OneCoin to exclude Chinese investors from ICO, no refunds?
Earlier this week the Chinese government announced it was banning Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).
The move is understandable as, while some might be legit, by and large cryptocurrency ICOs were and continue to be a front for financial fraud.
Those running them make promises based on nothing and gullible investors hand over their money (pumping the ICO).
What ultimately happens is those running the ICO cut and run with invested funds, or they launch a worthless altcoin which then proceeds to immediately crash (and then run away with invested funds).
OneCoin is a good example of this, with the Chinese government’s announcement having a significant impact on their ICO ruse.
OneCoin, along with every other MLM Ponzi points scam, solicits investment on the promise of a public coin launch.
OneCoin has been stringing investors along since 2014 on this promise, with the company using a database to track affiliate investment in the meantime.
What with China historically OneCoin’s largest source of investment revenue, they’ve no doubt been fielding a ton of questions since the Monday announcement.
Despite OneCoin already being illegal in mainland China, affiliate recruitment has continued unofficially through underground channels.
This recruitment is based on the same business model OneCoin is promoted on globally: Invest in OneCoin points, something-something one day the coin will go public and everyone with OneCoin points will become a billionaire overnight.
In a September 6th “news flash”, OneCoin advised;
In order to comply with the recently imposed regulations of the People’s Bank of China, the OneLife Network is informing all users of the OneLife & OneAcademy, that educational courses, related to the ICO activity of OneCoin will not be provided to Chinese members.
For compliance reasons any OneLife educational course sold on the territory of People’s Republic of China will not include any ICO related features and/or materials during the OneCoin ICO campaign.
ONE cryptocurrency is planned to float on a public exchange October, 2018.
That’s fine going forward, but what about Chinese affiliates who together have invested hundreds of millions of dollars?
OneCoin themselves acknowledge that the Chinese government has ordered
companies and individuals in the process of an ICO, enabling the financing of tokens should return the accumulated funding and adopt the necessary measures to reasonably protect the interests of all stakeholders, following the regulation.
OneCoin Ponzi points are tokens, so that’d mean OneCoin should be refunding their entire Chinese investor base no?
The problem with this is a large percentage of invested funds have already been used to pay pyramid recruitment commissions with.
It is likely that refunding all their Chinese investors, as now legally required by Chinese law, would bankrupt OneCoin entirely.
And so you wind up with waffle about educational packages that, within the context of the Chinese ICO ban, makes no sense.
Nobody in China paid thousands of dollars for copy and pasted Wikipedia PDF files. They invested in OneCoin Ponzi points on the promise of an eventual public ICO and future riches through public trading.
Even if that never eventuates (nobody outside of OneCoin is interested in their inflated value Ponzi points), the fact remains that the motive for investment is no different to any other ICO.
That binds OneCoin to Chinese law, despite their apparent insistence otherwise.
With hundreds of thousands of thousands (over a million?) Chinese OneCoin investors now legally entitled to a refund, what happens next is unclear.
the onecoin sept 6th newsflash ends with the para:
i guess, chinese members cannot convert their tokens to ICO shares but can continue to mine them into onecoin.
these mined onecoins will make them billionaires when onecoin launches on the twelfth of never.
onecoin can use this ruse^^ to avoid refunds!
ps: onecoin could at least spell ‘cryptocurrency’ correctly in their press releases. really embarrassing.
That’s the ICO. The other thing is related to the promised public listing, which has nothing to do with the ICO.
ICO = the “we’re going to take our coin public” promise since 2014. They’ve added share certificates or whatever they’re calling them on top of that, which is more investment fraud but another out once those crash too.
Interesting to follow and see what happens. Devastating for the Chinese.Who will react?
Can someone confirm if Russia is starting to act as well? I do hope.
Headline from “gerlach”.
Just saw Wahlroos heading for Canada in October, no dates so far. fb
Gerlach Report? Ugh. Has anything they’ve reported that hasn’t happened yet eventuated?
in reply to a query about what would happen to chinese onecoin investors and whether they had lost their coins, muhammad zafar replied:
m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1623586901049282&id=1383836981690943
Zafar and OneCoin are just as trustworthy as a gerlachreport…
meanwhile, this is happening to US onecoin investors:
Phillip Mihalakis [sept 5]: OneCoin has been my worst investment to this day
xyz: Why?
Phillip Mihalakis [sept 6]: Because I invested several thousand dollars and got locked out of my account because I’m in the United States so basically I can’t do anything.
i hope tom mcmurrain has something comforting to say to US investors, just like zafar has for chinese investors!
It’s “always” a year away, heh?
OneCoin has been promising an ICO (“going public”) since 2014.
The lie that OneCoin Ponzi points will retain their internal value when publicly traded is the sole reason people have invested.
The Chinese government are demanding companies refund anyone who has invested in an ICO, ergo every Chinese OneCoin affiliate is entitled to a refund now.
What OneCoin does in the future is neither here nor there regarding the legally required refund of current Chinese OneCoin investors.
Delighted by all this action against OneCoin and hopefully arrests will follow -including KARI on his next grand tour –including London this weekend.
What I suspect will happen is the ipo /ico and Chinese crackdown will suggest to OneCoin to delay the going public. It has already shifted from 3rd Quarter 2017 to 2018 and still counting.
It is withering by the day so hence all the promotional offerings ,splits ,arbitrary increase in price (not value) and statements from Zafar and other leaders who are still left
Technically Zafar is correct – nobody lost anything because nobody had anything in the first place. Their losses were a long time ago.
OneCoin has an obvious defence – you were buying educational packages, and you still have the educational packages so you can’t expect a refund in respect of what you spent on those.
The tokens were bundled free with the education, therefore you are owed only what you paid for the tokens, which is nothing. An obviously bullshit defence, but it will satisfy anyone who was greedy enough to buy the “packages” in the first place.
Meanwhile the big fleas just have to avoid setting foot in China as is already the case with India and the US.
I don’t feel bad for any US investor. It has been over a year (probably close to 2 years) since OneCoin removed the ability for someone to join using a US address. So that means that they had to use a fake address to join.
I need to find out who these people are so I can sell them ocean front property in Montana. All they have to do is wait a year for the ocean to show up.
How long do you think that’s going to fly once hundreds of thousands of investors start complaining to police?
Not that they can do anything… OneCoin management haven’t set foot in mainland China since the arrests early last year.
We all know OneCoin aren’t going to respect Chinese law and refund their Chinese investors. But what’s important to take away is yet another differentiation between it and legitimate players in the cryptocurrency niche.
Well at least Chinese investors can buy the most stuff on dealshaker without paying horrendous shipping costs ^^
yup. lucky chinese people.
i’m sure chinese onecoin investors bought onecoins not for the ROI, but in the hope that they could spend more money buying crap on dealshaker with their onecoins!
Maybe at the (near?) end of this sad story, Chinese people with Dealshaker rubbish in their hands will still have more than all other people who have onecoins.
i bet they’re properly grateful and all.
remember ruja’s recent bday bash where she dressed herself in baby bloomers and a diaper hat?
kindly refer to this photo for instant recollection:
85.14.28.164/d/images/slideshows/0000204931-middle.jpg
suffering from temporary insomnia today, i decided to pen a short ode to rujas blooming bloomers! 🙂
A Bloomer By The Sea
rujamama wore tightwhite baby bloomers to her party!
ever seen a crypto creator look so tarty?
—–
since 2014 she’s launching a launch that never launches
private exchanges, dealshitters, IPO’s, ICO’s she’s pulled all kind of punches
nothing fails as spectacularly as rujamama’s Fails
yet some poor sods follow her wagging their little doggy tails!
——
is it because rujamama wore tightwhite baby bloomers to her party?
and titillated her admirers by looking so tartily tarty?
——
btw, it’s graceful of her not to show us the backside of her tightwhite bloomer fanny
[psst: there’s bootmarks there from italy china india and germany!]
god knows what she’ll do next or even worse – wear next, but she’ll make us a mess
rob us financially, or shock us with her torturous, aargh inducing sense of dress!
—–
because you see, rujamama wore tightwhite baby bloomers to her party
and only a sleazy con artist can even dare be so shamelessly tarty!
🙂 🙂
RE: “therefore you are owed only what you paid for the tokens, which is nothing”
1.) Onecoin themselves are calling itself an ICO
2.) scammers like Tom Ocean …err …McMurrain have called it “the biggest crowd funding in history”
3.) if Onecoin says themselves it’s an ICO, are they then going to somehow explain how they have NOT “raised money” for it??
Seems like a Catch-22
@anjali
Kari claims to be in India 22-26 September. Alert the police please.
https://i.imgur.com/zW4FWrO.jpg
done and done.
i reported my mail to the navi mumbai EOW on sept 6th in comment#80 in the thread:
https://behindmlm.com/companies/onecoin/ruja-ignatova-charged-with-ponzi-fraud-by-indian-authorities/
Minus zero seconds, of course. But investors aren’t complaining to police. And not that many investors in Ponzi schemes complain to the police, because a) embarrassment b) knowledge that they are complicit in the scam c) the fact that they won’t get any money back.
They have nothing to gain by going to the police and quite a lot to lose.
I know that redress schemes were set up in the US for other Ponzi schemes but OneCoin only has a handful of mugs in the US. I can’t see the governments of India and Dubai putting much effort into compensating failed wannabe scammers.
Besides, even if a redress scheme is set up it’s like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
If you go to the police and they shut down the scam, you’ll get back a fraction of your investment. If you wait, maybe someone else goes to the police, and you’ll still get the same fraction of your investment. Or maybe no-one goes to the police, and the scam rolls on a bit longer, and you profit.
It’s like a reverse Prisoner’s Dilemma. What do you gain by being the one to squeal? Nothing. What do you have to lose by squealing? Everything. What do you do? Keep your mouth shut.
What does everyone else do, when they are under the same conditions? Keep their mouths shut.
As I said, it’s the flimsiest of flim-flam, but that doesn’t matter because these people go ape for flim-flam.
News from China, top leader of OC was sentenced 7 years in prison
nolink://news.sina.com.cn/c/2017-09-08/doc-ifykuftz5470546.shtml
Thanks for the heads up! I did coincidentally do a Chinese news search for OneCoin earlier today and nothing came up.
This latest news appears to have broke in the last few hours.
“China to allow ICO after deciding on licensing”
coinfox.info/news/7582-china-to-allow-ico-after-deciding-on-licensing
So onecoin will have a chance to prove their legitimacy by getting a license to operate an ICO in China? …err right?
Hi China, this is OneCoin here.
You’ve arrested almost fifty of our affiliates and confiscated nearly $50 million dollars we stole from your citizens.
But we’re good right? Can we has ICO license now plz ok?”
ICO = Initial COIN offering
As OneCoin don’t actually have a coin, no license for them.
Macau has adopted a similar stance to neighboring China. End of Onecoin events there?
SOURCE: ether.direct/2017/09/28/h1monetary-authority-of-macau-prohibits-cryptocurrency-financeh1/
Don’t think it will stop events (recruitment collapsing has), but what little affiliate-base OneCoin has in Macau will stop like China (no refunds kekeke).
Ah, South Korea now also joins the ban on ICO’s.
The world is getting smaller every day for Onecon.
Australia just issued warning about all ICOs too.
NOLINK://www.ft.com/content/1f60eb3d-2620-3be2-9e59-865b0b62a95c
the largest percentage of approx 9% of onelife’s traffic is from south korea.
south korea is the number three traffic provider on dealshaker’s alexa rankings.
china gone, now south korea gone and with alexa showing a freefall in onecoin/onelife rankings this thing is on a ventilator now!
theverge.com/2017/9/29/16384718/south-korea-ban-initial-coin-offerings-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-icos
I am in the market for OneCoins. I am paying $11 each, a discount from the quoted price of $19.