The world of DeFi and new finance coins is a minefield out there.
If you aren't careful, you will lose your arms and your legs
as well as your funds.
Recently, there's been a lot of suspected bad actors in the space
taking advantage of both investors and crypto YouTubers alike.
A complex ring of serial scammers is becoming more clear every day.
Understanding how many of these people are connected
and how we can combat them is a huge priority on this channel
from this point forward.
We're about to ruffle some feathers and make some enemies.
Two of my favorite things to do.
Let's get it!
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Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Everyday on this channel, I show you how to make money in cryptocurrency.
Maybe today, we talk about how not to lose money in cryptocurrency.
If you like money and crypto, make sure to hit that Subscribe button,
hit the bell and make sure YouTube notifications are turned on.
In this video, we're going to be busting out some of the worst people in the space,
and they are not going to like getting exposed.
They've tried to use me and other YouTubers as pawns in this game,
but they're about to find out who's the pawn and who's the king
and what checkmate feels like.
We're going to be making significant changes to the way we operate and work with sponsors,
and we're also going to be working on a way to further ease the burden from scams and rug pulls,
but more on that in a few minutes.
As you guys probably have noticed,
this channel has absolutely blown up this year.
I never dreamed in 1000 years,
we would be able to get to 100,000 subscribers in 2020.
We were at 12,000 in January.
Now, here we sit on the precipice of 200,000 subscribers
possibly by year’s end.
We’ve had some growing pains for sure,
as with each month, our responsibility in the space we feel has grown exponentially.
For two years, I slaved away on this channel with basically no results.
Working full time, sometimes up to 80 hours per week as a one-man show doing everything myself,
making usually about $1,000 a month.
If you didn't know,
it's not the kind of income, at least in America,
especially in a bear market,
that someone with a family of five can support,
but I knew long term the benefits of growing this channel outweighed the struggle,
and that's why I was so committed to doing it.
Finally, this year, we broke through.
We've always been selective with sponsors on this channel,
but we've had to learn that we have to continually raise the bar,
and we're comfortable with that.
With great power comes great responsibility.
That's Uncle Ben from Spider-Man by the way,
not Batman.
But we generally turn down about 90% or more of sponsored video requests.
That's reality.
However, we've done a lot of sponsored videos. It shows you the demand for this channel.
Always, 100% always, we've disclosed sponsored videos as sponsored.
But you have to understand the tremendous amount of requests we get,
easily averaging 25 to 50 inquiries per week,
and most of them are complete garbage,
and we ignore them.
Some make it into the discussion stage.
Most stall out there.
But we’ve developed a system of checks to assure that the projects we discuss on this channel
fit what we believe in and what we believe to be good projects.
We, earlier this year, had to learn the hard lesson that promoting projects with anonymous teams
simply no longer fit with what we were comfortable with
due to the fact that so many of the anon teams were rug pulling all over the space.
We no longer believe in projects with anonymous teams,
other than Bitcoin of course.
For the most part.
We think they are perfect candidates to scam people though
without the worries of repercussions.
Then, we believed a project having an audited smart contract that was airtight would be enough to warrant approval.
Then a project we covered literally switched out their smart contract after we did a video!
The audited smart contract was researched and approved.
Then it was removed,
and one with a rug pull back door was installed.
Like WTF.
But then, like a beacon in the night,
platforms started popping up everywhere to stop scams.
We loved it!
The idea was that tokens launching on these platforms would have locked liquidity,
which would prevent rug pull scams.
But, unfortunately, rug pulls are only one-way project scam,
so even this was not sufficient.
And none of those platforms seem to be working.
This is when a new type of scam started appearing in my opinion.
I'm going to call it the “smoke and mirrors” scam.
Tomorrow, I'm going to be discussing a lot more of this in detail
with one of the top scam investigators in the space,
who's now been added to my research team,
LiteLiger.
What he's uncovered and helped me to understand
is that this is a complex ring of serial scammers.
Here's the premise of the “smoke and mirrors” scam.
A project comes out with the idea of a deliverable product
that sounds awesome and solves a big problem that we're all having in crypto.
For instance,
a platform that stops scams.
People focus so much on the potential of the deliverable
that they're distracted away from the stink off the project and the team itself.
And since anon teams have become taboo in crypto due to the scams,
these are bold and brazen scammers who not only put their names and faces out there,
but even do interviews on big YouTube channels,
totally putting themselves out there.
This is why there's always a “reason” why they had to remove the liquidity
or there's a “bug” with the “code”.
They scapegoat a reason for their scamming
in order to keep themselves from being personally liable.
It's time to wake up though.
So let's get specific.
DistX, a project meant to curb scammers or rug pulls, is shutting down
after "failed business" less than six months after launch.
When I heard about this platform wanting to stop scams, I was super excited about it.
The idea of stopping scams is something I wanted to be associated with,
so when they offered me a partnership with them
to work with projects on their platform with a locked liquidity,
I jumped at it.
They raised 2500 ETH and supposedly ran through all of it
and magically had to exit scam--
Sorry--
close down their business.
One thing about me that you guys need to understand is that I'm too trusting.
I develop relationships with people, and I believe what they tell me.
If someone tells you something shocking about someone you don't know,
you will immediately believe it.
However, think about this,
if someone tells you something shocking about someone you do know very well,
such as a family member or a close friend,
your first reaction would be disbelief.
And if you have a good relationship with them,
you'll probably even defend them before having all the facts.
And I believe the trust and kindness that I show has been taken for weakness,
and that has been a hole in our ship we are now plugging.
So my first reaction to DistX exit scamming
was to believe their original story that they just couldn't make it in business,
but the smoke has become too thick in the room
that it's apparent not only was DistX a scam and a Ponzi scheme from the very beginning,
it's just one part of the complex ring of scammers that we've uncovered.
I have to take my hat off to LiteLiger’s recent expose video on DistX,
which has put a lot of stuff into perspective.
In the video,
Liger shows connection providing evidence that Adrian Daluz, the CEO of DistX,
is tied to numerous projects
that are using that same “smoke and mirrors” scam.
GHOST Protocol
DistX
UniTrade
UniLayer
SwitchDEX
Rocket Token
All have connections to Adrian.
What a twisted tale we weave.
Some of those we covered on this channel.
And the ones we didn't cover all contacted us for promotion,
but we turned them down.
Of course, not knowing that they were all connected.
These devs, Reborn1002, Xeno and Adrian Daluz,
were involved with many of these same projects working all together.
First off, starting with DistX,
one of my lead researchers and head admin of the BitSquad,
we’ll call him “The Cat”,
subsequently works with a lot of people in the blockchain industry.
The Cat reached out to DistX to aid them as he does with several projects he likes,
offering to connect them with various people.
So their claims that they had to shut down because they were going to fail
sounds like a lot of BS.
They were making a lot of connections.
Although it's very expensive to manage a blockchain project,
they had a working product,
which could have been tweaked to a model where they were profitable
and able to continue with sustainability.
They already had one successful token launch on their platform with Carbon.
But we believe this goes much deeper.
Looking into DistX and what it's supposed to be,
it's a launch platform,
but it's also supposed to have a DEX, a decentralized exchange.
In fact, kind of similar to SwitchDEX and UniTrade.
So is there something malicious at play here?
Well, we'll let you decide and investigate.
And the government could decide also, according to sources,
because Adrian has been reported to the federal authorities in the UK and the US
by holders of DistX who lost thousands of dollars.
But we can't make that assumption whether he's a criminal or not,
besides saying that usually where there's smoke, there's fire.
And it's clear we need to put as much distance between us and them as possible
because our partnership with them was based on lies.
And I hope that SOB gets the book thrown at him
if I don't have to throw it myself.
As we did sponsored videos with DistX,
we’d like to give a big amount back to DistX holders and ease the burden.
But here's the tricky spot we find ourselves in.
Let's say we give money back to the top DistX holders.
How are we supposed to know which ones of the top DistX holders
are actually people hurt by the scam
and not the DistX insiders holding large amounts of tokens themselves?
So, in a way, we would still be helping the scammers and harming the holders.
One person who I really want to believe, and I'm going to leave the name out here,
he worked previously with DistX.
He handed 50 Ethereum back to top holders of DistX.
But you have to understand this paranoid world we're now living in.
Is it possible that 50 ETH handed back was actually going to top insider token holders?
And the money was basically just being washed?
I don't know the answer to that question.
And I want to believe him.
I wish I did have the answer.
So this kind of leaves us in a no-win situation.
Some things we are considering is to create some type of scam fund
to protect members of the BitSquad who do get scammed.
But then again,
you guys can already probably see how this too could be easily manipulated.
We're also considering refunding portions of this money to those holding DistX
but using KYC requirements.
Basically using a process to verify the owners of the addresses
and that they are in no way aligned with any of the names on the teams,
but we feel like that feels a little like we're violating people's privacy.
But it may be the best solution.
So here's the long and the short of it,
we're going to give $20,000 back to the DistX holders,
but we do not know how we're going to do it yet.
We're going to take about 1-2 weeks to figure out the best way.
But we want you,
our community,
to drop some comments and suggestions below
on how we could accomplish this in the most fair way
that also tries to eliminate the DistX team from getting a portion of these funds.
So please, we're all ears, we would love to hear your ideas.
But wait, there's more!
Ironically, around the same time the DistX news was breaking,
we were contacted to promote an entirely separate project called BetFi.
Our antennas were already up due to our DistX investigation,
which we've been digging at for quite a while.
So we started looking into this new project.
And in the end,
we ended up finding some very suspicious things about them amid our research for the project,
which we'll discuss here in a second.
We saw another LiteLiger video exposing a connection between WavesBet, BetFi, UniLayer and SwitchDEX.
At that point, we realized what we're dealing with here.
It was that exact moment that we came to realize that many of these launchpad platforms
that said they were trying to fix scams
were actually perpetuating them
and potentially Ponzi schemes in a certain way.
In the same way DistX had launched its first project connected to someone they knew,
UniLayer did the same thing with BetFi.
What's more is all these guys were together at one point on other projects!
I mean, guys, can we keep it real here?
You see what's up.
They're all connected.
During the research for this video, it turns out
that UniLayer’s BetFi had a “contract bug”
which caused ETH to be allegedly stuck in the contract, according to Geo,
who owns UniLayer.
I don't know, maybe he also goes by Adrian.
I don't know.
Remember,
people know these guys, and they know how to find them.
So there always has to be a “reason” why the project’s scammed.
It's never just an obvious exit scam.
Geo was also involved with John McAfee's project GHOST,
with Josh, Adrian Daluz and others.
Geo also worked with Adrian Daluz on UniLayer’s SwitchDEX!
Turns out that WavesBet was sold to John McAfee and Josh.
However, WavesBet never transferred the code to SwitchDEX.
Now, BetFi has stolen code from HypeBet,
and the project has been a failed launch with the alleged locked ETH in its contract!
You put two and two together,
well, we already have.
One more thing to touch on for Mr. Adrian Daluz,
who's supposedly the lead developer in DistX.
Here, he's asking, in this image, for outsourcing developers on LinkedIn.
It's important to note that Adrian was also a lead developer on UniTrade,
a site similar to DistX.
At one point, they were looking for developers for a multi-million dollar project
on Upwork.
Here's more evidence, this time, from Telegram via LiteLiger.
Now,
along with all these projects, we've uncovered so many other scams this year,
including the Cloud Token remake, Torque Network,
BlockClout and many others.
Torque and BlockClout both contacted us for promotion, and we turned them down.
Now,
I’m not perfect.
My research team is not perfect,
but you have to know,
we do our best to be honest, transparent and aware.
My lead researcher, known as “The Cat”, has done a good job in busting a lot of scams.
Now, with the addition of LiteLiger to the team,
ironically, a bigger cat,
we hope we can keep scams to zero on this channel.
Make sure to check out my interview tomorrow with LiteLiger more on this topic.
Now, one big decision we made going forward from this time on,
we're not doing any stand-alone sponsored videos on this channel.
We are only working with projects as advisors or partners.
Long-term commitments to top-of-the-line projects
like YFDAI, Ferrum Network and others,
will be the only way companies will be able to work with me,
and these projects will be rigorously vetted.
We're committed to cleaning up the space.
Remember to drop some suggestions below
that you believe will help us to clean up the space
and help people who have been scammed.
And listen,
these people?
They may think they've won,
but like I said earlier,
they're going to find out what checkmate feels like.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.