Originally posted on Medium network but moved to the blockchain for obvious reasons.
One laughable comment often made by members of the blockchain ecosystem is that there are bad actors in all business sectors. No doubt these comments are put out by the bad actors in the blockchain sector.
Other sectors are highly regulated and offenders shipped off to Siberia but in blockchain bad actors believe they are immune from prosecution. Tighter regulatory control across the globe is helping to clean up the sector but there’s a long way to go.
The scams in the blockchain sector are wide and varied. Many are just a modification of scams in other sectors but the great decentralised revolution brings about a whole host of additional scams. Around 12 months ago well known author, cryptomedication, provided the evidence that leading influencers in the sector were involved in pump and dump schemes.
When a blockchain scam is exposed the guilty parties go to great lengths to cover up the issue and try to intimidate authors to remove the evidence of their guilt. For a leading blockchain this can involve hundreds of individuals working as a team to discredit the author. The team includes heavy bag holders, project employees, P-Rep candidates for DPOS chains, moon boys, and the general community that are more interested in their personal wealth than they are in blockchain adoption.
This article was recently published online regarding bad actors within the wider ICON team and as usual the team tried valiantly to discredit the author. The evidence provided in the article and the follow up comments is quite clear. Even after the article was published the ICON Foundation released this article.
The article released by the ICON Foundation contains at least one sentence that is factually incorrect. It reads “ In addition, the TX Challenge has successfully brought 240+ blockchain-based services on the ICON network.” The figure of “240+” comes from an online dashboard published by ICON which shows 246 teams agreed to stress test the network in return for ICX tokens. The ICON blockchain confirms this to be an outright lie, presumably as an attempt to pump the price of ICX for the team.
Before any ICX tokens were paid to the stress testing teams ICON was notified by several members of the ICON community that they were in breach of contract. One of the terms agreed between ICON and the stress testers was that a stress testing team could only be contracted once to carry out the work. This was to ensure that any one contractor could not receive more than 12,000 of the 600,000 ICX made available by the ICON Foundation.
ICX tokens were paid to the contractors on a weekly basis despite the breach of contract by ICON. As per the ICON blockchain, two contractors received over 216,000 ICX in total. ICON finally disqualified 87 contractors and dozens more were not eligible for tokens as per the terms of the contract. Disqualification was completed BEFORE they published their article linked above. This confirms the 240+ is false marketing put out by the Foundation.
Furthermore once they had published their article they stopped paying the contractors for work already completed. The blockchain address used by ICON to pay the contractors is shown below and confirms contractors remain unpaid to this date.
The final part week of stress testing was never paid despite ICON being made aware 4 weeks earlier that they were in breach of contract. The contractors I worked with were eligible for the maximum 12,000 ICX but 3 weeks after the work was completed the Foundation has only paid 4,200 ICX. ICON team member, Ricky Dodds, confirmed in his June 13th AMA session that “a number [of contractors] have been disqualified thus far and more could be disqualified going forward.” Yet almost a month later they haven’t been able to complete the simple task of working out which contractors they owe ICX tokens to.
We have identified several other issues that are being covered up by the ICON team in their heavily censored channels. If you want to read uncensored news about ICON check out the independent Telegram group at https://t.me/icon_icx
