Savedroid: The damage caused
An insider story to the stupidest prank in the world.
Imagine you fundraise 50 million dollars from investors, once the money hits your bank account you proceed to delete your website, and all the information about you. Finally, you email your investors a picture of you having a beer in the beach and saying :
“Thanks for your money, I’m out”.
If this is your idea of a prank, you would probably have a job at “savedroid”. The German company that decided to throw the crypto world into chaos while simultaneously damaging our reputation in the world stage.
So what happened?
Introduction
Yesterday I woke up to my phone vibrating to notifications, apparently the blog was getting a disproportionate amount of people reading it. I did not think much of it and continued my day normally, that was, until our blog got this comment on one of our reviews:
…uh oh.
I googled “savedroid” and found a series of articles by CCN, TechCrunch, and many others explaining that the company we reviewed in February had potentially defrauded people for 40M Euros. I went through their website and all the website showed was the following image:
The company’s Telegram was also abandoned by its moderators, and according to a Youtuber the offices were completely vacated. Not only that, but there was a tweet from savedroid’s CEO saying this:
Now, I consider myself a fairly calm and rational person. But the moment that I saw this I just thought that one of 3 things had to be true (in this order):
- He was kidnapped and extorted into posting this
- The Company actually just stole the money with their faces publicly everywhere
- It’s a prank
The last possibility was probably the least rational, because who would cause so much damage as a PR stunt. We already know that the field of ICOs is full of scams, after all our very first article was Why Most ICOs are Scams. So why would anyone “prank” people by encouraging the greatest fear in the field, and simultaneously ruining their own reputation?
Imagine a security company called people and said: “Your mother has been killed in a break and enter” and right as your whole world is falling apart they finish they waited a couple of minutes and said “Just kidding, but if you bought our house alarm, you would never receive a call like that!”
Not only that, there are a series of reasons why this was a monumentally stupid idea:
- People can commit serious self harm if they believe they have just lost their investment
- People remember “$50M USD ICO Scam” story much more than “That $50M Scam was a prank” in fact we have already seen that it is the case. People still ask us about the scam, without knowing it was a prank.
- Anyone who helped this company is also seen as part of the scam, and put at very high risk of harm due to collaboration with the pranksters
- Major credibility loss from the entire crypto industry
- Your company will be known as the one who scared people as a PR scam
The following day after the potential scam, savedroid’s CEO restored the website and posted this video on YouTube, explaining his position regarding the prank:
But the damage was done. Almost nobody paid attention to the prank, and most people outside of the industry just remember the 50M Euro scam. The worst part of all, is that we were involved with Savedroid, and we had no idea this was going to happen.
The Context
Early in February, we received a message from a German marketing company, requesting we do a series of reviews on some German ICOs. Our protocol with paid reviews is that we will charge companies to write the review, and then we show them the review. If they are not happy with the results we will not publish it, but we do not allow people to change the actual content of the review (unless we were inaccurate in some aspect).
We had an interview with Savedroid’s CEO, the now infamous Yassin Hankar. The interview was actually not out of the ordinary in any way, and the company was actually extremely transparent and honest with us. We were able to collaborate the information on the company’s incorporation, and reputation through German media companies.
Unfortunately, they never revealed to us that they would pull off one of the most upsetting PR stunts in history.
Our story, “Savedroid ICO Review” can be found here. It has since been removed from our publisher’s list, and we are considering deleting it, but for the purpose of transparency, we have decided to keep it online for now.
Fast forward to last week, I immediately contacted the German company who hired us to write the review and we received the following response:
“Hi Pablo,
We are currently monitoring this situation. At this time, however, the only information we have is the same that you do: that which is publicly available.“
At this point we lost all hope in the situation. When even the marketing company hired to help with this ICO has no idea about one of the largest pranks in history, then nobody knows what is going on.
From our perspective, savedroid kept their marketing campaign secret from everyone around them, making it even more dangerous, as nobody prepared for it, and it affected the reputation of all the companies, individuals, and investors around the project. And they did that without their consent.
The Conclusion
This wasn’t just a dumb publicity stunt, it was an extremely irresponsible and outright dangerous prank. Savedroid’s reputation was not the only one affected by the prank, faking a crime is still an incredibly stupid and irresponsible activity.
After these recent events, we have completely changed our policies regarding accepting sponsored stories, and the way we approach and are approached by them. We have since worked with the German marketing company that originally hired us for the review. Furthermore, we have decided that we are tired of having to rely on sponsors, so we are creating our own platform for content creators to profit without resorting to advertisement. We are doing this through Blockchain tech, but that’s beyond this article.
The ICO industry has already been heavily affected by many real ICOs, the last thing we need is people creating fake scams, that end up causing pretty much the same amount of PR damage to all of us working to make the industry more transparent and accessible.
Yassin has currently not answered our request to interview him and post the results publicly. We will update the situation in case anything changes.
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