DDK attempts to justify pump and dump Ponzi shitcoin
Over the last 48 hours DDK has been spamming their supposed rebuttal to our December 10th review in various places.
Written from the frankly insulting perspective that nobody is capable of understanding their simple business model, DDKoin alleges our review contains “false allegations” and an “inaccurate representation” of their products (of which they have none).
Let’s get into it.
Before we proceed, a recap of DDK’s business model;
As per our published review, DDK sells pre-generated DDKoin points to gullible investors.
Gullible investors park invested DDKoin points with DDK, in exchange for more DDKoin points (staking).
Through an internal exchange, DDK affiliates can realize a return – as long as the company is willing to pay them with previously invested funds or other gullible investors buy their DDKoin points.
DDKoin itself is an ERC-20 shitcoin that holds no value or purpose outside of the DDK investment scheme itself.
Throw in an MLM compensation plan that pays on DDKoin parked with the company by recruited affiliates, and that’s literally all there is to it.
DDK’s review rebuttal begins with the company claiming it is “more than happy to provide our corporate address”, but then failing to do so.
In our review we surmised DDK was being run out of Malaysia. This is based on the fact that DDK’s owners, Azrainuddin Zainal (aka Arai Ezzra) and Datin Nur Ezdiani Baharoddin, reside in Malaysia.
The reason DDK don’t want to publicly acknowledge this is because the company is not registered with the Bank of Malaysia.
At the time of publication, Alexa pegs just over a quarter of traffic to the DDK website as originating from Malaysia.
Thus it follows DDK is primarily soliciting investment in DDKoin from within Malaysia itself.
As per Malaysian law, conducting money changing and remittance business activities without a license attracts a fine of up to RM5 million and/or a ten-year prison sentence.
This is why DDK pretends they operate out of Singapore through shell companies.
DDK’s rebuttal continues with a mighty waffle about how the technology behind their DDKoin shitcoin is legitimate.
I don’t believe we ever questioned the technology behind ERC-20 shitcoins, so I’m not going to bother addressing this.
Suffice to say that anyone can set up an ERC-20 shitcoin token of their own in about five minutes.
Next up, DDK claims it’s not an MLM company.
DDK is NOT a multi-level marketing crypto ponzi, DDK is a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) based technology that practices unique voting system to achieve consensus, blahblahblah cryptocurrency jargon.
To be clear: DDK is very much an MLM company.
Through a unilevel compensation plan, the company pays residual commissions on parked DDKoin by downline affiliates.
For the purpose of correctly identifying DDK as an MLM company, whatever is attached to its MLM compensation plan is irrelevant.
For boiling down DDK’s scheme into its most simplest form, BehindMLM earned the company’s scorn.
Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair, you should take responsibility for the accuracy of your work by verifying and not oversimplifying information before publishing it.
We highly question your portal’s credibility and capability as a trustworthy news outlet and as these ethics were simply ignored.
While spewing cryptocurrency jargon serves the interest of scammers trying to wow potential investors, here at BehindMLM we’re all about simplicity.
When you read one of our reviews you won’t get any fluff, just the facts.
Unfortunately for scams such as DDK, this is counter-productive to their goal. It is of course much harder to pull the wool over an educated mark than one you confuse by bombarding them with your “tech”.
DDK also took objection to our dismissal of DNC as the “dropped” shitcoin that preceeded DDKoin.
DDK’s first attempt to scam people saw it launch DinarCoin (DNC) in late 2015.
DNC was of course just another ERC-20 shitcoin. It pumped and dumped before DDK abandoned it to reboot with DDKoin.
DDK claims DNC is still alive and well, as evidenced by provided transaction data.
Take a look at the supplied DNC transaction data though, and you’ll see the last transactions were over ten days ago for token amounts.
Indeed over the last month there have been only twelve DNC token related transactions.
DDK claim they “CONVERTED AND MIGRATED” DNC to DDKoin. Which, let’s be honest, is just another way of saying they abanoned DNC for DDKoin.
DDK seems to have a problem with our verbiage as opposed to the facts.
After some more waffling on about their shitcoin tech, DDK brings up a legal opinion from some Singaporean law firm.
I’m not going to waste my time with this because
- DDK is operated out of Malaysia;
- DDK is not registered to offer securities in Malaysia; and
- offering unregistered securities in Malaysia is illegal.
Point six of DDK’s rebuttal disputes the fact that the company and its owners are collecting money from affiliates.
This is yet again a VERY SERIOUS FALSE ALLEGATION, that you simply published without any legal backing.
As we are moving towards 100% decentralized system and open source project, we have allocated pre-mined allocation of 1.7 million token of DDKoins for the stakeholders and thus, it is very clear that you failed to understand the concept of cryptocurrency project, where through pre-mined allocations, stakeholders are holding their own real valuable asset that they are able to stake through our DPOS technology to receive rewards as per clearly stated in our whitepaper.
Yeah, it’s not that I don’t get the concept of staking. It’s that DDK is very much accepting real money for initial acquisition of DDKoin by affiliates.
DDKoin is not publicly tradeable, so the only way to initially acquire it is from the company itself or by purchasing it from another DDK affiliate looking to cash out.
Once again DDK unsuccessfully tries to hide the facts behind tech jargon waffle.
And that continues, with the company going on about having ‘been very transparent on the progress and development of DDK platform to our community and the information is also available within our public domain, just a few clicks away‘ blahblahblah.
Personally I don’t have a problem with the tech behind ERC-20 shitcoins. It’s proven itself to be highly effective in separating gullible idiots from their money through utilization by hundreds of MLM cryptocurrency scams.
Our review however took issue at DDK operating a Ponzi pump and dump token shitcoin MLM opportunity, which ultimately the company failed to address.
Try harder guys. Might be easy pickings in south-east Asia but here you’ll have to do a lot better than “but muh tech!”
Update 16th April 2019 – As of April 2019 DDKoin has removed their blog post criticizing BehindMLM’s DDKoin review.
We had no hand in the removal and we’re not sure why the blog post was taken down.
The “but our lawyers said” card can always be debunked by pointing out that 50% of lawyers are always wrong. If any question of fact goes to court, then both sides get a lawyer and they can’t both be right.
Forget for a moment that, as Oz said, the lawyer’s letter is irrelevant as it pertains to the legality of the scheme in Singapore and Oz was commenting on its legality in Malaysia:
…in this case DDK’s lawyers are in the 50% of lawyers who are wrong because their opinion rests entirely on the idea that there is no investment activity attached to DDK whatsoever, and DDK users are just trading tokens between themselves for real money for the fun of it.
While it may be true that this does not technically constitute the equivalent of an unregulated security in Singapore, it does constitute a pump and dump scheme.
If someone tries to justify some scheme to you on the basis of “our lawyers said”, there is a high risk you are being conned. If they justify it on the basis of actual facts and the laws/regulations as they actually stand, that’s totally different.
And you should pay your own lawyer to analyse the facts and confirm your understanding is correct. The opinion of the scheme’s lawyer is totally worthless to you as they are paid by the people who want you to give them money.
If you get arrested for something you didn’t do, you don’t just plead guilty on the advice of the prosecutor on the grounds that he’s a lawyer so he must know what he’s talking about. You need a lawyer who is on your side.
Likewise if you are a party to a financial transaction you don’t take advice from the lawyer on the other side.
That last line “Might be easy pickings in south-east Asia but here you’ll have to do a lot better than “but muh tech!” sounds unintentionally like an insult to the SEA people.
Anyways, it’s not because of the location but more on their target demographics.
From what I’ve read and studied on their project, it seems that a very large portion of their users are slightly older people who I believe don’t really know much about ‘the tech’ but only care about the promised return and how easy it is to make money with DDK.
Wasn’t meant as an insult but more of a blunt fact.
You only need look at the sheer amount of MLM crypto scams coming out of Asia. People there are swallowing all sorts of Ponzi tech-hype bullshit en masse.
Not that it’s not happening elsewhere in the world, it just feels like most MLM crypto scams have origins in SEA.