I'm only a few days in to the experiment I'm doing to put $1,000 towards trying to follow the McAfee recommendations. This is turning out to be more difficult than I thought.
First of all, the coin pumps seem to be pretty legit pumps. Legit in the sense that they work, but I'm not convinced that they're good for the economy. McAfee says they're recommendations that he believes in for various reasons unrelated to pumping + dumping, but I'm not feeling right with it so far. There's a "pump & dump" industrial complex developing in this space and that's not good. More on that another day.
Let's look at McAfee's first "ICO of the Week," BEZOP.IO, the "next Amazon." This company is a shitshow. I bought my .5 ETH of shares, and when I set up my account, the company confirmed it by sending me my user name and password by email, in clear text! For anyone with any experience in tech, that's a really bad sign. Very sloppy.
Now, BEZOP is spamming me with really poorly written emails. The first was an explanation for various mishaps and contained numerous spelling, grammar and style errors. There are clearly native English speakers at the company but these communications are going out with no review. A second spam email that BEZOP sent today doesn't have the same grammatical errors as the first, but it's addressed to "Dear [name]" and instructs users to go through a ridiculous login/logout process and says at the end to "Pick Your Favorite Crypto and donate!"
WTF. donate? Not exactly a term I'd want to see when making an investment. These are not donations.
This is the most redic. The use of the word "donate" got my interest. I'm not doing any due diligence on these ICOs (because the point of this is to see if a Whale like McAfee can do that) and what a mistake that is. But now that I know that Bezop is seeing my investment as a "donation," I thought I'd look up the terms and see what they mean. Here's a screenshot of their terms of service. This is really something.
They have no terms! That language is basic dummy text out of a box. Wow. My experiment is definitely fascinating. It's obviously a difficult thing for me to recommend to anyone to take on, based on what I'm seeing. I'll ride this through and keep you informed.
More than a test case for profit, I'm getting the sense that McAfee is providing an example case for the need for consumer protection.