How to lie about your company’s achievements
When deciding where in the crypto-market to invest, one always tries to assess not only the product, but also the company behind it. In today’s world faking high value can be achieved through many of the tools that the digital platforms provide us with.
Part of the evaluation process of a certain business is looking into its backers. As many of you know, Crunchbase comes quite handy in such a situation, as it provides its visitors with a large database of VCs, accelerators, startups and their funding rounds. The data is comprehensive and easy to find.
However, Crunchbase, in its larger part, is just like Wikipedia — openly editable. The upside is that the amount of information on it is growing with a speed, which is greater than the one dozens of full-time employees can achieve. The downside is that it’s hard, if not nearly impossible, to track its accuracy. To validate these suspicions of ours, we decided to create our own imaginary company out of thin air.
Within minutes it was not only registered on Crunchbase, but we stated to have publically ‘secured’ a seed investment of 8 million dollars from one of the largest Chinese VC companies out there. Neither the website’s staff, nor the venture capitalists themselves had to approve this message. The latter either weren’t notified about this by the website or did not care to check on the assertions that others were making about them.
From here on, sending this page to others and convincing them that we are an already trusted entity would have been a piece of cake. We decided to get even further by establishing our reputable personalities via LinkedIn — another platform where lying is extremely easy. No one had to confirm that we hadn’t really studied at Harvard or that we had, in fact, worked at Google. Setting striking biographies took nothing more than a couple of minutes and lots of imagination.
For profile pictures we used stock images of serious-looking ‘businessmen’. Making hundreds of connections in less than 48 hours with individuals we did not know was not only feasible, but extremely simple, especially since most of them were working in Marketing and were looking for potential customers through the platform.
Partnerships were the next step of our reputation build-up, as they ensure potential upholders that your business has been thoroughly assessed by other companies as well. We contacted the representatives of several small ICO projects via LinkedIn, offering them to that we are listed as their advisors for some reasonable amount of their tokens. Negotiations did not take too long and had we not changed our minds, our fake avatars would have ended up in the ‘Team’ section of a few crypto-projects. Our contribution would have been none other than just to lend our faces — which weren’t even ours. None of these startups even offered a video call to make sure that we were the ones who we claimed to be.
From here on creating a Wordpress website about the next disruptive blockchain project and even hiring someone to write our Whitepaper via Fiverr would cost us around a thousand dollars — and we don’t even have to be specific as to how exactly we are disrupting the industry. Pretty good deal, considering the millions that can be raised only through bold claims, pretty pictures and ‘solid’ partnerships.
We did not put together this article with the intention of giving instructions to anyone on how to initiate a fake ICO campaign. Instead, we’d like to warn inexperienced investors out there about the basic efforts one needs to put in order to build a notable image on the Internet. Stay safe and suspicious!
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