A quick google search reveals many different people claiming Vitrocoin is a scam with lots of different reasons. That said I'm gonna talk about a few quick ways to determine in a few minutes by looking at an ICO if you should look further into investing.
There are numerous reasons people invest in ICOs. Only a handful of them are right. Let's talk about a couple wrong ways. Keep in mind that these are acceptable reasons to investigate an ICO, they are not acceptable reasons to buy into them.
- Fomo
- Promise of returns
- Marketing
I'm gonna start from the bottom up
- Marketing
Throughout history, marketing has been used to bring appeal and attract attention to a product. Marketing is a wonderful tool to help show people what you have to offer while at the same time explaining it's use or purpose. Now, that you what they have to offer, it is up to you to decide if you need it. What is the product doing for me or others? Is there already someone providing this? Are there other options with more established companies able to provide a better or faster service.
Since I started with Vitrocoin, I will use them as the use case.
This website, is useless. There is no information as to what the product actually is. If you read the use case, it's just... a blockchain. That is it.
Twitter
Zero profile. No way to stay in touch with updates or information on one of the most widely used platforms for companies to reach out to their clients. Searching the hashtags #VIC and #Vitrocoin show endless people talking and asking about when they will receive their funds, is this real, and is this a scam?
Bitcointalk.org
A Valuable place to go and dig deep. Into developers and development. A place where the team of a project usually spends many hours and assets explaining, answering and accounting for their product to the development community. Well, Vitrocoin doesn't have a bitcointalk thread of their own and the only one I found above talks about it being a scam.
Truth is I have no doubt in my mind this is a scam at this point, red flags popping up left and right. When I first got my 100 coins the site had the ticker as the comment above mentioned, and the balance even wrote it out as 100 VTC ...... in a few times a day and watched it rise in that short time period from $13 to $22 on their embedded chart. Coincidentally I have been unable to find anything online supporting these claims, or really any sort of site that catalogues actual cryptos and the markets they are on, going to, what stage they are in
Steemit
A community of awesome people who strive to make the world better and the relay of information more reliable. At least, that is how I look at it. A quick search of Steemit Vitrocoin shows some posts but sadly, they are posts explaining the project but in very little detail. This is not meant to call any fellow steemers (is that right? I am a newbie) out, so I apologize if you don't like that I linked your page. I assure you that I have not researched any reason to believe you were part of the scam.
This post here is just sharing information and while I am positive the author meant no ill intentions, the post simply feeds into FOMO.
This steemer made a post about the ICO and has since updated it. I commend him for that.
"Accidental" marketing intended to promise returns I don't know if this Steemer knew it was a scam, they could have genuinely been an investor which it appears to me.
- Promise of Returns
Simply put,nobody can do it. If someone tells you, "This is worth X, and in y time it will be 2X and in 2y time it will be 4X and in 4y time it will be 20x!"
If anyone is offering guaranteed returns, you need to run from them. Nobody can do that, ever. It's just not possible. My day job is to underwrite loans for investors. Even with a 10 year track records of no losses, I will STILL NEVER say the returns are guaranteed.
Vitrocoin has listed on the front page of their site:
- Q1 $20 estimated target price
- Q2 $40 estimated target price
- Q4 $200 estimated target price.
In several other places such as their whitepaper, they mention that it will have the chance to be as valuable as bitcoin. Red Flag CITY!!!
Turns out they were providing a fake ticker to continue to fool investors into thinking the scam was in fact not a scam. I would link the price ticker but it has been taken down from what I can tell.
Closing this section out, I will only touch briefly on their "lending" platform. I'm new to this but in my 20 years of writing loans, I've learned a thing or two. Anyone who's been looking at Crypto for more than 2 weeks knows about this.
Does this look familiar?
It is the matrix Bitconnect used to explain their payouts by investing in Bitconnect coins.
- FOMO
Last but not least, don't ever buy a project, good or bad, due to FOMO. Outside of the top three (BTC, ETH and LTC) the phrase DYOR is said time and time again for a reason. I will admit that i bought into a few bad projects over time, but as I read into them and learned more, I hopped out of those coins and now I spend lots of time reviewing a coin before I buy EVEN if it's a solid project.
Lets start by saying that the Vitrocoin ICO was a planned attempt to get people to buy into FOMO. There are numerous reports on Twitter about people seeing the ICO countdown ticker reset as the end approached. As people would post on social media that the timer was expiring, others start to feel the FOMO seep in. They buy in because "Surely I don't have 5 minutes to google this before I drop hundreds or thousands into it."
Jeezus, People, I personally have scanned the net for many minutes trying to save $0.20 on dog poop bags. If your money means so little to you that you will throw it at people you don't know because of people you don't know telling you that you will run out of time to do so if you don't, well, you deserve to loose your money (Again, looking at myself here once or twice).
At this point it is safe to move on and look at other coins without losing a second of sleep about the loss of your moon-lambo.
The farther you dig into this rabbit hole with Vitrocoin, the more obvious it becomes that there is no investment here and that if you have put anything towards it, well you may as well write it off next year on your taxes, or this year if you got in the ICO ;)
Thank you for taking the time to make it this far. If you have any questions, comments or additions I can make, feel free to ask.
I always follow upvoters and appreciate your eyes. Feel free to resteem this as well.
Quick Question: What do steem users call fellow steem users? I'm reading my use of the phrase "Steemer" and it just sounds like something bad, eg. Cleveland, BTW, that is NSFW if you don't know what it is. Be warned!
Although I do feel like it is quite applicable to what may happen to us when we invest based on FOMO and without Doing your own research.
I am taking suggestions for upcoming ICO's to look into. Please submit your requests in the comments below and I will upvote and follow those suggestions I will work on.