Life after ICO: LAToken turned out scam not blockchain (+Bonus: Valentin Preobrazhenskiy and the Biznes Molodost) — part 2/3

/// English translation of the original article (http://telegra.ph/ZHizn-posle-ICO-Okazalsya-LAToken-ne-blokchejnom-a-skamom-ch2-04-06) ///

First part of the story: https://telegra.ph/Life-after-ICO-LAToken-turned-out-scam-not-blockchain-Bonus-Valentin-Preobrazhenskiy-and-the-Biznes-Molodost--part-13-01-16

Well, my skepticism is one thing. Always one may say to me the “universal argument” — “you had not been taken for that job, so you write libels in return”. So let’s listen to other crypto boys.

Here (https://cryptorum.com/threads/latokens-ico-for-us-customers-scam-or-poor-marketing.527) the author was much confused about news from LAToken had claimed that everything’s fine and Howey Test had passed, and US citizens had been allowed to invest to the project. But later things rapidly changed — and it had seemed nothing allowed. At that moment most of the ICOs had rapidly changed from “security” tokens to “utility” ones, so here maybe I was too carp at LAToken. No-one wants to travel to american jail for stocks issuance in SEC rules violation.

And here (https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/la/post/p_216463/ETH) was very interesting discussion about LAToken ICO:

- Well, they never give any estimates, never explain to investors (such as I am) what is going on, change terms and dates all the time. If not a scam, than very close to it in terms of behavior. I am disappointed.

- Why do you say scam? From the updates they have been giving to the public, sounds like they have a good team so far! I also think tokens are transferrable now. Hope the token is legit

- What good team? They only have some guys over telegram that have a job to calm down and delay as much as possible the public. They are buing time in the worst way possible. Promise 1000 things — so far none of their promises has been fulfilled. They always prolong deadlines. I feel SCAMMED already. Look at the long post above — It is exactly what is going on with LAT

- We never change term. All early US keep the same terms and conditions. Our team is much bigger than “some guys from the telegram”. You can easily find photos and descriptions in our blog and “team” bookmark of the website

It’s clear that there was no clear answers for the questions (in the future usual feedback from LAToken team), many breaches of many promises, delays and terms changes on the fly. However there is interesting link in the conversation on https://smarticoinvestor.com/

And one more interesting thing had emerged. LAToken appointed the man who had been working for them as an advisor! Knight’s move and cost saving!

The author of the article started to dig into LAToken advisors scheme, and scandal arise then, and happens the following:

“Updated: I’ve removed the portion about Anish Mohammed here. He had a contract with Zalogo Management, which is the parent of LAToken. Anish had given his termination of advisory services to them at the point when I contacted him and by the contract LAToken had 30 days to remove him from the site, which they have done. It was miscommunication on my part and I have edited the article as such.”

It appeared that Anish had contract with Zalogo (another Preobrazhenskiy project but before hype around the blockchain, that transformed then to Ai Banks and LAToken) — so why not to add Anish to LAToken advisors, isn’t it? Then public conflict happened — and Anish Mohammed had become LAToken employee as mentioned on it’s website. Well, it happens to everyone.

But more interesting is correspondence between Sam McCulloch and Preobrazhenskiy and his team.

It’s classic case: “Why do you keep posting random bullshit about our project? … Fuck off, man”, “Your reputation is worth 0”, “And who paid you then to spread bs about our project?”, “Pathetic looser”.

All the disappointed crypto scammers write to me pretty the same phrases when I do their ICOs / Crypto funds reviews. No-one of them can even pretend that somebody could clearly see their fraudulent scheme.

However the letters from Preobrazhenskiy were more exquisite. “Tweaking facts”, “too entrepreneurial and too creative for facts checking”, “it’s better to choose other career”, “spreading fake information”, “the world … tend to reward for value creation and penalize for the value destruction”, “believe people can change”. And the classical threats of lawyers to be incited and to be condemned had been in place.

There was amusing misprint in the word “coach” and writes “couch”. Everybody’s now a coach. Maybe I should become a coach too.

And as final point we witnessed the scandal LAToken VS Ranier Michael Preiss, who had had no idea that he had been LAToken advisor during ICO. The classic tricks of the scammed ICO.

Complete circus. At that point SEC would better consider investigation against this buffoonery LAToken ICO, but fortunately for them their turn have not been just beneath yet. The guys are still lucky.

Now the question is: what started the mess between Sam McCulloch and LAToken? It started with this publication from 22 August 2017 — https://smarticoinvestor.com/ — with a pretty eloquent title. “LAToken ICO — Stay away”.

The author presented quite understandable claims to Preobrazhenskiy and Co:

1) The business model was not financially verified (for example, the volume of commissions), so it has not been evident that their business would ever be profitable someday

2) The structure of its derivative drawn shitcoins changed for stocks was not clear how it would be used, and also there was question on ownership of shares tokenized

3) Absolute lack of understanding by Preobrazhenskiy and Co about how purchase, sale, ownership of art happens and on the related procedures and the financial and legal risks. Hence nobody knows how assets tokenization would generally happen in real life.

4) LAToken team constantly avoided direct and clear questions from investors in the Telegram chat. Moreover, Telegram chats had benn cleaned of issues that are “unduly strained”.

It was not surprising that Valentin, Denis and other had anal fire happened, and dialogue with Sam moved into the plane of insults and threats. Great investor relation job, LAToken!

But one thing is to be attacked by the bloggers — one may quarrel with him. Another thing, when it was Financial Times — https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/08/23/2192544/of-crypto-apples-and-other-fantastical-fruit/ — where, by the way, there had been fitting for that case category of “ICOmedy”. Here one should hold back the laughter.

What did FT indict to LAToken team?

1) Legal meaninglessness of the stock and the housing tokenization

2) Sluggish attempt to get off the security token topic

3) Couldn’t care less attitude to self-proclaimed ban on US citizens participation in trading on a like-exchange LAToken and in LAToken ICO

4) Obviously the guys in LAToken were threatened with Regulation S with complete ban on their shitcoins’ promotion in the US, but the boys had been facing investors in New York and offering their tokens (good time to write a note to the SEC)

5) The derivative definition principle also causes confusion

6) The Author did not understand why the heck one needs like-exchange LAToken (hereI fully agree with the Author)

7) Company registration had been changed from Singapore (“too strict regulation”) to the Cayman Islands.

In general, that was adequate list from which one can conclude that either guys at LATokens were fools or it was a scam, or both at once. And also they had David Drake as Advisor. Well, he is fishy character (see here and here), who would be the adviser of any ICO, if only bucks had been brought.

Also there was new publication that had finalized third-party claims to the smiling bespectacled guy (which is pictured on the right) and entitled “LAT: LAToken’s ICO. Dump ASAP!” — https://kaiserwilhelmkingofprussia.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/lat-latokens-ico-dump-asap

The claims in the article were about the same as has been described above: complete crap with the ownership, lack of understanding of the regulatory environment and the Howey Test substance, the bullshit of the Preobrazhenskiy and his team statements, the trash instead of the business model, the false derivatives, the “freezing” of 80% of the tokens issued. And the complete uselessness of this project to society indeed.

The claims are done, and let’s look at what has LAToken become in the end. Go to https://latoken.com/ and we see…

“The concept has changed” ©. Everybody pivot, guys! Now, instead of like-exchange one can observe another pathetic back and forth crypto exchanger for LAToken-shitcoin.

Oh sorry, it is now called “our own crypto currency exchange”. And yet, where are Apple shares, oil, realty and paintings tokenized for now? Valentin, where does it disappear?! As well as the company’s mission and declaration for investors, where is it, Valentin?! Surely you buckled under the SEC claims and did not want go to jail.

However, if one could choose between scamming the investors (“the pivot, guys”) and prison — the choice of the Preobrazhenskiy is clearly understandable. However it is still called a SCAM, anyway.

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Version of the site LAToken from December 28, 2017: http://web.archive.org/web/20171228151013/https://latoken.com/

Please note the change of the company descriptive names to “Crypto Trading Platform”.

Version of the site LAToken from Jan 31, 2018 http://web.archive.org/web/20180131132553/https://latoken.com/

As you can see, cryptocurrency trading only. No real world assets. The concept has changed ©, the money spent, and everybody can go home.

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LAToken market cap and trades can be seen here: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/latoken/

Congratulations to all LAToken investors who did not sell tokens and decided to hold them. You have made the feasible contribution to the crypto economy development in one particular Moscow office.

Now, we all know that LAToken came out with usual scammed shitcoin with a bunch of “pivots” in the process. Its CEO — Valentin Preobrazhensky was typical liar and “face seller”, but it is not the end of digging in crypto shit yet.

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The end of the story: https://telegra.ph/Life-after-ICO-LAToken-turned-out-scam-not-blockchain-Bonus-Valentin-Preobrazhenskiy-and-the-Biznes-Molodost--part-33-01-17

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(c) Cryptocritique [ t.me/cryptocritique ]