Cryptocurrency Rises 382% in a Day, Smells of a Potential Rekt’d Token Scam in Making

Cryptocurrency space is flooded with thousands of tokens and a new one gets added every other day. The vision behind Bitcoin was to create a decentralized currency system to give power in the hands of the community, rather than a big financial institution and banks holding a monopoly over people's money.

However, as the popularity of Bitcoin grew beyond anyone's imagination, the crypto space saw a surge of tokens making a foray. The rise in popularity of cryptocurrency has attracted a similar amount of scammers and Ponzi schemes who feed off the fact that people are not well versed with the crypto technology, but the quick money that it makes has lured them to space.

In the long run, only a few tokens would survive the crypto race but till that time scammers are making the best of it.

Vestchain (VEST) has recently entered the top 100 by market cap group after making a massive surge of 382% in the past 24 hours, and a look at its bitcointalk forum page casts more doubt about the project then provide any answers.

The BitcoinTalk Forum Page Shows Fake Name Altered Social Media Accounts and Dubious Profile Pictures

Vestchain (VEST) official Bitcointalk forum page made its debut back in July 2018, and as usual, the beginning was filled with ideas, long term goals and loads of positive chatter around the project. However, things started to look fishy by February where it was discovered that most of the associates of the project have been using fake names and identities.

The original website has removed the section which gave information about the founders completely now. But, social media is a cruel thing and as they say once something goes on the internet, it stays there forever. A series of previously taken screenshots suggest that the co-founder and CTO Shawn Carter is Russian by identity and his real name is Cyril Koval.

The same goes for the Head of Business Development and Operations, Darrell Lee who in reality is a user by name Roman Gritsenko. The Backend Developer, Carlos Whittington, was also revealed to be a dating site user with the name Robertas.

A close look on the website suggests that the photos used by the scammers have been flipped and slightly altered using any photo editing application. Most of the core members are Russian and they tried their best to give their names a European origin.

VestChain Members Says There Website was in the Test Phase

When accusations started to flow in from all corners of the internet the vestchain decided to pop up with an explanation which any 5-year old gives when caught red-handed. The team said their website was under the testing phase. Their response on Bitcointalk forum read,

“The section about our Team appeared on our website just a few days ago and is now in a test mode. All the photos, first and second names don’t really exist. Our most considerable mistake is that we haven’t opened the test mode section on our website earlier. Currently, the section about our Team is closed and is being developed. We will soon update this section on our website.”

According to the explanation given by the Vestchain, there website's Team Member column was under the testing phase for over 6-month and they were using the fake identity for the testing purposes. However, the team info section has completely disappeared now, but the internet users have identified several users connected to the project and they have been shilling their crypto token for well over 9 months.

What Made the Community Suspicious of Vestchain?

From the daily low of $0.006056, the value of VEST tokens jumped 382% up to a peak of $0.029249 on Monday. This sudden surge brought the market capitalization of the Vest token at $206 million and also put the token in top-40 for a brief period of time.

However, the token price rebounded back and brought the token price to a mere $0.01 range and cut down the total market capitalization to $80 million.

Conclusion

Crypto market has been looking for a bull run for almost a year and the recent price rally since April 2nd has made the community more optimistic, as the sudden surge in prices helped the majority of the cryptocurrencies to break their upper key resistance levels and make double-digit gains.

These kinds of situation serve as a perfect opportunity for scammers and Ponzi schemes to make the most of the current trends while the market is in a frenzy and people would think the surge is because of the recent bull run. However, it backfired for Vestchain since it made unprecedented and impossible gains which attracted a ton of attention towards its chain, and this led to their fall.