they just couldn’t come to a deal with him 🙂

Scammers against a scam. It’s like turkeys voting for Christmas 😀

As for the people. Like I was saying, Chestnov was a talking head for LAToken, but instead of getting a well-deserved prison term, he continues to fool honest folk. His companion Daniel Biesuz is part of some very sketchy projects – Lapo.Blockchain and HYGH.

As for Dan Gartman, he actually seems like a real-life Gordon Freeman. Look at him. He should be chasing headcrabs with a crowbar, not working as a CTO.

If that wasn’t enough, most of the team members are shady through and through. No Sarah Connor, no Kyle Reese. This guy, for example, is only mentioned in news items about Ubex.

Let’s cut to the chase – sorry Anton, sorry chicks, but you’re douchebags. Because of people like you, many will continue to steer clear of blockchain for a long time to come. You’re turning a great industry into a piece of shit and a pyramid of pyramid schemes. May you burn in hell and have fun telling tall stories in a prison uniform.

You, our dear readers, should give this scam a wide berth, instill faith in crypto into your friends and share our posts online. The community should be aware of who can be trusted and who can’t. May the saviour join us!

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