Remember CONFIDO, one of the latest ICO's gathering funds for the ultra awesome Trustless escrow payments with shipment tracking? Well, they vanished with $375,000 user funds...
Confido billed itself as a company that is developing "smart contracts" to act as an escrow between a buyer and seller during a transaction of some sort. Traditional escrows would be held by a third party. But smart contracts are supposed to be fulfilled when both sides meet certain conditions, removing the need for that third party.
After raising nearly $375,000 through an initial coin offering the group has disappeared with the funds. To be exact, they have vanished from the face of the internet, with their website and social media accounts related to the company and the founding team have been deleted.
The ludicrous scam seems to have a lot of people pissed off at the moment as the number of posts on the official announcement thread in Bitcointalk.org, Reddit, Twitter etc are multiplying.
The following announcement was made on Reddit yesterday by the "appointed" representative of CONFIDO group.
"To our community,
Thanks for always standing by us. We have achieved some incredible things these last two weeks, and the crypto space is beginning to notice us. However, we owe you an apology. Right now, we are in a tight spot, as we are having legal trouble caused by a contract we signed. We signed the contract with assurance from our legal advisor that there was minimal risk and it would not be an issue. I can't and won't go into details, but he was wrong. It is a problem.
We are trying our best to fight our way through this. As it currently stands, development has been delayed until a resolution is found. We are honestly not sure how long we will be delayed by, but we’re trying our best to get this behind us as fast as possible.
It is likely that we will be able to find a solution to rectify the situation. However, we cannot assure you with 100% certainty that we will get through this.
This announcement will shock a lot of people, and that’s understandable. I, Joost van Doorn, want to personally apologize for any financial damages this announcement will cause to people. It was never our intention to hurt investors; we didn’t see this coming.
We will keep you guys updated. Please join our announcement channel
Regards,
The Confido team."
On Monday, TokenLot, the firm that hosted the ICO, put out a statement saying the Confido team had "pulled an exit scam."
The Confido Team lineup was :
Joost van Doorn - Founder, CEO
Max Kruger - Co-Founder, CTO
Liam Bellum - Full-Stack Developer
Mick Spatz - IOS/Android Developer
Though a quick research reveals, that those names are fake.