Shills, Sharks, And Shysters: The Murky World Of ICO Reviews
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One of our key offers to our readership is our ICO reviews, which we create in the course of personal due diligence for our own investments. We share them with our audience because we put time and effort into them, and we feel the information we gather and the conclusions we arrive at are worth sharing.
But we have chosen a field in which sharks feed on sharks, because there aren’t enough fish to go around. We swim in waters infested with greed and lies, polluted by the incessant flow of money into self-proclaimed crypto influencers’ grubby hands.
It’s depressing – and not just for us, trying to create a quality product in an industry full of self-serving garbage, but especially for those entering the world of cryptocurrency for the first time. They have no sense that the ‘resources’ they’re finding are often nothing more than paid mouthpieces for get-rich-quick ICO schemes. And the only people who are getting rich quick, in crypto as in other industries, are the people who run them.
In this short piece we’re going to spell out as clearly as we can exactly what we do, and why we do it.
But first, let us explain – without exaggeration – that every single day, we could be earning thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands, in all likelihood. All we’d have to do is respond to messages like this:
Perhaps it’s unfair to single out this one site – because this happens day after day after day. But if we don’t call them out, who will?
The question is, why do these people need to offer cash for a transparent review?
People who pay money for a service don’t expect to get hammered by the people providing it… so how honest is it really likely to be?
We’ve been offered cash, bitcoins, bounties, tokens, referral bonuses, even commissions based on how many “investors” put money into a particular coin, and how much they throw at it.
This happens every day, multiple times per day.
Who else are they offering this to? And who’s accepting the offer?
For the people whose idea of a “deep dive” is a YouTube video and a spreadsheet, this is easy money. Their due diligence may be restricted to regurgitating what the ICO marketing team feeds them, but hey, who cares? They get paid whether the token sinks or swims.
How about the Twitter “personalities” who think that ‘retracting’ their voluble recommendations is enough to offset the losses for which their shilling is responsible?
And the websites that claim they don’t take any payment whatsoever… but that are owned by the same people who own other *paid* media outlets?
We’re not accusing Hacked.com of taking money for ICO reviews, but CCN.com takes a whole bunch of advertising money from ICOs. And they’re owned by the same people. How tall are those Chinese Walls in reality?
The fact is, it’s incredibly easy to buy a bunch of followers on Twitter, set yourself up as an ‘influencer’ and start accepting cash for services rendered. It’s just a more sophisticated version of joining a Telegram group and immediately posting a referral link saying “Hey, what do you guys think of [insert shitcoin here].”
And that must be why so many people are shilling any coin that will meet their price.
Say what you like about the guy – at least John McAfee is clear about it. He gets paid to shill coins.
So let us be equally clear about our own incentives.
When we review a token, we do so from the point of view of actual investors. We – our team – actively seeks to participate in those ICOs we review positively. With some, because of residency restrictions or because there is a limited supply, we may not be able to – and we simply share that we would like to invest, if it were possible.
In short, we try and keep it straightforward and honest. And in that spirit, you can expect that our really deep dives into ICOs will eventually form the backbone of an ICO review subscription service – because the truth is, our team spends dozens of hours on every one of these ICO reviews (and we’ve spend thousands, literally thousands, of hours putting together our methodology, distilling our rating criteria, and benchmarking our process against actual ROI. We don’t even want to think about how much time and money we’ve put into building a site to share it!)
We interview the team. We audit and review the code. We compare the tokenomics to competitive projects. We believe that our diligence goes far and beyond anything else in this market, and we’re eventually going to charge a fair price for it.
What we won’t do, is compromise our principles. It says so right at the bottom of this website, on every page – “Crypto Briefing exists to advocate for the safe and responsible integration of blockchain and cryptocurrency into mainstream life.”
That’s what we’ll keep trying to do. We’ll keep trying our best to protect our readers from scams, and we’ll keep looking for projects that are good enough for us to put our money where our mouth is.
We might even track down the occasional errant CEO who then turns up with a flimsy excuse and a new website that was only registered on the day he disappeared…
In the meantime, do your own research – especially when it comes to the recommendations you receive from certain online sources.
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