my advise to you guys is go an see the TV show "American Greed" . Ive watch every season and quickly you get to understand the forumula of a lot of scams. This follows a very similar pattern some of them very simple and ran for years. GOOGLE "tom Petters" thats just one of the top of my head. I consider myself an expert in scams. Ive read alot of the books from enron to books about worldcom. To the Bernie Madoff scam. This certainly has alot of the red flags you typically see.
For those who think "why wouldn't he just take the ICO money and run". Scammers don't think like that. The biggest pay day for nico is to unlock those 10mil coins and sell them. Even then let the project die off and start another one. Building the platform to a basic level with delayas will get him there.
OK, but answer this:
1. The only reason to steal 10's or 100's of millions (vs just a few million) is if you expect to be able to enjoy the money, which means living large with mansions, fancy cars, etc. Does someone like Nico think they can run a scam like this and escape prosecution and death? How does someone pull off a high profile scam like this and expect to get away with it and enjoy the spoils? As noted earlier, simply taking the ICO money and running is a lot more plausible as you can live a lifetime on a few million dollars and hide without attracting attention.
2. Why make such an aggressive initial beta schedule? Why not add a few more months to the schedule to buy more time?
3. Why lock the tokens up for a year if the intent is to cut an run?