It is the latest entry in the ever-growing list of successful scams in the ICO universe. The team behind Pure Bit, which had marketed itself as a project setting out to create a new crypto-currency exchange, has disappeared.
Over 13,000 ETH had been received from contributors before the suspected South Korea-based scam took its website and social media profiles off-line.
The project team, according to accounts on Reddit, operated under complete anonymity and had justified its doing so because of the current ban on ICOs within South Korea.
Scams Less Frequent
It is thought that just under $20 billion dollars has been raised via the ICO fund-raising mechanism in 2018 so far, and that as much as 10% of this figure is being creamed off by scam projects.
However, whilst anything up to 80% of projects presenting themselves as ICOs may be outright scams – according to one report from ICO advisory group Satis – it is still thought that the vast majority of scam attempts are unsuccessful.
The South Korean government banned ICOs in September 2017, although is currently believed to be reviewing its policy.
However, on the back of yet another successful ICO scam along with a report from the South Korean National Police in October detailing concerns over an increasing number of hacking episodes on South Korean crypto-currency exchanges, there appears to be little appetite amongst South Korean legislators for a reversal of the ban.
