On Scams and Illegal Activity

hey everybody happy Sunday I hope everybody enjoyed the fourth of July I decided to make video on the back of some stuff that's going on Twitter telegram reddit and other channels so I've been in space for nine years and during that time period I've seen every scam you can imagine every piece of illegal activity and disgusting conduct that you can imagine I remember one bit Kinect came out in talking to certain exchanges about why they listed it and asked him do if this is a scam or not it looks it's definitely a scam the economics don't add up and they say yeah well it probably is but we're making good money trading it I saw every ICO scam you can imagine I've seen so much bad stuff okay and what's really disheartening is when you work five years on something and you put your heart and soul into it you just have a giant event with ten thousand people attend and then you see floating around telegram Twitter many channels some videos some scammers in China using my face our company's logo the card on Foundations logo who have absolutely no affiliation with us none whatsoever basically to frauding farmers they get paid cash usually how these events work they don't actually buy a token or do anything they just take the money and run I have no recourse for that I can't sue them I have no idea where they're at what's going on this happens all the time same for Vitalik with aetherium same for Brad and XRP they just put a person's name whatever the cryptocurrency of the week is and they go and defraud some people okay and over the last few weeks excuse me a few days we have seen tons and tons of tweets personally sent to me sent to the foundation in our official telegram groups of a particular video over and over again saying why are you defrauding Chinese farmers over and over again and we're we don't even know what's going on we have no idea what this is they're not officially representing us we have no involvement or connection to these people it happens all the time it happened with big connected happened with one coin it happens every single day any time something goes up people magically appear and say would you like to ride that go make a hundred X a thousand accent you're all going to get rich they take the money they disappeared this is something that's happened our space for a long time every single top 10 top 15 cryptocurrency has been the victim of this and put yourself in our shoes how incredibly disheartening and saddening it is to go do something say the same thing for six years straight since 2014 when I did my TED talk all the way to today consistent message consistent vision about what we are what we're trying to accomplish then someone takes your face your logos takes your company's representation and then goes and says they're an official agent of it or that they're somehow connected to you and then uses that to defraud people and think about the mess that that leaves because when those people figure out that they've been defrauded they don't go to the scammers they come to us and complain to us and say why did you do this and then we have to unravel this whole thing we have a whole group of people who are volunteers the card Auto ambassadors who deal with this on a daily basis people come to them all the time saying I just lost my ADA from the official wallet on Android we say we don't have one on Android what are you talking about they said yeah I downloaded this application I put my private keys in I've lost all my money we have to unwind that report it to the Google Play Store and go through that every single day it's it's like cockroaches you step on one there's a thousand more of them because this is human nature and this is what people do and for the most part I ignore it and for the most part I say well it is what it is it's the society that we live in scumbags and criminals are going to be here all the time but every now and then it percolates up every now and then you see people who are have huge followings 200,000 followers on Twitter Stoke those fires and make implications or say whoa what's going on here because they want clicks or it's a fun little game for them it's not a fun game when you do these things and you accuse people of things they didn't do what you're doing is attacking the hundreds of thousands of people in the Cardinal ecosystem saying that they belong to a scam that they are part of something where they're all just gonna be walking off a cliff like lemmings and you're saying all the work we've done everything we've accomplished as an ecosystem means nothing and I really don't appreciate it when marketing directors of companies for example push these things out or make implications as well for example that the recent appreciation of ADA maybe somehow correlated to a very small event and ruled China not the 10000 person event that we held and the delivery of a road map that was delayed for two years obviously there's proportionality there but the implication is of course that ADA goes up because we're defrauding people I see it all the time it happens all the time and it is our space and no one seems to go to Vitalik and say hey well you're affiliated with these people in China who use your face and name and clips of you speaking in Chinese to justify themselves and sell ether they don't seem to do this with XRP but they seem to do it with us and they seem to have that implication with us because they don't the project and because they don't it we must be scammers and criminals and I will never apologize for defending my community I will never apologize for defending our integrity never once there are a lot of good people here and there's a lot of good work that's been done and I'm not sorry for being blunt and critical and holding people accountable for the statements that they make I never will say sorry for that we have to stand together and this is an industry-wide problem for those who share these things today when it happens to ADA it's going to happen to your coin too and has happened to your point too if you pay attention and these scams hurt the poorest people from the planet people who live in a information asymmetries people who can't do proper due diligence people who got taken in and there's very little recourse because you can arrest the people at the presentations you can arrest the people who take the money the people behind them are politically connected usually at the local and governmental level and as a consequence they can just run away keep all the money pay bribes and keep doing it day after day month after month the names changed the tokens change the scam stays the same the vast majority of the people who made money off of one coin are still floating around the vast majority the people who made money at the top for big connector still floating around and this will continue in our space just as it did in the 19th century in early 20th century with the early financial kids of America there were tons of boiler rooms there were tons of scams there were tons of assets being sold that didn't exist this is just what happens when you have a new market in information asymmetries so before people the dog pile on or accuse people on Twitter or say all this a PR nightmare or Charles is just being arrogant please do understand our face our logos our brand is being used by people to conduct illegal activity which we have nothing to do with we don't tolerate and every single time we have recourse whether it be we can sue or we can root file a police report we do but for everyone we can capture we know of there's a thousand that go on that we don't know of and the victims of these crimes almost always come back to us and or the projects that they were scammed and affiliated from and complain and we have to unravel the whole thing and it takes hundreds of hours if not thousands of hours of communication of work to fix it all up and they have a very negative view of the entire cryptocurrencies face all crypto currency they don't just hate wherever they got scammed they say bitcoin is a scam ether is a scam that whole crypto thing is a scam this hurts every single person in our industry when this happens and the people who prevail they need to be in jail and even when you put them in jail there's ten more who show up because that's how scams work all right so I hate making videos like this but I'm just blown away by this recent thing that's been propagating I thought it would just die down I said come on guys let's be obvious here this has nothing to do with us but it kept spreading and kept being pushed and larger and larger people on Twitter kept it and syndicated it and said what's this all about why is Charles in China why are these banners here why are you holding this official event and we of course said we're not because it's true we're not yet it happens and it's just disgusting it really is it deeply bothers me it has always deeply bothered me it deeply bothered me when exchanges listed bit connect it deeply bothered me when people became I see advisors in our industry prominent people knowing very well that that project that they belong to had no capability of actually succeeding but they seven figure eight figure payouts and there was no recourse it deeply bothered me that people sold at the top in 2017 knowing the market was going to collapse and there was no recourse for any of that retail investors got hurt I just see these things happening again and again and again I was on Bloomberg when Bitcoin was 600 bucks during the ico boom saying it was a ticking time bomb please everyone be cautious about this stuff the numbers are unrealistic and of course they were and a lot of people got hurt from that a lot of people got rich from that and justify themselves being smarter than others this is just the nature of the industry that we're in and where we're at and we'll do what we can to manage things and that's why we have ambassadors that's why we have two centralized curation that's why we report all the time fake apps on Apple and Google and we report all the time criminal conduct we filed a lot of these things throughout the years and we'll continue to do so and we do what we can to help people who have been victimized where and when we can but Mauston we can't it's deeply frustrating that I have 125,000 followers on Twitter the people who have 5,000 followers on Twitter have verified accounts and I don't and we asked Twitter can you please tell us what we need to do so I can get a verified account not for narcissism and arrogance but because every single week there's at least 50 reported fake accounts for me there's been no exceptions the last three years and those fake accounts say we're giving away ADA or we're doing this and some people fall for it and over the years hundreds of thousands of people have been scammed by those fake accounts so we tell the Twitter organization please Twitter and we're not alone in this Vitalik has and many other people have can you do something about it can you prevent these fake accounts from propping up and what I report that fake account Twitter asked me to upload a picture of my passport to verify its my identity because I don't have a verified account and they refused to give me one so what recourse do I have what can I do I can't stop accounts created by BOTS it's all automated and they just run scripts and they create them out of that I could spend the next hundred hours a week doing this stuff and I have no control over when people put my face on a logo or my based on a banner and say they represent me other than the fact that I'll reported of course or send a cease-and-desist where and what it's possible you may have noticed there's some geopolitics between China in the United States and I can't even travel to China okay so what exactly can I do in that type of environment how exactly can we operate we have no infrastructure as a country a company in China the foundation has very limited infrastructure it's all volunteer in China so it's a ripe market for people to be scammed and abused and for that to be blamed on us so the conclusion of this video is it's a rough space and lots of stuff happens I've been at it for nine years and I've seen unbelievable things no longer you're in it you're going to see unbelievable things and the scams will continue the illegal conduct will continue use common sense if anybody comes to you and says you're going to get a tax or 100 X or a thousand x off of this they're lying to you and if you do get it you're lucky and you're lucky off the backs of somebody else because for you to sell whatever you've gotten that 10 or Hunter X from the other person has to buy it so that person had to put up the cash and so what why is that gonna hold its value over time there are very few things that have the using utility to match that and furthermore we've told people who we are for the last six years and we've been very consistent our messaging about what the project is about what we're trying to accomplish we've entered marketplaces like Ethiopia by the way I haven't been able to contact my director of Ethiopian operations African operations for three days now I have no idea if he's okay they shut off the whole internet there's a lot of bad stuff going on in that country I hope he's okay he was in Addis Ababa so there are very real people and consequences of risk to trying to do the things we're doing and we've been clear about what we've been trying to accomplish we just had an event with 70 plus presentations 10,000 people attending it where we showed all the things we're working on and why we're a good ecosystem and where we've been investing our time effort money and what we'd like to accomplish as a project judges on that if you think the strategy's wrong say so you think proof of steak can't work well then have an academic debate about that if you think that we're in the wrong market places and those markets will never appreciate or we can't get adoption those markets okay that's fair criticism and there's a thousand other things you can say that are fair to say we're idealistic dreamers and we don't know what we're doing or we don't have the experience to do what we're doing and then anybody who says that let's have a debate I'm happy to do that but please don't go to Telegram Reddit and Twitter and other places and take some obvious criminal conduct and then say we're were the guys running that we're behind that and that's why ADA it's going up on coin market cap because $10,000 or whatever the got scammed from these people changed hands and these people don't actually body ate it when they say they're selling it they just take the money and run and then say they're gonna hold it on behalf of somebody else but no no let's believe that is what's responsible for marketing preciate it's insulting it's insulting to us it's insulting to all the people in our ecosystem and it's predatory on the ecosystem as a whole and it hurts every single person who holds crypto when we tolerate this conduct it needs universal condemnation and we as an industry have to be better I'm tired of the industry getting away with well it's a free thing it's it's this that in the other guys if you don't want regulation then ask yourself what are the things we have to do as an industry to avoid regulation we have to self-regulate we have the self moderate when we see bad actors we have to excommunicate those bad actors and get rid of them otherwise they just get worse and worse and worse take more and more and more and then eventually governments come in and they say well you didn't solve that problem so we're going to go ahead and solve that problem it was the collapse of the excess of the 1920s that led to the creation of the Securities Exchange Commission it was that all the trust and bad conduct during the Knickerbocker crisis that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System and the central bank of last resort people said we don't want to be bailed out by JP Morgan for heaven's sake and we are doomed to repeat that as an industry if we don't do anything about these events in the solution isn't just to laugh at or mock or criticize people who happen to be the victim of those events the solution is as an industry as a whole to condemn these things and communicate and coordinate with each other when we see scams with aetherium and ripple or other things we let them know that people are using your trademark your brand your logo we directly reach out to them sometimes and say hey we saw something you guys might want to look into this it looks it's crazy and it's illegal I'd the same courtesy on our side instead of just people going to Twitter and mocking us or saying we're behind it is that too much to ask I don't know but I'm not going to apologize for getting emotional about it and I'm not going to apologize for being passionate about it because we represent a lot of people good people who work hard every single day and they deserve us to get passionate about it and they deserve us to work hard to try to stop these things at least within our own ecosystem so use common sense and let's work together as an industry and if we don't well it's predictable what's going to happen you're going to have a sec specifically for crypto and international agreements specifically for that and all this stuff is going to get regulated to the point where there are five bank coins that are legitimate and everything else is illegal if that's what you want as an industry this is the road that will lead us there it's just how it is it's what happened with the SEC there was tremendous financial innovation occurring in the securitization of things but the scams of securitisation led to the Howey test and then it meant that only 100 plus 200 plus million dollar people could play in the IPO space and small businesses couldn't secure ties it took until from 1933 to 2012 with the JOBS Act before we got any liquidity on the small to mid-size business with reg the exemptions excuse me a regulation Part A I believe it is is that what you want is this where the industry should go so let's clean up the mess let's work together it's a call to all crypto project founders and all people that are involved in positions of trust and authority of the industry just be better and when you see things let us know directly don't go to Twitter don't go to telegram don't go and read it don't imply these things you've achieved nothing you'll get some short-term clicks and tweets and and like oh yeah good job and then when it happens to you you'll be treated exactly the same way it'll hurt you just as much as it hurts us all right well anyway that's all I have to say on this topic be safe everyone and as always we'll do our best if you see something sent it to our ambassadors and I'm trying my best here to just keep as many people as safe as we can but I'm just one actor in a decentralized ecosystem and one voice in a decentralized ecosystem and unfortunately my voice is against the wind of incentives and there's a lot of people chasing short-term profit in exchange for the long-term viability of our industry and it makes me sick and sad it has to stop as always take care everyone