Faucethub.io buys Cryptoallstars. Promptly Shuts it down!

What a strange 5 days it has been.

On Valentine's Day this strange announcement came from Crypto Randy Marsh (@nondualnelly) announcing a new game that was hitting the blockchain. He called it Crypto All Stars. It had a marketplace, much like CryptoKitties or CryptoFighters. The difference was, these cards were of Famous Twitter Shitposters. And instead of buying a card and owning it for good, you bought a card only to have someone else come in and buy it for twice what you paid. You get the nice payout, but have nothing left to show you ever owned a cool Twitter personality trading card.

This seemed like a little harmless fun, the cards were starting at 0.001 ETH and would take 10 buyers to push them up to 1 ETH. Surely no one was going to pay $1000 for a picture of someone's Twitter profile.... were they?

It turns out they were, and what started out fun and harmless, quickly became a contest to have the most expensive card. At one point a single card was valued at over 11ETH, meaning someone had already paid 5.5 ETH for the privilege of owning the card.

Those running the "game" never made any qualms about the fact that these digital assets had literally no value, but it didn't take long before the term "Ponzi Scheme" started floating around.

I have to admit, I did participate in that first morning of card trading. I owned @CryptoDale and @notsofast and one other that I don't remember at the steep price of 0.095 each. All three were quickly sold and I had, in fact, doubled my money. Not a ton of profit at those prices, compared to what others ended up making, but it was a nice little profit.

New cards were being added, and things seemed to be humming right along. Then I am checking my twitter while on a layover on my trip home from Buffalo when I see a storm of Tweets about the death of CryptoAllStars.

Randy Claims he was locked out of everything by the coder who was working as the Dev on the project and was demanding to be bought out. Randy did not want to buy this guy "Adam" out and I guess was going to try to start from scratch or something. There's a ton of he said she said going on as to who is right and who is wrong.

Fast forward to tonight where we find out that someone has purchased CryptoAllStars to the tune of 30 ETH ($30,000 ballpark) just to shut it down as a lesson to the community.

Check out the announcement:

Hello, it's mexicantarget and I need your attention.

Roughly 5 days ago a new Crypto-currency project launched called http://cryptoallstars.co. This innovative project brings in the big names in crypto by converting their Twitter account handles into collectible & unique Blockchain Smart Contracts built on top of the Ethereum network.

The website is a fully decentralised (dApp) which runs inside Mist browser or Brave browser with the Metamask ETH network bride extension, allowing you to view the current price of each card and buy cards directly in your browser from your Ethereum wallet. They make it very easy to get involved and own your first collectible card.

The juice is that every purchase gives 4% to the owner of the Twitter account! This means that if YOU get your name added, you can earn when someone buys your card, and you don't even need a referral url! It's quite nice to earn, isn't it?

The concept of the "game" is quite simple. The owners of the site start by listing a few big names on twitter as collectible cards. The first one's who get to buy it at a super lower price boost the price by roughly 50%. This means if you bought the FaucetHUB.IO card at 0.001 ETH, someone can only buy it off you for 0.002 ETH. When you sell the card, there's an 8% fee of which 4% goes to the owner of the site, and the other 4% goes to the owner of the twitter account (regardless of whether you own your own card or not).

There's nothing wrong here, right? It's an innovative harmless game, right?

Wrong! It's a money grabbing ponzi scheme causing innocent members of the twitter crypto community to lose a LOT of money..

I guess you scammers didn't see this coming. Adam & "Billy".

So. I've been fighting against scum like you, who make Ponzies and get people in sh*t, just because of your stupidity and greed.

I burned ~$30.000 just to buy your project and shut it down, because I'm getting really sick from situations like this, where poor suckers invest in schemes like yours and get burned.

This is a lesson for my community. I've been doing what I've been doing, so I can make people happier, instead of add weight on their backs.

Currently, 30 ETH coins are sitting in escrow on bitcointalk, in Cyrus' possession.
You both have provided addresses and you'll get your money.
Consider this a gift from FaucetHUB.io.

The ones who donated their earnings to charities, you da real MVPs.

I guess I am unsure what to think about this move. Certainly there were some people who were upset to be stuck with a "card" that no one wanted to buy. Eventually someone was going to end up with a card that was too expensive for anyone to be willing to pay for it. And I think we saw a lot of cards go way over that point. But there are a lot of things people spend money on that have no value. This feels like a pure gamble, double or nothing, and some people wound up with nothing. That's the risk you take. Don't play with what you can't afford to lose!

So Crypto All Stars is Dead. Randy and Mexican Target are going back and forth on twitter arguing about whose fault all of this is. And I am left to wonder, where will the next project like this pop up from. Sure it only lasted five days, but some people made a lot of money in those five days. People will see this as a model to make some cash and flee the scene, and there will be a whole different set of buyers out there ready to try their luck at the promise of quick and easy profit.