Confido, a company that touted itself as a “Smart Contract ” Startup , has veritably disappeared, leaving its ICO investors in the dust with empty pockets. The Confido ICO, which raised US$374,000 - no small chunk of change, but a pithy amount in the ICO landscape - has left investors holding useless ERC20 tokens.
Shortly following the ICO, CFD tokens lost over 98% of their value, plunging from US$1.20 apiece on November 14 to just US$0.02. Following the massive drop, the Confido website and the company’s presence on social media were erased. Online digital assets associated with the company were deleted.
Confido’s disappearance has been dubbed an “exit scam”.
A “Tight Spot”
Mysteriously, the company left just one online trace in its wake. A cached version of a Medium post written by Joost van Doorn, the alleged Confido CEO, told of “legal trouble” that the company was having with a contract that had put it in a “tight spot”. On a cached version of the since-deleted Confido website, van Doorn is described as holding a master’s degree in international business with field experience at PepsiCo, eBay, and Zalando.
In the post, van Doorn wrote that the company “signed the contract with assurance from our legal advisor that there was minimal risk and it would not be an issue. I can’t and won’t go into details, but he was wrong. It is a problem.”
Lots of Questions, No Answers Yet
Van Doorn added that “we are trying our best to fight our way through this. As it currently stands, development has been delayed until a resolution is found.”
While some may find it more comfortable to believe that Confido was not a malicious company, but was rather an innocent organization that was somehow caught in a legal trap, the details surrounding the company’s disappearance and the loss of token value are extremely suspicious.
TokenLot, the platform that hosted the ICO, has officially stated that the Confido ICO was a scam, and announced plans to contact the FBI.
