The biggest crypto scandal to date?
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A trading app called iEarn Bot has cost thousands of potential cryptocurrency investors everything and could “be one of the biggest crypto scandals to date,” according to a BBC News report.
According to the BBC investigation, the company operates in a large number of countries, including Romania, Indonesia, Nigeria and Colombia.
“At first, the app works very well,” said Silvia Tabusca, a Romanian expert on organized crime for the European Center for Legal Education and Research. Claiming that the number of investors appears to be “quite high,” she said:
That was the experience of a Romanian investor who spoke to BBC News under the name Roxana.
Roxana said the customers who bought the robots were told their money would be invested by the firm’s artificial intelligence platform, Roxana added, which guaranteed high returns and seemed to work well for a while.
“You could see in the app how many dollars the app generated: there were graphics that showed how the investment was going,” she said. “It looked pretty professional until at one point they announced maintenance.”
Withdrawals were frozen and never restarted, BBC News said. Roxana said:
The report said dozens of high-profile Romanians invested because “the app was sponsored by … a leading IT expert in the country.”
Who told the BBC that he also invested savings and lost money.
The report noted that when some of the claims on the iEarn Bot website were fact-checked, they could not be verified.
These included the person named as CEO who said he had never heard of the project, and both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies including Huawei and Qualcomm listed as strategic partners denying knowledge of it.
The iEarn website is definitely editorially challenged.
Apart from the bots, the company had launched a token, IBOT.
The “IBOT Smart Coin White Paper” available on the website has the following slogan: “Build a new ecosystem of global decentralized digital.”
It goes on to say “The company’s main product is AI artificial intelligence robots.”
The first line of the White Paper reads:
In addition, the website also has a clearly displayed copy of the company’s money services (MSB) registration with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Which, according to the FinCEN website’s MSB Registrant Search tool, is legitimate.
However, the FinCEN website also says, in bold:
However, this document and a couple of business registration documents from Colorado – which anyone can get – led a Colombian investor, who was also actively recruiting investors, to say “that showed they were legal.”
But the report said Colombian withdrawals were halted in December. And BBC News tracked down a digital wallet that received around 13,000 payments worth around $1.3 million.
