Quote from: JHR1963 on January 30, 2018, 09:28:15 AM

Nice find, but it proves nothing. It is just an easy trick to get posts behind your name and get some status on bitcointalk. Just post in every ico thread some basic meaningless questions.

Actually I did further digging, and from just TWO pages of this ANN thread I found 19 users ALL commenting the same things, on the same 15 ICO's. By extrapolation, there could be HUNDREDS of fake accounts exploiting bitcointalk.org! This is huge. I've messaged the admin and I'm waiting for a response. The usernames in question are: Captain_Jack_Sparrow, recnapon, Mutanca, FranzyFox, macolde, Chermander, Captain_Killer, gastlator, Varsity_Blues, Beahelm, Moto_angel, Anayajurus, Grinin, Ttexav, Glen Thompson, BearuBear, Tator, Monkey_Thinker... I encourage you to check their post histories yourselves if you don't believe me.

Also, a further update and another smoking gun! I was approached via Telegram by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I will post sections of the transcript here:

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I read your post on bitcointalk.org about symmetry fund (that it is a scam). I'm not registered on bitcointalk so I decided to write you here.

I checked people that you noted in your post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2480514.msg29199461#msg29199461 . I could read Russian so I can tell you that post in Russian were made in "life talks" (topics with subject like "What is your favorite sport", "Do you like soccer", "How to quit smoking" and etc). All these people have posts in the same topics. So in my opinion they were created by one person and post in Russian are needed only to create a more real look of these accounts.

I also wanted to say that symmetry github code is quite poor. Their dividends controller had newbie mistakes (and I suppose still have) and what is more interesting it just cant check if you bought tokens on round one or round two (it is important because these rounds was supposed to have different service fee).

I asked them to elaborate on the code issues:

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The code I was talking about could be found here https://github.com/symmetryfund/symmetry/blob/master/DividendManager.sol

It is official symm github repository and Andrew gave link to it in a Telegram common chat. DividendManager.sol was supposed to handle dividends distribution. I'm a programmer so I could read programs code. And I was interested how they solve problem of determining token round (they have to check some how in witch round token was created and devide holder tokens into two groups with different service fee). So I opened DividendManager.sol and found nothing about it. The only thing that is checked by thier code (lines 37-61) is the amount of SYMM tokens. If it is less than 1000 then service fee is 15% if it is more than 1000 then service fee is 7.5% (lines 45-51). And line 48 was fixed. Now it is:

} else if (token.balanceOf(addr) >= 1000E6) {

but 8 days ago it was

} else if (token.balanceOf(addr) > 1000E6) {

So 8 days ago there was a newbie mistake: in case you have 1000 SYMM you won't get divident at all because of error in code (there was now dividends calculation for this case).

And I might be wrong but there could be an error with initializing dividends_before_commision and dividends_after_commision variables.

Anyway this could doesn't check when SYMM tokens were bought (doesn't check round). It just check the amount of SYMMs holded. And all this code looks like it was not tested. Now it seems that they published it just to look more legit.

TL;DR: There is no code to check which round of the ICO tokens were purchased in - dividend calculation is based purely on amount of tokens held.

I have some programming experience, and to me it looks like the dividends_before_commision and dividends_after_commision (besides being spelled incorrectly) are not being initialised properly - they are initialised in the 'if' part of an if/else statement (type declared as uint256) but not initialised in the 'else' block (only an assignation). Definitely agree that it looks like this code has not been tested at all and is probably just there for show.

Back to the topic of the fake/scam accounts for now, our anonymous friend also had this to say:

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May be they were not created by symmetry scamers. It could be another team that handle all these bots and provide kind of advertisement services. I mean you pay them to get post on forum to make a better look of your project. With more post in a topic it may seemed that more people are interested in a project.
It is very common in Russian social media so I assume that someone just make same promotion business on bitcointalk and scamers just buy post from them.

Makes me think of all the reports of russian manipulation of the US election - we know it happens, is this just another example? I think that is likely.

So, to recap:

1st smoking gun - funds being transferred from ICO wallet to scammer wallet
2nd smoking gun - code containing basic errors, and not being able to calculate the dividend payout correctly as per symmetry fund's website
3rd smoking gun - this ICO is either part of a coordinated group of scams run by a single group, or has engaged the services of social media manipulators to artificially promote and lend legitimacy to their ICO.