Blockbroker.me has stopped operating under very suspicious circumstances. The Company claims to be a new ICO broker platform that offers investors better than market deals on ICO’s, completely eliminating ICO fraud by creating a 100% safe investment environment.
Insider.pro has gathered up the facts regarding this story.
The Blockbroker website at the time of writing is completely empty except for a misspelled single line tex: “The Block Broker Platform is undergoing maintenence. Please check back soon. Thanks”
Based on the data from Domaintools: website is 85 days old, created on March 3rd, 2018 and last updated on June 1st, 2018
Founder of Blockbroker, John Jakobs
The Website went under the unforgiving microscope of Reddit not long before it’s disappearance. A user submitted a post comparing the portrait images of John Jakobs and an Ukrainian photographer Alexander Krishtal (aka Alex Amadeo)
One may consider that Alex Amadeo is not even aware of someone using his visa photo from his personal Instagram account.
After some digging we came across various accounts of Alex Amadeo, some contained very little information like this blogspot page and this flickr account.
According to his Instagram and Facebook however, Alexander Krishtal does exist and accounts are active. In 2017 he even went to Africa to participate in a charity project to build an orphanage. The project didn’t materialize due to financial problems. But normally, Alexander is working as a freelancer specialized in Photoshop manipulations.
The only crypto world connection he has is through his instagram account where he follows a crypto developer that frequently leaves likes and comments on Alexander’s posts.
Luckily Mr. Krishtal, who became the face of this scam replied after almost three weeks and gave his comments exclusively to Insider.Pro
Alexander says that he was unaware of the ICO in question but he was contacted on several occasions about a photo on his profile page.
Here’s a part of the conversation:
“I remember, I was contacted and told to delete the photo, around half a year ago.” said Mr. Krishtal “I get 5-10 fake messages on freelance every day. But I deleted the photo for a week or so, but then put it back up. I thought that why should I care, it's my photo. I just didn’t want to get into all of this.”
Insider.pro: And they gave you money for this?
“They did, or even send $10. All I remember is that I told them mildly to go away when they asked me to make a photo with some code on it.”
Insider.pro: Are you planning to do anything about this?
“I don’t think that I will do something about it, as you said, only the photo was stolen.”
Regardless of the shock, Alexander still thinks that cryptocurrencies are the future and admitted to investing in a few litecoins (LTC/USD).
ICO listing sites flagged Blockbroker before it disappeared
Airdropking.io gave only two stars to the company due to almost empty white paper and unreliable information on it’s team. Their evaluation states: “The whitepaper is super short, it could be compressed to a few pages because it has literally no text and only images. The only team member that has something about BlockBroker in the LinkedIn profile is the founder itself. Pretty dubious.”
Icoholder.com praises the Blockbroker more than enough by saying “Block Broker is about to change the world of ICO investments forever!!!” However in the “team members” comment section most answers doesn’t seem to be logical. For example; to the question of “As a team member, сan you tell us about your role in the ICO project? What do you think about idea?” a team member Nikita Dotsenko’s reply was simply “Yes”. But according to the Coin Shark website; Nikita Dotsenko works there as a Sales and Marketing Manager.
Blockbroker team may not exist at all
Company lists several profiles as it’s team members. However a search on professional networks shows that either these people do not existing in real life, or are not related to the company.
Jacob Fox is listed as Head of Marketing, however in his own profile Mr. Fox has not mentioned Blockbroker.
Hardik Mandanka is shown as CTO/Developer but once again the personal page does not refer to Blockbroker in any way.
Google - time travellers biggest friend
Google cache archives snapshots of old versions of the websites. When we checked an earlier version of Blockbroker, we could see the announcements and the white paper. And keep in mind, cache versions of the site do not show images and links may be broken.
Reddit community never forgets
As we mentioned earlier, Reddit community was all over Blockbroker even prior to its disappearance. Even a quick research shows that users have warned fellow redditers about this ICO, found and shared suspicious information on their experience of how Blockbroker banned people from their telegram channel when they started asking tough questions.
By Nadya Astam