I agree and have used many of these more established pools with success.  However, it sounds like some of these pools have even fallen victim to similar sophisticated scams based on some feedback I'm getting after posting this... Wild Wild West at the moment.

If you've played around much in the well known Discord ICO pool groups you'll see that discounts / bonuses are not uncommon and many allocations are lost due to someone leaking details... so the voice chat / secrecy and bonuses were not really a tipoff.

I still have a few of the ppl from their scam group showing-up in my discord friends list and it looks like they are expectedly switching all of the usernames (Vee is now 'Touka').  My assumption is the basic structure of the scam will remain the same...

A few more details...

Confirmed myself and another person were scammed concurrently by this group... even though the Discord server name and users were all named the same, myself and the other person scammed were never actually on the same server.

Sucks - add me on telegram {removed} as I have a few questions for you..

I'll take this as a lesson learned. I knew it could be a scam and I was taking a risk, but like I said... first time I've heard of anything this sophisticated (I've searched the interwebs and no mention of a similar scam being run)

I'm fairly cautious and this is the first time I've been scammed in my many years of crypto trading... They are good.

Heads-up so others don't get scammed.  I'm fairly active in a number of Discord ICO groups that pool via prima block and I often post my list of 'hidden gem' ICOs that I find... Story below...

Recently, I had a person reach out to me and ask me to join their team as a researcher.  They were a small pool of ~20 users and the group was supposedly able to negotiate private investor deals with ICOs.  It started with a discord voice interview where 3 members of their team (all Americans based on accents) interviewed me for ~30 minutes before accepting me as a researcher...

I started researching projects and gave them my analysis on a few. Their security was fairly tight and hardly anything was written down in channels - instead most of the communication was done either via DM or voice chat.  Occasionally they would gather all of the investors into a voice chat, the leader of the group "William," go over details of the private sale along with minimum ETH contribution.  We would all pledge how much ETH we wanted to contribute and then he would send a private address, we send the ETH, and then things would go quiet for a week before this cycle continued.

The pools involved ~20 ppl and the majority of the other investors would engage in some light conversation in the chat and there were even a few girls with valley girl accents.  I did a small contribution in the first pool and the second pool required a much higher minimum so I initially got cold feet... but William had me chat to a few members etc. and everything seemed on the up and up although I told him that I wouldn't be participating in any more pools until I received coins just to make sure everything was legit...  Heck, some of the ppl I chatted to in the channel even had twitter profiles...

We chatted for a few days and everything seemed cool... but then I was suddenly removed from the server / channels and blocked so its clear it was a scam. Things like the twitter profiles were also deleted.

Below is info on the group / users just in case:
Server Name: "CE Pooling"
Main User running the Scam: "William#0148"
Other Admin users: "Felix O#8508" and "Send#4941" ("Josh")
Other users participating in pool that were obviously in on the scam:
- henryjohevas2#1702
- Nathaniel87#9656
- Crypto_Jon#7670
- Gary#8125
- Laura#6374
- Scott Rotman#9948 (found this guys real linkedin w/ same pic as used on discord and emailed him a few times with no reply.. assume it was someone faking his identity)
- Vee (didn't capture full username) - she had a real twitter @NickiSenpai on her profile.  She had me add her bf's twitter which was @spenny42_ which had her twitter name in their profile (@spenny42_ is now deleted and @nickisenpai is private)
- Moe (didn't capture full username)
- Crypto King (didn't capture full username)
- Sebastian (didn't capture full username)
- Sharmarke (didn't capture full username)
- NathanielSmith87 (didn't capture full username)
- Hedgefund Alex (didn't capture full username)

I knew I was taking a risk... but searched everywhere and didn't find anyone mentioning a similar scam.  Also, as you can see they went to a lot of effort to pull off this scam (I also messaged with the guy and took up a lot of his time trying to validate if they were legit or not).

A few pics of the group:
- Channels in group (you can see mostly voice) https://ibb.co/nzcNQ8
- Admins of Group https://ibb.co/iW4fCo
- Members of Group https://ibb.co/dq1hQ8

Be careful out there ;-)

I agree on XLM. I'm also a big fan of SMART.

Good info! Thanks :-)

I've helped a lot of friends get out of the irrational investor mode... i teach them to take split trades across 10+ trades at minimum, convert part of gains into cash until they cash out their principle, showing the information on past crises, and get their longterm coins into hardware wallets so its hard to make quick rash decisions.... it's worked quite well to make them rational.

Thanks - bookmarked!

I'm not going to send 0.1 btc because I'm no fool... but happy to share my social media / phone number with you and if I crack it share it 50/50

You need to make a choice - You either cut it off and change-up your daily routine or you decide your willing to risk / strain your friendships...

Personally, no relationship is worth destroying multiple friendships and whoever I marry needs to be able to gel/be friends with my circle of friends as well (important dynamic).

Wish you the best..

I would use the airdrops for masternode coins to start doing masternodes... which will generate you monthly income which you can use to by more master nodes until you get target monthly goal or sell it all to take over someone's existing profitable online business.

I'm surprised by how many exist as well. I know THC is planning on masternodes, but that their develops have been really bad hitting self imposed roadmap targets and even worse at communication (check out their reddit thread).

Do any other the other coins have teams have strong community outreach and any others planning on masternodes?

Looks interesting - thanks

It's just someone shaking the tree to drop weak hands ;-) It's working... I'm noticing many people sell off their crypto in a panic (I tell them not to....)

Taking a break is healthy :-)

I found masternodes make for a healthier hobby.... i don't constantly watch the price and just have push notifications if a server goes down. 

Thanks for clarifying! It had been several years since I logged in... so hard to remember.  I must have mostly been a browser :-)

The more FUD the more it validates crypto in my opinion... I look forward to when we have full decentralization via the entire stack so that a government 'ban' has even less meaning

bump? :-P

I did send an email to the address in the pic 3 days ago.. no response.