Let’s have a little chat — about ‘e-Chat’.
e-Chat is a company that claims to offer a new, unique way for people to communicate and for content creators to create and share content. Since we can both safely assume that as a potential investor, you just want to be sure that you aren’t pouring your hard earned cash into vaporware, we did a lot of the hard work for you and even went ahead and rated the company.
We begin our analysis by running the company through a Google search to see what shows up — are there any references at all to this company before the ICO? Do they really have the product that they claim to possess? In our case, searching for e-Chat tells us that they have hardly any presence on the internet. The only results that link back to them are from their ICO and from news reports about the ICO. Weird, but possible for a company that’s under a year old.
Let’s take a look at the whois details for e-Chat. This generally gives you a good idea about the people behind the website and more importantly — gives you a way to contact these people. Running a whois search, we see this:
Domain Name: ECHAT.IO
Registry Domain ID: D503300000040436165-LRMS
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL: http://www.instra.com
Updated Date: 2017-09-25T22:25:41Z
Creation Date: 2016-09-25T18:18:21Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2018-09-25T18:18:21Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date:
Registrar: Instra Corporation Pty Ltd.
Registrar IANA ID: 1376
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
Reseller:
Domain Status: ok https://icann.org/epp#ok
Domain Status: autoRenewPeriod https://icann.org/epp#autoRenewPeriod
Name Server: EDNA.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: NOAH.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2017-10-24T16:02:26Z <<<Well well. It looks like they didn’t bother filling in even the information required by ICANN for a domain. Quite a feat and it reflects poorly on both e-Chat and their registrar — Instra.
Maybe the website has some contact details that might give us some idea about the people behind the veil? There seem to be a couple of documents for a company called ‘Crypto Currency Service Center Company Limited’ registered in Hong Kong.
Now, if you’re wondering, just why e-Chat is held under this very, very generic company, don’t worry — we’ll get to that in just a second. Let’s take a minute to note the address in e-Chat’s website — a quick search reveals that this address is actually held by a certain ‘Offshore Company Corp.’ who specialize in creating shell companies in tax havens — specifically Belize, Hong Kong and Seychelles.
Any interested person can purchase one of their generic-by-design companies and have it transferred to their name to be able to conduct business in almost total anonymity. If you’re going to ask your investors to give you upwards of a million USD, is it too much to expect that we at least know who to contact if something goes wrong?
Let’s take a quick look at the network profiles linked on e-Chat’s page shall we?
First stop — Twitter. e-Chat has over 5000 followers on Twitter (now almost 6000). For a Twitter account that is under a month old, this is almost unheard of, unless you’re resorting to clickfarms or are a celebrity.
“For a Twitter account that is under a month old, this is almost unheard of, unless you’re resorting to clickfarms or are a celebrity.”
e-Chat is a startup with less than six months under its belt and even less since they launched their applications. Let’s take a quick look at the followers themselves with Twitteraudit … and it appears that less than 17% of their followers are actually real people …
Understandably disheartened, we move on to their Facebook page — and wait a minute — is that seriously 38,000 likes for a marketing page? At that point, it’s fair to expect some level of human activity from the accounts behind these likes right?
Oh dear. Would you look at that. We’ve got maybe a dozen comments in total and they all look fake, or look like bots making noise on the page. Better, if we take a look at the posts to the page itself, we see several posts, all originating from Kenya or Tanzania. We reached out to e-Chat for comment, but e-Chat’s official response is that they’re a global platform and they have users from all around the world. They’ve since deleted the posts, but we did make a copy before they started cleaning up: http://archive.is/EpPZF
But ask yourself this — if that’s the case, we’d expect to see at least one other post from a real user from a different location.
Opening their Steemit profile page shows us more (human) activity than their other social media profiles put together. At five upvotes and four solid comments, their top post seems like a real hive of activity …
… until of course we check the post time and the comments:
The article was posted at 10/16/2017 12:22 AM UTC.
The first comment was at 10/16/2017 12:23 AM UTC.
The second comment was at 10/16/2017 12:24 AM UTC.
The third comment was at 10/16/2017 12:30 AM UTC.
In e-Chat’s defense, opening a new account in under a minute and commenting on a post is pretty great.
The best part is that we haven’t even really spoken about the mobile applications yet — and there’s a good reason for that — in both their Whitepaper and announcement on Bitcointalk, e-Chat claim to use MTProto to encrypt messages sent by users:
In the same ‘paper’, and on their site, they claim to be the first messaging application to be completely decentralized:
This is interesting, because MTProto is not a decentralized protocol and NEEDS a server to handle key distribution at minimum.
It gets better — the whitepaper reads like poorly written fiction and has more technical details on how they intend to market their solution and has poorly copied market analytics — most of which are totally irrelevant to the product. They go into great detail about the functioning of MTProto — which is a product that is not owned by them, but provide almost no detail on their own product.
The real kicker is probably the final line:
After we requested them to comment on our findings, e-Chat promised to upload a list of their directors and founders to their site.
On the 31st of October 2017, we noticed that e-Chat had updated their page to that of their new ‘employees’. Let’s take a closer look at these employees shall we?
Thomas C. Sima
Does not mention e-Chat anywhere on his profile. Very interesting for the supposed ‘CEO’.
Maybe he’s just shy. Let’s go to the next employee:
Edwin Dearborn
Again. Nothing about e-Chat. Seeing a pattern here yet?
Moving on:
Oops. Must’ve forgotten to update that profile.
Not one mention of e-Chat.
Here’s where it gets even more intriguing — one of the directors actually mentions e-Chat on his profile. In fact, he’s got a very highly rated LinkedIn profile and looking at e-Chat’s track record, this leads us to believe that this is one of a few possibilities:
- His account was compromised and sold to e-Chat who repurposed it.
- He was led along by e-Chat who offered him a job and he took it. This doesn’t make him a perpetrator, just a victim.
- He’s actually one of e-Chat’s ‘founders’.
There’s one last employee and since he’s such a riot, we saved him for last:
Oh and just another damning bit of info — his name that’s listed on the site is wildly different from the one on his LinkedIn profile:
Remember those documents earlier? Well. e-Chat was incorporated in October 2016. And his description of his role at e-Chat doesn’t help his case either.
And if all that wasn’t enough, there’s always e-Chat’s own LinkedIn page:
Overall rating: 1/5
Our recommendation: Take your money and start running the other way folks, these guys seem faker than Lance Armstrong’s yellow jersey.
One More Thing: Just in case, the links that we’ve spoken about go offline due to unforeseen technical reasons, we took the liberty of archiving everything for the record. Here they are for your viewing pleasure:
Main page (2017-10-18-06:15 UTC) - http://archive.is/ilHun
Facebook Page (2017-10-18-06:15 UTC) - http://archive.is/EpPZF
Twitter Audit (2017-10-18-06:15 UTC) - http://archive.is/2HMjY
Twitter (2017-10-18-06:15 UTC) - http://archive.is/Mso0RSo there you go. What do you think? Leave behind a comment and/or share this post to prevent others from getting scammed. And if you enjoyed this post, leave us a clap (or two).
If you have any comments or if you’d like to reach out to us privately to fix any inaccuracies in this post, shoot us a mail at: deceptico@protonmail.com or reach out to us on twitter @deceptico_
