Reasons to be Wary of John McAfee, episode 53,492
Perennial headline-maker and Cryptocurrency ‘influencer’ (what an awful word) John McAfee has been in the news. Again.
For tweeting. Again.
In the last 24 hours the prodigious sexagenarian has not only bragged – and it was unquestionably a brag, see below - that he charges $500,000 per tweet to promote an ICO, but also managed to promote an ICO that was almost immediately called out for at best plagiarism, and at worst fraud.
Here is the brag:
My tweets are now $500,000 per tweet. If clients want me to reply to comments, then it is $100,000 per reply. But what is your point? Obviously, people feel that it is worth it. Statistically, each tweet averages over $3 million in revenue for my clients - a 600% return.
John McAfee () May 18, 2018
And here is the instantly infamous McAfee tweet:
I am advising and supporting the pink Taxi ICO - https://t.co/bH2by8US6l - created in response to the massive increase in sexual assaults on women, especially in Muslim countries. They currently operate in 50 cities, hiring only women drivers trained to support womens' safety. pic.twitter.com/Gs7mnpOs99
John McAfee (
The ICO in question, Pink Taxi had – and this is so brazen that it’s almost impressive – copied the website design, content and the whitepaper of A2B Taxi, another ICO that already exists.
Let’s just process that: an ICO plagiarised another, similarly niche ICO and then paid the World’s most notorious shill to promote it.
Needless to say, they got caught.
In fairness, Pink Taxi haven’t attempted to hide behind the veil of internet anonymity and have instead issued an apology, blaming a third-party marketing team (who apparently have a dangerously negligent lack of knowledge of intellectual property laws).
This is all very admirable, but even assuming it is true it begs the question: what were the marketing agency doing writing their whitepaper?
To put it bluntly: either they deliberately stole the content from a competitor and presented it as their own – and then compounded the issue by lying about it -, or they hired a marketing team so incompetent that one assumes that can only have had an average age of twelve, and an average location of their parents’ houses.
DYOR as always, but this author will not be investing in Pink Taxi.
I doubt I'll expend the time to review it, either.