eComelize Review: Former OneCoin dev goes rogue

12 Comments on “eComelize Review: Former OneCoin dev goes rogue”

#1

Gary G

Mar 1st, 2020 at 8:57 pm  Gary G(Q)

Hi – the attempt to clone companies refers to BCB Coinstrike Ltd which is Duncan’s company and holds the ByCoi blockchain as referred to in the true ByCoi WhitePaper.

The cloned company is BCB Coinstrike Holding Ltd incorporated on 7 Feb 2020. It appears that Jan-Eric subsequently fraudulently altered the WhitePaper to reflect this new company.

Also, Ovid.ie is a registered trademark at the Intellectual Property Office of Ireland – trademark number 261297. It is owned by Duncan’s company Dantir Dilela Ltd. Duncan has sent Jan Eric a cease and desist letter to stop this trademark infringement which has so far been ignored.

Not sure what their senior management team were thinking when they did all this?!!



#2

PassingBy

Mar 2nd, 2020 at 4:22 am  PassingBy(Q)

Let’s take a short look at what “Arthur’s Bycoi platform” actually is, and in what way Nyman could have “fraudulently altered the WhitePaper” (Gary G.), shall we?

Arthur says “the platform has not been developed”. But it’s unclear whether he means the blockchain part, or the shopping site they were supposed to be building (IOW, the aborted New DealShaker but with Bycoi instead of OneCoin).

As to the blockchain part, it turns out it’s not much of anything.

They use (or plan to use, whether they’re actually operational I cannot tell) software called MultiChain. This is an entirely legitimate piece of open-source software, a distant derivative of the Bitcoin core software.

It is meant to make things easy by allowing lots of aspects of the blockchain to be changed by simply setting parameters, without having to familiarize oneself with the underlying code.

This also allows blockchains quite different from the Bitcoin model to be created, such as entirely proprietary ones, where all tokens are mined by just one party.

While the Bycoi website acknowledges this, they do try to suggest they’re more than just another user of a piece of free software: on the bycoi.io site there’s a link simply labelled “Github”, clearly trying to suggest they’ve developed software of their own.

The Github repository that points to is in fact MultiChain’s one (it’s a company, not a community project).

As to how it works, it’s very simple from the user standpoint. Let’s say someone wanted to set up a blockchain called, oh, why not, OzCoin. They’d need a computer with a static IP address. After downloading the MultiChain software, and if they’re happy with the out-of-the-box default settings, they’d simply type:

multichain-util create ozcoin

Then, to start the new blockchain actually running, type:

multichaind ozcoin -daemon

This will create the genesis block and set the first node running. They’d now have a fully functional, one-node blockchain.

Adding more nodes is simply a matter of downloading the sofware on those machines and using the same multichaind -daemon command, but adding the IP address of an already-running node.

Their white paper explains how it works, and how it is different from other blockchain models, in very general, non-technical terms.

The Bycoi white paper is mostly a crude cut-and-paste job of that paper, with some added stuff which appears to be more copypasta, and a very few perfunctory insertions of their own name.

I say crude, because this results in something that is both pointless, and meaningless.

Pointless, because they could have just given a link to the Multichain website and left it at that. Meaningless because it lacks the information that would tell us how their blockchain is set up, IOW what parameter values they have chosen (unless I missed something vital when looking through the document).

One short example. MultiChain has a parameter called ‘mining diversity’. The white paper says this:

By restricting mining to a set of identifiable entities, MultiChain resolves the dilemma posed by private blockchains, in which one participant can monopolize the mining process. (…) MultiChain implements this scheme using a parameter called mining diversity, which is constrained by 0 ≤ mining diversity ≤ 1. (…) We suggest a value of 0.75 as a reasonable compromise.

So if you want a total monopoly (perfectly legitimate, depending on your purpose), with only one entity being able to “mine” (which in that case of course doesn’t require any special effort, they can create blocks at will), you set that value to 0.

The Bycoi people (if there are more than just Duncan Arthur) do not say what value they’ve set it at. They’ve just blindly copied the whole thing.

To summarize: that white paper tells us nothing at all about Bycoi. Just what one could “fraudulently alter” in what is just a heap of general copypasta from other freely available documents beats me.

What would be interesting to have someone explain, is: is there currently a functioning MultiChain-based blockchain on which their supposed coin already lives? If so, under what parameters has it been set up, how many nodes are there, who owns those, and who controls which nodes can join the network?

Without that information, it’s all smoke and mirrors, and we have absolutely no idea what it is Duncan Arthur and his former business partners are squabbling about.

It’s quite possible that there is absolutely nothing there, except a company name and a registered trademark. There certainly is no EU trademark on Bycoi.

Arthur does have it registered in Ireland. If that’s the only registration there is, everyone in the world is free to use that name for themselves, except in Ireland.

Using a freely available piece of software like MultiChain doesn’t create any intellectual property. So it’s completely unclear to me just what it is that he wants his former buddies to “cease and desist” from.



#3

Rocky

Mar 2nd, 2020 at 5:53 pm  Rocky(Q)

Dear PassingBy,

I’ve appreciated your comments before, thank you.

As regards trademarks, a trademark issued in any EU country is applicable in any EU country. A trademark registered anywhere can be enforced in terms of the WIPO process and is relatively easy through courts.

You might not be able to find a registered trademark because it takes a while to register as some countries are faster than others and are being processed. The general rule is that it belongs to whoever claimed it first and has the best show of legal ownership.

A first application is as enforceable as a registration. Also, in countries where the English derive law applies, the holder can claim “copyright” without any form of registration.

This doesn’t apply to the US of course but is enforceable in the EU as the Irish law enforces it as much as the UK.

Thank you



#4

Semjon

Mar 2nd, 2020 at 8:46 pm  Semjon(Q)

This might be somewhat far-fetched, but let’s put it out there, for the sake of entertainment, if not anything else.

When I watched Jan-Eric’s video featuring eComelize dashboard(youtu.be/_G5ZQxtxvjU?t=832), it seemed somehow familiar looking…

The reason being that a month or more earlier, I had stumbled upon an obscure MLM-Ponzi called GreenEst Network (greenest.network), which has a pretty similiar looking dashboard. Compare:
youtube.com/watch?v=xpEjmaIxRBo

(Or what do you think, doesn’t the GreenEst dashboard bear general resemblence to eComelize dashboard, indicating that it might have come from same “factory”? )

The context in which I stumbled upon GreenEst, was that in a Finnish crime-themed forum (which contains, among great noise/nonsense, occasionally intersting rumours/tips relating to unfolding crime stories), someone out-of-the-blue claimed (murha.info/rikosfoorumi/viewtopic.php?t=27938&start=1665#p993797) that Finnish expat crooks based in Spain’s “Costa del Sol”(Malaga-Fuengirola-Marbella-etc) region had set up this pyramid scheme, because their previous source of income had dried out — and it was this case which forced them change their careers:

theolivepress.es/spain-news/2020/01/17/marbella-based-finnish-expat-charged-among-53-others-and-pop-star-in-finlands-biggest-ever-drug-trafficking-case/

Now that we possibly have a bunch of crooks based in the same region, both building pyramid schemes, and sharing a similiar looking platform — one might wonder, is it just a pure coincidence? 😉



#5

PassingBy

Mar 3rd, 2020 at 3:12 am  PassingBy(Q)

@Rocky:

a trademark issued in any EU country is applicable in any EU country.

Nonsense. If that was true, there would never have been any need to create EU trademarks, and the EUIPO.

In the EU as elsewhere in the world, a national trademark is only valid in the country in which it’s registered (except for Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which have the one Benelux register).

Making all national trademarks valid across the EU would create insurmountable problems, because there are a huge number of identical or near-identical trademarks owned by different people in member states, predating the creation of EU trademarks. Those would all start to conflict.

The only thing a national trademark protects one against at the European level is someone else registering that same mark as an EU one.

A newly-created EU trademark must not conflict with any existing national one, and vice versa. But if all Arthur has is an Irish trademark on ‘Bycoi’, someone else is free to go to the trademark registry in, say, Sweden, and register it there.

A trademark registered anywhere can be enforced in terms of the WIPO process and is relatively easy through courts.

Again, nonsense. There are no worldwide trademarks. The WIPO cannot enforce anything.

All it offers is a service allowing someone to more easily register the same trademark in lots of countries, by making just one application at the WIPO, which then deals with the national registries, for those countries the applicant has chosen to register in.

They have to pay the application and registration fees in each one, of course (plus a fee for the WIPO itself), and there’s no guarantee it will be granted everywhere.

Someone might for instance already own the mark you want to register in one particular country (look up well-known cases like Budweiser or Nike for examples), or your mark may be such a common word in that country’s language it doesn’t qualify, or there may be some other national rule (for instance, in the UK the use of the word “Royal” in trademarks is restricted).

If you really think it is easy to enforce a trademark everywhere in the world on the basis of just one national registration, why on earth would anyone ever pay for more than registration in just one country, the one where it’s cheapest?

You might not be able to find a registered trademark because it takes a while to register as some countries are faster than others and are being processed.

I only looked at the Irish and the EUIPO register, for the word ‘Bycoi’. Duncan Arthur has that registered in Ireland, not at the EUIPO, and he doesn’t have an application pending for one at the EUIPO either.

I obviously have no idea if he has registrations, or pending applications, anywhere else, and I’m not going to go through all the world’s trademark registers to find out.

If he did get an EU one, any ones in individual member states would be superfluous.

Applications are as easily found as actual trademarks, because that is the stage where other people can object to the registration (usually, because it’s too similar to one they own – this is what happened when OneCoin tried to register ‘OneLife’).

So they are always public for a length of time between application and either being granted or turned down. Plus, they remain publicly available even if turned down.

The general rule is that it belongs to whoever claimed it first and has the best show of legal ownership.

The whole point of a registered trademark is that it creates that legal ownership.

Also, in countries where the English derive law applies, the holder can claim “copyright” without any form of registration.

This doesn’t apply to the US of course but is enforceable in the EU as the Irish law enforces it as much as the UK.

(a) Copyright is an entirely different form of intellectual property to trademarks.

(b) Where is copyright involved in the spat between Arthur and his former best buddies?

(c) Irish law stops at the Irish border, regardless of EU membership.

(d) Not that it really matters, but you’ve got it completely backwards.

Historically, Britain used a legal model of copyright which required registration with a government agency. If something was published without registration, it was automatically public domain.

Whoever registered something first, whether it was their work or not, owned the copyright. This model was exported to the colonies, including the future US.

It made copyright something that was limited to national jurisdictions. It also gave us the symbol ‘©’, from the stamp that was used as proof of registration.

Continental European countries mostly used a model where copyright arises automatically, at the moment someone creates a work. Whether or not it’s published is immaterial. Since no government agency is involved, this model can easily be extended across borders.

This was formally done in a treaty, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, signed in 1886.

Over the following century, more and more countries which had followed the British model ditched it to adopt the Berne Convention, including Britain itself.

The one major holdout was the US. It only finally made the change and joined the Berne Convention in 1989. (This has created a complicated legal status for many works published in the US prior to 1989, because the old US-only rules continue to apply to those.)

Since then, the basic rules are the same the world over, and there is no longer any need for copyright registration anywhere.

Although there are forms of, optional, official registration in many countries, which it is wise to use since they can help someone prove they are the rightful owner of a copyright, should a dispute arise.

In the US, registration also still carries additional legal benefits when a copyright violation occurs (simply put: you can claim more money from the violator).



#6

Rocky

Mar 3rd, 2020 at 3:58 am  Rocky(Q)

Passerby, you surprise me. As an armchair lawyer you clearly have no idea what you are talking about but have an amazing capacity to search Wikipedia.

Do you understand what the EU is? If you took a regionally sucessful brand like Hesburger and tried to open something that looked like it in a place where it had never been heard of, used their menu or something that confused someone into thinking they were in a Hesburger, in say the Shetland Islands, part of the EU, how far do you think you would get?

The holder of the copyright can sue in any part of the EU.

Why is there is there an EU copyright agency? For the same reason there is an EU medicine authority, banking authority, etc, to standardise everything and make 27 nation states apply the same thing and respect the others’ authority. You can’t just take what belongs to someone else.

Copyright and Trademarks are species of intellectual property law. Your history of what Britain may or may not have done in her “colonies” – tell an Aussie he comes from a colony, is irrelevant. IP belongs to you or it doesn’t.

With your logic a trademark needs to be registered in all 195 countries there are. You might have noticed, probably not, that nation states enforce each other’s rules when their rules match.

That is why we have things like extradition, something else for you to look up on Wikipedia.

Protecting the people who come up with things and their ideas is very much in the interests of everyone. Next you want to look up patents. Those are ideas, you’ll find, where inventions of physical things or processes are protected.

If I invent someothing, do I need 195 patents? WIPO exists because of the same reasons the the WTO exists. What case law can you produce of a country allowing someone to appropriate intellectual property can you produce? Probably very little from the civilised world.

I suggest we all crowd fund you to go and start a rip-off McDonald’s in Kinshasa



#7

Garden

Mar 3rd, 2020 at 6:20 am  Garden(Q)

Rocky, in #3 you have erroneously claimed that

As regards trademarks, a trademark issued in any EU country is applicable in any EU country.

A trademark registered anywhere can be enforced in terms of the WIPO process and is relatively easy through courts.

In EU, you have three options:

a) registering the trademark at national level with the corresponding national office, yielding trademark protection only in that country

b) registering the trademark with the Benelux BOIP for protection in the three countries of Benelux

c) registering the trademark with EUIPO for protection in all EU countries

Furthermore, there are 34 classes of goods and 11 classes of services according to the Nice Classification and your trademark protection is valid for 10 years only for the classes of goods and services registered (and paid for).

Your Hesburger enjoys EU-wide protection because the owners registered a EU-wide trademark in 2005 (euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/004444675) for Nice classes 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 42 and 43. If they decided to only register the trademark in selected EU countries instead, there would be no protection outside of them.



#8

Rocky

Mar 3rd, 2020 at 7:09 am  Rocky(Q)

Thanks Garden. Again, why are we having this discussion? It belongs to you or it doesn’t, you can enforce if it belongs to you. That’s what the EU is.

Arthur can sue someone in Ireland and the service will be just as valid as if the person is in Bulgaria, or anywhere.

Let’s talk about more important things. Hesburger is kind of like McD’s but not really, sort of like Burger King, but puts mayonaise on everything, and uses more bacon.



#9

Semjon

Mar 12th, 2020 at 6:50 pm  Semjon(Q)

Duncan Arthur is now continuing the Bycoi project under the banner of “Unica coin”.

See: coincorner.se/ByCoi-Newsfeed

I don’t know who wrote this, but this text from that feed contains some interesting allegations regarding OneCoin leaders:

WHAT WAS PLANNED IF KONSTANTIN WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ARRESTED.

BACKGROUND
Konstantin Ignatov (KI) had ordered Mr. Duncan Arthur (DA) to produce a new e-commerce platform, as he found the existing Dealshaker (he thought) was of very poor quality and was not reliable.

OneLife had contracted Jan-Eric Nyman (JEN) to work on the New Dealshaker and DA to manage it. KI had a very good relationship with DA, which of-course upset certain staff in OLN office in Sofia and some leaders.

KI was not happy with the development of OLN and all the power struggle among the leaders. KI was of the same perception as his sister Ruja, that OLN was a necessary evil.

KI then ordered DA to change the name of New Dealshaker to OVID® and keep the trademark private, develop it outside OLN and with no funds from OC/OLN.

KI had planned on the 12th of March to inform the staff and members that he is selling the Network, closing the Forex project and have the Sofia being run under OVID® management. KI wanted to give all OLN members, to at least get, their invested money back. KI believed OC would never survive.

KI and DA were arrested in USA on the 6th of March and KI was accused of wire fraud conspiracy. DA was released after long interrogations and could went back.

Why they were arrested is questionable, but many suspect a conspiracy by some power-hungry leaders and office employees.

DA went direct to Sofia and wanted answers from Veselina Valkova (VV) on many questions the US authorities had put forward to him. DA was just told to leave the office and never contact again.

Quickly Simon Lee was joining VV, who later betrayed Simon and quit and as per Simon and “King”, left the company with some 30+++ million Euros together with Habib Zahid (HZ) and for security they destroyed the complete IT system, but of-course they copied everything before, to start a new life in Dubai and a new OC/OLN like company. Nice people.

DA then continued to let Jan-Eric Nyman (JEN) develop the IT system for OVID®, started a new coin, and with the recommendations of a National Bank got an exchange license.

DA’s health was not perfect, and JEN saw his chance.

He directed all funds to his own company bank account and started to change all passwords etc. DA noticed this and everything was reported to the UK Police and to the Fraud department.
Also, the exchange license was withdrawn from the BCB Exchange and an investigation has been started by Estonian authorities into fraudulent trading activities.

Interesting to notice is that after DA had some IT specialist looking into the existing IT platforms, he was informed that the BCB exchange was an OTC exchange (over the counter) and completely manipulated to keep the price balanced.

The Ovid e-commerce platform does not work and is of very amateurish quality. A lot was just copied from SiteTalk (which was built by JEN) and OneCoin.

It was estimated that the price tag was far below 100.000 Euro, so where did the other hundreds of thousands of Euro go???? ONLY Jan-Eric Nyman knows!

(Text stumbled upon)



#10

PassingBy

Mar 12th, 2020 at 7:59 pm  PassingBy(Q)

Why they were arrested is questionable, but many suspect a conspiracy by some power-hungry leaders and office employees.

What total bollocks. The first sealed indictment against Ruja was filed in October 2017. Konstantin, the man who had taken over as the public face of the business, was obviuously a prime target of the continuing investigation, and on an FBI watchlist.

The idea that his arrest in March 2019 involved a conspiracy by anyone inside OC is totally ludicrous. Konstantin showed he’s an idiot (or, to quote his own lawyer, a lunkhead) by travelling to the US, that’s all.

Whoever wrote this still seems to be in denial that OC was a criminal scam from the start, as is also shown by:

DA then continued to let Jan-Eric Nyman (JEN) develop the IT system for OVID®, started a new coin, and with the recommendations of a National Bank got an exchange license.

Yeah, right, a “National Bank” was cooperating with some obscure guy setting up an OC clone. Sheesh.



#11

LORD

Mar 12th, 2020 at 8:30 pm  LORD(Q)

My bet would be Andreas Åhlin,

He is a usefull idiot (and also the “creator of coincorner”) (much like Igor Krnic) but whit the charisma of a gardenslug, so he will newer be a “rich” ponzipimp, but mimcs all the other properties of one…

Why? how knows, the only “good” aspect of being a scammers is being a filthy rich one….



#12

OCexStaff

Mar 13th, 2020 at 1:27 am  OCexStaff(Q)

good story but far away from the truth :}