Another blackeye
The tragedy of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain is that some really good people are or were working on it. There are some great ideas and applications.
Yet at some point in the frenzy, they were overrun by scammers, marketers and fraudsters. The ICO mania brought in the world's worst people.
One of them was Shaun MacDonald, who raised $31 million to create a crypto version of the Bloomberg Terminal. It's an easy sell. It would have been a centralized, top-notch crypto platform with all the functionality for trading professionals.
They had some flashy marketing and as recently as May, TechCrunch was producing a flashy video about it with working prototypes.
It was a scam.
An epic scam. Shaun MacDonald didn't even exist. He was a convicted fraudster named Boaz Manor who had been given a four-year prison sentence for misappropriating $106 million from a hedge fund.
One of the investors was Ran Neu-Ner who was a regular on CNBC's Power Lunch and reportedly lost $1.2 million (he says it was 'north of $300,000).
As usual, the sub-Reddit is a tragedy:
"All the money is gone. I was told they spent it before the ICO was over. Some people were paid a million dollars for less than 3 months work. The whole team quit. Theres no product, now money, no team. Go homeguys its over," one user writes.
