IP.Gold: A Cautionary Tale of A Tarnished ICO — Part 3

Published in

IP.Gold

8 min readMay 16, 2019

a multipart series told by the founders detailing how you can make all the right decisions and still fail.

Part 3: Downhill From Here!

Sorry for the long hiatus! Life happened when we had other plans. It is worth noting that now that Bitcoin is on the rise and there is some renewed interest in crypto IEO/ICO/STO, COMSA/Tech Bureau テックビューロ株式会社 is trying to remake itself as “newborn baby” — clean, innocent and free of its past like the Phoenix. A “new team” at COMSA/Tech Bureau has emerged emerged, with only great things to say about its future, after the previous COMSA team that is liable for taking $300 million in crypto profits from the community and for the failure of IP.Gold’s ICO launch, has left, been paid off and has faded into the background like so many due. COMSA/Tech Bureau figures that enough time has passed for people to “forget” being taken advantage of and lead-on for months, hoping that contributors and the COMSA community, as well as IP.Gold team, will have moved on and instead will focus on the newfound Bitcoin utopia bull run! Hmmm, I suspect that COMSA/Tech Bureau takes us all for fools!

OK, At the end of Part 2, it’s the third week of May 2018, over a month into the IP.Gold Public ICO, still waiting for support, but getting only excuses and silence, then ultimately, accusations of “its your fault” from COMSA/Tech Bureau . No “promised” apology to the COMSA community by COMSA/Tech Bureau board and executive management for launching our ICO over 3 weeks late, no promised exposure to COMSA/ZAIF community, no promised investor meetings at CONSENSUS 2018, no private investor introductions promised personally by Takao Asayama 朝山貴生 as part of us signing our agreement, nothing. Meanwhile, all the money and goodwill IP.Gold and its advisors spent on coordinated marketing efforts and momentum for the IP.Gold ICO launch, just faded away into nothing as launch delay went from days to weeks. Several private investors that IP.Gold and its advisors lined up, who “loved” IP.Gold, disappeared as a direct result of us not being able to launch the IP.Gold ICO, indicating that we were “having problems” and “potentially unstable”, or simply not taking our calls. In fact, more than a one million dollar asset investor rescinded their escrow agreements with IP.Gold a week after our planned launch date, claiming they couldn’t trust us to “follow through” on our whitepaper if we couldn’t launch our ICO on time! And all of this was happening amid mounting internal and external community comments and stories calling COMSA a “scam” being met with either complete silence from Tech Bureau Japan publicly or “We will ask the team” as a simple response from the community moderator or removal and expulsion from the COMSA community.

In the world of “overpromise, underdeliver”, COMSA/Tech Bureau takes the cake — in history! When confronted with the FACTS that COMSA/Tech Bureau, its management and its team failed to launch the IP.gold ICO on the COMSA.Global platform on the day agreed to by all parties, COMSA/Tech Bureau started by making excuses that it was the KYC platform that was holding it up, then Japanese FSA that was holding it up, then the non-Japan, non-USA marketing restrictions were holding it up, then finally they resorted to blaming IP.Gold for not providing the proper testing resources and sign-off! FYI, we had the team available literally 24 hours a day waiting to test — and gave them answers within hours of any testing results — only to be met with silence from COMSA/Tech Bureau! You would think that COMSA/Tech Bureau, who completed a successful $95 Million ICO and who pocketed over $300 Millin IN CASH, could do a better job launching their first ICO — unless they never really wanted to launch the IP.Gold ICO, but to look like they were launching an ICO to appease the COMSA community and stop all of the negative comments and the slide of the COMSA token.

This all seems more and more plausible when you take into account the complete lack of any support for the IP.Gold ICO from the COMSA/Tech Bureau board and team at every level. In fact, it was quite the opposite. When IP.Gold suggested we could manually handle the crypto wallets and deal with KYC during the ICO closing, like COMSA themselves did, COMSA/Tech Bureau decided against supporting this for IP.Gold. When it was agreed between COMSA/Tech Bureau and IP.Gold that both a public apology by the CEO of COMSA/Tech Bureau and an email be sent out to COMSA/ZAIF members about the IP.Gold ICO launch, COMSA/Tech Bureau sent out an announcement as part of the update bulletin to the COMSA community from Patrick Spiess of Tech Bureau EU that the IP.Gold ICO was simply “live” and the marketing email, with the agreed upon text, that was supposed to go out globally was “accidentally” sent to a much smaller subset of COMSA/ZAIF members and different text was used. When the IP.Gold management team was promised $10,000 in reimbursements to come to CONSENSUS 2018 to represent and pitch the IP.Gold ICO to private investors, only to stand in Tech Bureau booth in the corner for 2 day pitching Tech Bureau as their “booth bitches”, all while the COMSA/Tech Bureau people were running around to meetings and being told either “we are working on getting the meetings setup” or “thy cancelled the meeting” or “it’s not the right group for you” — and then being told that it would be “difficult” for COMSA/Tech Bureau to reimburse us for our expenses! Even the two final efforts made to renew interest in the IP.Gold ICO and get it “back on track”, updated tokenomics and a migration to NEM from ERC-20, that were initially met with great enthusiasm and support from COMSA/Tech Bureau, failed to materialize any promised marketing or operations support — and always at the last minute after IP.Gold had spent money on marketing and had renewed the interest of investors because “COMSA/Tech Bureau is on board”. Something always went wrong. A misunderstanding here, the FSA there. Whatever the excuse, COMSA/Tech Bureau was never there when they promised they would be and often did everything they could to either actively or tacitly undermine the IP.Gold ICO. As it is so often said, “actions speak louder than words”, and there was little to no actions of any kind from COMSA/Tech Bureau to support the IP.Gold ICO launch, its re-launch, the company, nothing. In fact, the actions taken by COMSA/Tech Bureau, or lack thereof, were quite the opposite of support and the terms of our contract. with nothing but excuses and a complete and utter lack of support, COMSA/Tech Bureau followed it up in defensive communications that took no responsibility and stated to IP.Gold staff, lack of funding, its token model, the industry, the FSA, and just about anyone and anything else were responsible for the failure.

It wasn’t long before we suspected we were the scapegoat for much larger plan that was going on behind the scenes in COMSA/Tech Bureau. After all, we knew, from emails, texts and messages to us from within COMSA/Tech Bureau and its board, that COMSA/Tech Bureau had cashed out the crypto contributions from their ICO, to the tune of $300M+ USD, within a few weeks of closing out their $95M ICO! We knew that the excuses they gave us that they could not support the IP.Gold ICO with marketing COMSA/ZAIF holders because of the FSA were totally false, as all of the other ICO platform/partner providers and exchanges in Japan were marketing every ICO they could get their hands on worldwide, including Japanese and US citizens and companies. We received further confirmation when IP.Gold talked with several other companies at CONSENSUS 2018 that were slated to launch on the COMSA/Tech Bureau platform that were having reservations due to both what was happening with IP.Gold and the issues they were having with COMSA/Tech Bureau.

Unfortunately, even though we wanted to, IP.Gold couldn’t just leave and re-launch the ICO on their own or on another platform. We were under contract, heavily integrated with the COMSA/Tech Bureau platform and literally out of the money we spent on the launch. More importantly, IP.Gold management’s professional reputations were being questioned and a move to another platform after a several weeks delay was not being viewed as positive. We were left with little choice to keep moving forward and salvage what we could from our relationship with COMSA/Tech Bureau. After all, announcing the IP.Gold ICO boosted their COMSA token price by over 30%, kept their community from questioning their motive for taking $95M in crypto and validated their crypto launch platform, COMSA.Gloabl, albeit unsuccessfully for us!

But COMSA/Tech Bureau wasn’t done with IP.Gold yet. As a final insult, and without any mention and complete disregard for the catastrophic personal and professional consequences their “failure to launch” of the IP.Gold ICO caused, COMSA/Tech Bureau informed us that, after some serious negotiations internally amongst the board, COMSA/Tech Bureau informed us they would not charge IP.Gold the 100,000 USD launch and support fees in our contract. WOW, How gracious of them! COMSA/Tech bureau completely failed to provide the services as outlined in the contract with us, on time, which caused irreparable damage to the launch of the IP.Gold ICO and our reputations, and after “serious discussions” you’re going to forgo charging us the $100,000 USD launch and support fees… What about what IP.Gold is owed for all of the money spent on coordinated marketing for our ICO launch Date on COMSA/Tech Bureau — That was 3 weeks late — after all of the marketing money was spent and gone! Seriously, all emotion aside, Tech Bureau failed to launch the IP.Gold ICO on the agreed upon launch date, giving little to no notice that they would be delayed, and offered little to no support as defined in the contract, instead insisting it was always something or someone else’s fault.

COMSA/Tech Bureau not only perpetrated a scam on IP.Gold, they perpetrated, and are continuing to perpetrate a scam on every single COMSA contributor, token holder, private investor and the entire COMSA community! Mere weeks after the COMSA ICO, they were sitting on over $300M USD IN CASH in Japan, but gave little to no money to the USA or EU teams developing the COMSA.Global ICO launch platform, while they fought them over reimbursement requests for extra cheese on their sandwiches!

Whether you think COMSA is an ICO scam or not, it is certainly a “long con” with IP.Gold as one of the “marks” who got sucked up into COMSA/Tech Bureau/ZAIF’s elaborate ruse by Takao Asayama 朝山貴生 and his “team” to placate the COMSA community, without needing to deliver anything. After all, they already had over $300M USD in cash just sitting there in the bank! This gives a new meaning to the phrase “laughing all the way to the bank!”

Part 2:”Failure To Launch”

Part 4: “Demand Letter & Silence”

Here is a list of COMSA/Tech Bureau major investors. We ask that everyone copy and paste this story and their own personal or professional story and send them directly to the following:

Infoteria Co.Ltd. (now Asteria)

https://www.asteria.com/en/

ww-business@asteria.com

Ouka Wave Co., Ltd

https://www.okwave.co.jp/

https://go.okwave.co.jp/contact

Shinsei Bank

https://www.shinseibank.com/

https://www.shinseibank.com/english/crm/form/n01/

JAFCO

http://www.jafco.co.jp/

ir@jafco.co.jp