KickICO - how to completely screw up an ICO and lose all credibility.
Kickico pre-ico
I sent 15 ethereum (~ $5680 USD) and got in on the Kickico pre-ICO. Kickico sounds like an amazing concept. It’s a kickstarter clone on the blockchain and the team also plan to use the platform to launch/fundraise future ICO’s. In addition, the team have some respectable developers and an already up and running product.
I had a reasonable amount of conviction on this coin/token.
The team are based in Russia and maybe I’m completely off on this but I thought the cost of developing/producing products in Russia would be relatively low. Russians are smart as well so you could invest in well designed/thought out projects, at a low cost to develop and make a fortune unless of course, your worst nightmare comes true....
You get ripped off.
Boasting how important it was for ICO’s to be careful when it comes to being hacked and why they should use KickICO to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, the KickICO team posted this message on facebook July 19th 2017.
So what happened during their ICO yesterday?
That's right...
The really annoying thing about this incident is how it's being managed.
These guys look like a bunch of amateurs compared to the Tenx team who are far more sophisticated, communicative, honest and last but not least, didn't get hacked.
As if the hack incident wasn't bad enough, I then get this message
The “cap” for the ICO has been reached but there is a "hidden cap". I must have glanced over the footnote when I was contributing my ethereum. Since when has there ever been a "hidden cap"?
They haven't actually explained why there is a hidden cap, who the money is getting allocated to, why they need an extra $15M USD suddenly or if there will be a "secret extra special hidden cap" after this one. Is it because they were hacked? I found this post on facebook but they didn't bother sharing this information on twitter.
So now all we know is that they were hacked, lied to us about their cap (which is all of a sudden more than the initial ICO and less than double what they first decided to set the "cap" at) and need an extra 15-20M USD for no good reason.
I follow certain guidelines when investing in cryptos and have my criteria for selecting money making cryptos. This however doesn't account for Token/Coin teams moving the goal posts in the middle of their ICO.
How many investors do you think are going to launch their ICO's from this platform? Given the fact that they completely screwed up their own ICO and lost all credibility, none, that's how many I'd say.
Looks like the KickICO guys are even annoying Clif High due to email distribution without his permission.
And here they are giving conflicting answers again! One members say they will stop after soft cap is hit, and the other says they will keep running to 24hrs! After I called them out about that fine print under the campaign! Stay away these people are scammers! I am documenting everything and posting here
@bigga it's all stored on the blockchain. Thank you for having the foresight to think about this. It's good to document everything!
Yeah remember that "hack attempt " a lot of people tokens they said is useless because they made a "change" to the smart contract and will be issuing new tokens.Which I thought was impossible. So let's see what happens.
What someone said in opus slack about the team .
@bigga You should be a research analyst! Well done you. This is great information that you're sharing with everyone.
What I found on twitter. It gets worse and worse for these guys . And here is the slack of the CEO saying he will sue his investor for having an option !
Oh dang, I bought a little yesterday. Thanks for the post. Lets see where it goes, to me it looked like a really solid thing, but you made me secondguess. Nice post, thanks for the information!!
@flurin - let's hope they get their act together. Maybe I'm being a bit harsh but their actions don't exactly fill me with confidence.
upvoted and followed you if you like cuteaniamals please follow me....
@cuteanimals - done! I look forward to following you.
Oh, I have also bought a little. I had good vibes for them. But now, you have made my mind go in other direction. Both the points you have raised here are pretty strong to raise skepticism in the minds of investors.
Let's see if they do better in future otherwise I won't take much time to dump their coin. Nice post, btw. Thanks for information. Following you.
@tech-nomad let's hope for the best, I put a lot of skin in the game myself. I just hope they don't let everybody down.
@big.bad.johnny, please, make sure you get the information right before you make any more confusion than there is already.
As a team member I would like to reply to your post:
ICO campaign was declared everywhere with its goal of 50k ETH and hard cap of 200k ETH from the very beginning. And after reaching the goal it continued to hard cap.
We officially lower the hard cap of the ICO to 100k ETH and declare a hidden cap somewhere inbetween 50k ETH and 100k ETH. We made this decision because of ETH price doubled in the last months.
So when the hidden cap is reached we will announce it and close the crowdsale.
During the crowdsale an attempt was made to compromise the crowdsale smart contract, but safety worked and no money was lost in any way and ETH was safely transferred to our secure multisig address
We have redeployed the crowdsale contract and token contract to avoid anymore fraud and continue crowdsale as planned
We have closed slack team channel to stop the scam activity with imposters for everyone's security.
Considering the hype we have for our ICO and the attention it got - we have withstood all the attempts to compromise the ICO and kept it secure.
After all, hackers don't sleep and we took best security precautions during the crowdsale.
@muxacr thank you for replying to my post. I appreciate someone from KickIco taking the time to reply to these concerns.
Whatever your reasons, this ICO has been badly managed. Don't take it just from me, have a look at your twitter feed:-
You should do the honorable thing and close the ICO now.
Yes look at the three conflicting caps they posted, so poorly managed and I just wish I hadn't invested at this point.
https://imgur.com/gallery/GQNU4
Their website even got flagged for phising
@bigga this rabbit hole goes pretty deep....
Lies ! You said 50k to 200k now it's 50k to 100k? What is this who are you guys fooling?! https://imgur.com/gallery/GQNU4
So much confusion in this ico and misleading and you want people to use your platform ? Exactly like what he said no credibility!
KickICO goes to a space of crypto without studying the hackers moved. I believed as Programmers of all these nodes you must ready for any eventualities which mean KickICO has contengencies plan while doing ICO. Do they they have double 2FA authy and google authenticators to prevent the hackers to coming in the website this is hilarious how it's hack because as far as i knew the programmers of decentralized block chain are high knowledgeable that's why KickICO your programmers are questionable. Two, The Management of KickICO should be transparent nothing to hide the total ICO raised funds so that Investors must have confident hidding something it's putting investors to have less confident in KickICO. For me, I am not participating in ICO my reasons are do they succeed on their platform after the ICO and second thus investors can withdraw immediately their investment or get ROR or Rate of Return as fast as the development of kickICO because i don't like my money will sleep. I joined some ICO of Adscash coins Nick johnson Founder of it is only sucking the blood of investors and getting money from the pocket of investors and manipulate the rise of adscash coins without even trading or returning the investors of money He keep the money of all investors himself and sucked by their blood imagine almost half million investors were chasing by Nick Johhson almost one year already since i joined and there is no return even a single dollar of investor this is open scammed but yet many investors are blinded. Nick Johnson story was he scammed Click Intensity before almost 200K members were scammed without getting their capitals and now adascash and other company he added to establish aside from Adscash but the same he sipped all blood of all investors without single dollar of return because until there is not trading almost one year already he always promise that you can cash out your adscash coins now but until now his company is not doing but he keeps advertesing to scam investors beware of Nick Johnson?
@rollycustodio1 Thank you very much for your comment. It's important that you're sharing this information with us as we need to make each other aware of the scammers out there.
Best keep away from KickICO.