ACChain: Unraveling the Links to Puyin
Puyin Coin, a known exit scam, may be linked to ACChain, a project accused of as much by some community members.
If you see Jia Wan involved in a blockchain based company, you might want to steer clear. Wan is the registered owner for Shenzen Puyin Blockchain Group and domains puercoin[.]com and puermall[.]com both of which are associated with Puyin Coin. Despite a great deal of hype over Puyin Coin which was a digitized luxury tea based coin, it turned out to be a scam. Six people associated with the project were picked up by Chinese police in May 2018 after the company allegedly scammed consumers out of 48 million dollars.
Steep Prices For Tea
Puyin coins were supposed to be based on holdings of the rare variety of Pu’er tea only found in the Yunnan Province, in the southwestern region of China, but it’s unclear whether the company behind the project actually owned significant holdings in Pu’er tea to offset the value of the coin. Puyin Coin’s marketing team put all the bells and whistles on their ICO campaign, however when it came down to actual tea assets, the company turned out to be rolling the investments of consumers into token purchases of their own coin, inflating the trading volume fraudulently. During this time, on the exchanges it was offered, Puyin Coin rose from $0.07 to $1.57.
Links To Other Projects
Jia Wan’s name also appears on another project ACChain where his title is “CEO of Guiyang Blockchain Financial Co.,Ltd.” ACChain told me Wan left the company in February 2018.
ACChain was recently under fire on Reddit, after allegations of an exit scam began to spread when a user posted photos of what was believed to be an office space once occupied by ACChain’s developers who had since fled and complained about the team’s ghostly presence on GitHub over the past few months. Users may have noted that the page with the ACChain team is no longer physically linked to the site, but the records of the original founding team still persist and have been archived.
Lately, in response to backlash from the posts on Reddit, the ACChain Telegram group administrator has resorted to deleting messages deemed as “FUD” which some users believe are relevant questions.
Additional Investigation
Attempting to get to the bottom of this I reached out to ACChain in the midst of these allegations. I received a response from a source at ACChain, who told me the contentions that the office spaces had been abandoned were false.
According to my source at ACChain they had been hacked by an SQL injection and around 500,000 coins were stolen and moved to an account on the TradeSatoshi exchange. Rather than being a breach of some kind, my source at ACChain told me that there were indications the hack may have been an inside job.
ACChain said it opted to work with TradeSatoshi in order to freeze the account in control of the stolen coins, and barring that trading on the platform was outright frozen. Regarding this incident and the appointment of Genieve Leveille, who is also associated with other projects, ACChain issued this statement wherein it expressed work would continue to resolve ongoing security issues:
“ACChain continue to refund those affected and urge all those not yet refunded to come forward if they have not received the email and to contact security@acchain.org. The appropriate authorities were notified, and importantly a criminal investigation is ongoing. ACChain continues to work with Entersoft Security and the security issue and systems involved have now been resolved.”
Fake News And A Botched Real Estate Venture
Another individual with seeming ties to both Puyin Coin and ACChain is Ben Gibson, who is a partner at Collins Barrow, a charted accountants group. Gibson’s name comes up in a couple stories about Shenzen Puyin Blockchain Group attempting to make an investment of $655 million in Dallas/Fort Worh area real estate, one of which contends, “Puyin Blockchain Group of Shenzhen, China, is teaming up with Serene Country Homes to fund construction of 2,300 houses in the Sendera Ranch community in northern Tarrant County.” This was published back when hype for the project would have been bolstered by such reports.
However I spoke to Gibson about this. He not only set the record straight to let me know that Shenzen Puyin Blockchain Group ended up backing out of the real estate deal; in addition Gibson told me that he has no association with ACChain. He denies any involvement with the project, and said he has repeatedly asked ACChain to remove references to him on its website.
When I asked ACChain what Ben Gibbons did for their team I was referred to their previously published statement which doesn’t explain his role. This is a pretty big discrepency.
If the founding team of ACChain did walk away and leave the remaining members behind to pick up the pieces, it might be a long time before investors in the project see their return, if ever. I’ll continue to provide additional reports on this as facts emerge.
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