I believe - but not 100% sure - that if a Telegram channel is deleted by its owners, then anyone else is free to register a channel with the same name. Read up a few pages, I raised this point and somebody here said that they created the channel to prevent further people falling victim.

This is a scam ICO. go back to page 11 of this thread, and read from there until the end. The money is already gone, don't invest.

Yes, but notice how it is just a generic crypto article and not anything to do with SYMM? The twitter account is probably managed by the same manipulation business that they have hired. If they ARE active on twitter then why haven't they responded to any of these allegations instead of reposting meaningless drivel?

Good news, I've managed to have SYMM delisted from several ICO report pages. I'm currently working on having the main website taken down.

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:


I asked them to elaborate on the code issues:

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:
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.
  

Also, beware all the people making comments like this:

I just checked three at random and noticed some peculiarities: identical merit, identical activity. Almost identical number of posts. Accounts all created within hours of each other. If you look at their recent posts you will see they are all commenting virtually the same thing on the same ICO threads, minutes apart:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1384493;sa=showPosts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1383858;sa=showPosts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1384310;sa=showPosts

I suspect that these accounts (and probably others) are associated with the scammers involved with Symmetry Fund... and any other ICO's that they mention in their post list I would be very wary of (Mobilink, Pecunio, GRON, Saifu, OKO, Setcoin, Lucyd, Freelancer, Styras, Chatello, Dogezer, AMP, HeavenCoin, and more... several posts are in russian so i can't read them all.

Cheers

Hi all, just another quick update, I received a reply from the other conference organiser that I emailed, Blockchain West:

Suspected that might be the case after I posted, so if a channel gets deleted anyone can register one with the same name?


Interesting, and valid point... although the comments suggest that address has been associated with phishing scams. I haven't contributed to the ICO myself, but is it possible that the contribution system has been compromised by a hacker?

Definitely not part of the team - SYMM has just been on my radar and I was planning to invest because it looked promising. Just trying to do due diligence and clear up some points. We're on the same team.

Yeah, he's not listed, so I emailed them directly at organizer@bitcoinsuperconference.com to ask, and got a reply from a Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Marketing confirming his attendance.

Haha... I think there's a slight difference with your site! But I see your point, it's probably easy enough to register a company if you're a scammer.

Good catch, thanks for pointing that out.

^ Very good idea. I'm sure a managed fund style of token isn't going to trade at much of a premium over its NAV.

Thanks for the replies everyone. Some good counter-arguments. The company/team directly involved could certainly be scammers, but I also wonder if they might be innocent and have been hacked somehow? It's certainly worrying that they haven't addressed these allegations directly and have shut down their communication channels instead of tackling the situation head-on or releasing a press statement though.

I think I will wait until it hits an exchange (if that ever happens).

Hi all, are we sure this is a scam and not just FUD? There's a few things I find really weird, i.e.:

• Official website's telegram link now directs to a group called "symmetryfund is a SCAM !!!!!" ... seriously? This makes me think it's a salty community manager who has either hacked or had control of the account and has had a falling out. Scammers are not batsh*t crazy and wouldn't advertise the fact that they're scammers.
• Many of the points listed in the original post seem very nitpicky, i.e. registering a website using an anonymisation service is quite common. And the naming of jpegs? who cares?
• The linked medium article now returns a page saying 'suspended'
• I reached out to the organisers for the upcoming conferences mentioned on their site, and have so far had one reply confirming Vlad Savochkin as a speaker at Bitcoin Super Conference
• The linked business search at http://web.caymanchamber.ky/directory/results.aspx?Keywords=symmetry+fund is for the Chamber of Commerce, and is a local business DIRECTORY. not a REGISTRY. I created a free account on the Cayman Islands General Registry (www.ciregistry.gov.ky), and searched for "SYMM LTD" which is the entity mentioned in Symmetry Fund's Terms of Service (accessible through the website's footer). There is a result, but I can't get full details without paying $40 (someone else is more than welcome to though!)
• Andrew Lewin DOES clearly exist - and he was previously registered under the UK's Financial Services Register (https://register.fca.org.uk/ShPo_IndividualDetailsPage?id=003b000000LVd4uAAD). However, he is marked as 'Inactive' - but that could just be explained by a geographic relocation

All that in mind though, I do find the total radio silence from Symmetry Fund on their other social media channels a bit disturbing - but perhaps these channels are all under the control of the same malicious actor?

Has anyone else done any further digging? I personally don't feel like there's enough evidence to conclusively call this as a scam either way yet. I feel like most of the original claims made by rjinsent can be refuted (or ignored) as above.