The Biggest ICO Failures of 2017
Last year, ICOs offered some of the highest investment returns in modern history. But not all ICOs have been successful, in fact over 50% of the ICOs from 2017 have failed already. Some investors received no returns whatsoever after investing. Some of the failure’s have been incredible, dramatic and in most cases, legal. Here are the biggest ICO failures of 2017.
ONECOIN
Not only was this one of the biggest ICO failures of 2017, but it was a scam on a massive level. The only objective was to steal from investors and do it on a large scale quickly. The ONECOIN ICO took over $350 million from its investors. There was no business or a whitepaper.
Though over 18 members associated with the scam have been arrested by police in India, the investors still haven’t got their money back. The ONECOIN scam is the darkest episode in history of ICOs so far.
Coindash
This was one of the biggest hacks leading to investors losing their money in an ICO. Coindash, who is based in Israel had their system hacked and the hackers stole $10 million worth of investment funds.
There is no official explanation of how that happened but the sources say that their website security was compromised and the hackers changed the address where the ether tokens were to be sent. This resulted in the investors tokens to be sent to a fraudulent address and by the time it was fixed the hackers had already received over $10 million.
Eventually the ICO was suspended. Coindash definitely made investors question and rethink about the security aspects of an ICO before making an investment.
Veritaseum
This ICO was based on Ethereum blockchain and raised funds in Ethereum’s ether tokens. Though there were warnings about the ICO’s glitchy tech which made the fundraising vulnerable to hackers, there wasn’t much done by the company. 36,000 VERI tokens were stolen worth over $8 million and caused the ICO failure. Though many investors accused the Veritaseum team of the scam being an inside job, tnothing has been proven.
Enigma
Enigma was another massive ICO hack which happened because of a minor but extremely irresponsible mistake of Enigma CEO, Guy Zizkind. Enigma started their ICO for a secure cryptographic coin and their advanced encryption method and security were their key features.
The CEO did not set up a two factor verification method for the tech and his account was hacked. A fake email was sent out and many investors sent in their investments in response. Hackers were able to get over $500,000 worth of Ethereum.
Droplex
Another scam like ONECOIN but on a much smaller scale. The scammers were able to make only over $25k. With everything copied from QRL, another ICO, Droplex had nothing of its own expect for the website and the wallet and got busted before stealing a large sum of money.
Those were just a few of the ICO failures we saw in 2017. This year we will see more, but with much more regulation.
