Post
Topic
Board Service Discussion (Altcoins)
Re: Coinstarter.com (scam?)
by
mvl
on 26/07/2017, 18:11:16 UTC
There are numerous reasons to be very very careful:

  • anonymous domain registration
  • no contact data other than an email address and an unlisted phone number
  • Who are the people behind this site? All the information they provide us with is:
    Quote
    Behind CoinStarter is a team of Entrepreneurs, Economists, Philantropists and Software Engineers working together with the belief of creating something better.
    Basically that tells us exactly nothing about the team and they stay anonymous
  • What is there USP? The answer they give is rather meaningless and non-informative. It contains some nice buzzwords but in the end it tells us nothing(again):
    Quote
    Our platform uses artificial intelligence to create and deploy smart contracts onto the blockchain.
    We believe that combining AI with our talents overseeing every stage of the process, we can create the next generation of blockchain technology, that simplifies the blockchain and makes it viable for mass adoption by the public. It's like a drag and drop tool to power your blockchain.
  • They claim their tokens have a certain value, based on nothing but their claim. They can't be traded and no ICO price had been realized yet.
  • No whitepaper, no source code, no wireframes, no demo, not even screenshots of a product exist.
  • While fiddling with the website yesterday I found some hosting related data in a piece of json in a webpage. I scratched out some sensitive data but you can see it contains creditcard related data, including an email address. It also contains hosting plan related stuff and apparently the hosting options they picked are pretty cheap:
Code:
window.app_plan ='{  
   "display":"Professional",
   "no_branding":true,
   "can_add_capacity":true,
   "initial_capacity":2,
   "initial_storage":10,
   "api":true,
   "scheduler":true,
   "bulk":true,
   "collaboration":2,
   "logs":336,
   "version_control":720,
   "db_backup":720,
   "custom_domain":true,
   "ssl":true,
   "sub_apps":false,
   "import_export_csv":true,
   "seo":true,
   "pw_protection":true,
   "recurring_frequencies":[  
      "weekly",
      "monthly",
      "quarterly",
      "yearly"
   ],
   "monitoring":true,
   "monthly_price":69,
   "yearly_price":62,
   "support":"Email",
   "index":3,
   "id":"app_professional",
   "paying_user_id":"14906087*************09837812160",
   "paying_user_email":"j.henner****f@q*****c.de",
   "card_data":{  
      "id":"card_************",
      "object":"card",
      "address_city":null,
      "address_country":null,
      "address_line1":null,
      "address_line1_check":null,
      "address_line2":null,
      "address_state":null,
      "address_zip":null,
      "address_zip_check":null,
      "brand":"Visa",
      "country":"DE",
      "customer":"cus_AXA0sRmDsX7ivv",
      "cvc_check":"pass",
      "dynamic_last4":null,
      "exp_month":1,
      "exp_year":2021,
      "fingerprint":"************",
      "funding":"credit",
      "last4":"**64",
      "metadata":{  

      },
      "name":"j.henner****f@q*****c.de",
      "tokenization_method":null
   },
   "frequency":"month",
   "additional_capacity":0,
   "additional_storage":0,
   "add_ons_pricing":{  
      "capacity":{  
         "unit":1,
         "price":20
      },
      "storage":{  
         "unit":10,
         "price":10
      }
   }
}';
  • The site looks like someone took some effort to build it, but it is a point-and-click solution website builder (look at the source code)


To recap:
- anonymous domain registration
- anonymous team
- no product
- no whitepaper/demo/screenshots
- non-existing token with an attributed value based on thin air

So what do they have?
- a lure to tease our greedy brain

There are numerous signs that this is either fake or a scam and exactly zero indications that this is a bonafide project.

Better think twice before you sign up.