Disclaimer: I'm not for sale. I don't take on services and I don't take on personal requests. I don't accept payments nor donations. I'm not a shill, and I will speak my mind. Opinions are my own, and I will not reply to comments. I'm here to expose the truth, what's behind the organized "crypto-mafia" tasked to disrupt what the crypto-community is building.
It's no surprise that fraudsters and scammers plague this industry. It's no surprise that shilling services are a profitable business. In this article, we're going to tap into the world of "Organized FUD".
What does "FUD" mean?
“FUD” stands for "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", it's a well-known disinformation strategy that plagues all industries, but specifically the crypto-industry as a whole, for its volatile nature. Taken from Wikipedia, "FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear".
There are some notorious players in the industry who operate on a larger scale and that are specifically tasked with guaranteeing that you are misinformed. I'll introduce one of them in this serious of investigations in trying to uncover the truth being "FUD", their "Modus Operandi", “Sensationalist Journalism”, their “vectors of distribution” and “active agents” that help disseminate the "FUD" throughout the industry.
ProofOfResearch The Critic Exposed - FUD'd
I've been following closely a series of "articles" and "in-depth reports" from a medium profile called ProofOfResearch. Specifically, I've read his article called “Warning: Bitfinex is No Longer Solvent — Remove Your Money Now [In-Depth Report]” on which ProofOfResearch uncovers a series of reddit accounts who have been complaining about connectivity, technical and support issues, which "leads" to rumors of said centralized exchange being insolvent. To be honest, I despise any centralized exchangers and so called "stablecoins". But they are a necessary evil for the community to acquire a learning curve so that they realize (the hard way) that trading a centralized entity for another centralized entity is the same thing as self-inflicting even more pain to your left leg so you don't focus the pain on your right leg.
But my quarrel isn't with crooked centralized exchanges and their byproduct stablecoins, that’s another topic I’ll eventually cover. My quarrel is with "organized FUD". And today we're addressing the FUD machine that is called "ProofOfResearch".
Who is ProofOfResearch?
ProofOfResearch is a medium.com profile that writes about multiple topics in the crypto-niche. Upon opening his medium.com profile, we come across an interesting article.
At the moment of this report, the user was permanently banned from Medium (again).
source: https://medium.com/@proofofresearch/my-credentials-80c8acba311
Who is CryptoMedication?
Upon googling his former aliases, we come across a concerning amount of articles accusing CryptoMedicated/CryptoMedication AKA ProofOfResearch of all sorts of crimes, from blackmail, extortion and sexual offenses:
3.) http://www.dpscs.state.md.us/sorSearch/search.do?searchType=detail&anchor=true&id=3732976
4.)
5.) ~~~ embed:1021513846966677505 twitter metadata:c3BlY3RyZWFpfHxodHRwczovL3R3aXR0ZXIuY29tL3NwZWN0cmVhaS9zdGF0dXMvMTAyMTUxMzg0Njk2NjY3NzUwNXw= ~~~
Companies such as Spectre, TrueChain, Bancor, and many others have been victims of CryptoMedicated sophisticated extortion, blackmail and gaslighting attempts, as well as FUD dissemination (for-profit).
ProofOfResearch is also the editor of ZeroNoncense, a crypto-coverage for price analysis and hot takes. And it turns out, unsurprisingly, that ZeroNoncense was among the initial publishers of the article we mentioned earlier: https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/crypto-investor-warning-the-implications-of-bitfinex-exchanges-insolvency/
It’s surprising how this individual is allowed to report for a large number of crypto-news outlets, as he himself mentioned, including bitcoinexchangeguide.com , which should make due diligence before letting fraudsters publish in their platform.
Who is James Edwards?
Known as:
ProofOfResearch CryptoMedication, CryptoMedicated, Josh Gordon, Peter Mercury, Bobby Fisher, JamesTheBang, Randomshortdude
Source: https://warosu.org/biz/thread/7915921
source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3158314.msg32646270#msg32646270
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3107128.msg32101401#msg32101401
James Edwards is ProofOfResearch AKA CryptoMedication AKA CryptoMedicated AKA Josh Gordon AKA Peter Mercury AKA Bobby Fisher AKA JamesTheBang AKA Randomshortdude, a known fraudster, FUDster, scammer, known for blackmailing and extorting, from Owings Mills, Maryland according to the articles mentioned above. Just google any of the aliases he used, and you will find concerning results. And please, keep in mind that such results are prior to his publication under his new alias “ProofOfResearch”.
If we take into account previous research on different links mentioned throughout this article, it’s quite possible that James Edwards could’ve manipulated sentiment and narrative of an event that doesn’t have a consistent fundament to it, since he is known to manipulate social media with fraudulent results, as proven on this article: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@exposer/cryptomedicated-or-james-edwards-and-chayleh-tracey-fraud-exposed-or-picture-proof
He did make an article desperately trying to prove his innocence, which contains some contradictory arguments, so interpret it at your own discretion: https://steemit.com/bitcoinbravado/@cryptomedication/bravadogroup-involved-in-child-pornography-racism-n-word-doxxing-stalking-and-intimidation-in-response-to-being-exposed
Social Media Manipulation
If you look into the profiles that like, re-tweet and comment his tweets, you can clearly see that many of them are fake, bought accounts to boost social activity. And this has been happening for a while now, as you can see on the following screenshots.
.png)
This is just scratching the surface. There have been allegations of CryptoMedicated AKA Randomshortdude buying services to manipulate social media results, which he might as well have done with some of the Reddit “complaints” on the exchange’s sub-forum.
Who is Jamesthebang AKA Randomshortdude?
Since the screenshots are self-explanatory, we should go back to the topic. I’m sure that if said exchange was having withdrawal issues, a lot more complaints would follow, and not a few dozens. Even if I do agree that keeping funds in a centralized exchange is incredibly risky and stupid, this story was purposely amplified by sentimentalist journalism, if we can even call it that, led by a crook who is a known criminal in the industry.
Upon reading thoughtfully the detailed article explaining who CryptoMedicated is, we came to the realization that online crooks will always be a part of the crypto-space and they will always come back with different names, with different aliases, and will always go back to old habits.
You should always investigate your sources thoughtfully, and take your conclusions from your own investigations.
(We will Continue Our Work in Part 2)
Think!
Great. Fight FUD with more FUD.