Part 2 of our Fitrova Investigation on Steemit
Part 3 of our Fitrova Investigation on Steemit
In a world of crypto where you come across projects like BitConnect or Verge, you would assume even scammers take better precautions in order to succeed. The article below is the result of a new token that raised so many red flags, it was hard to ignore and this one made it personal. That’s why the community of an exchange decided to investigate the scam of Fitrova.
COMMUNITY WORK ON AWARENESS ABOUT FITROVA-SCAM!
Welcome to this article which was created with the help of many communities that are concerned for the well being of uneducated investors. At this point, we are going to provide you with all the information we gathered about Fitrova (FRV), an ERC-20 token that very likely is a malicious project with the goal to cheat people out of their money.
Please read this article carefully before considering to invest your hard earned money into FRV.
TL,DR:
Following are the information that make us fear that Fitrova is not a legitimate project:
[1] Team members have no traces on the internet other than Bryan Seiler. His image is the only one that does not look like a stock photo also. LinkedIn icons on the team members names do not work. This is misdirection for the customer if their LinkedIn profiles aren’t publicly available. (Fitrova has just removed those icons today)
[2] None of the partnership gyms have acknowledged or posted anything to confirm FRV partnership. Fitrova team says they are under Non Disclosure Agreement, while at the same time they are able to disclose these partnerships.
[3] Tyrone Campbell’s profile on the site says he “developed prior competitor tokens with different metrics in the past”. No response on what tokens he was involved in.
[4] Joseph Lampton supposedly worked for Wells Fargo. No one named Joseph Lampton comes up in relation to Wells Fargo though.
[5] Partner company Twilx is also owned by Bryan Seiler CEO. A review from a web developer there implied 100,000 usd in unpaid work with no resolution. The other is just a French crypto news website.
[6] Instead of answering these questions when raised by less than two dozen people in a telegram chat — Fitrova decided to delist from the exchange the questioner’s traded at, which cancels a trading promotion, and threatened legal action. Anyone questioning these things and not accepting a vague answer or “google it” is instantly banned from FRV telegram
[7] https://article.wn.com/view/2018/03/06/Billionaire_Sam_Zell_says_Fitrova_is_the_Next_Big_Thing/
This article states Sam Zell endorsed Fitrova on NBC news, but there is no video. The video is actually just a jpeg. (Any stock market investor know that Sam Zell (UHNW $5B) is doing many interviews with CNBC on finance and real estate, however none related to Crypto).
[8] FRV admins have given crazy price preditions, guaranteed volume, and stated on their website that they can prevent price dumps from happening by having exchanges limit the maximum daily FRV that can be sold. This is price manipulation.
[9] ICO article promoting Fitrova as an ERC20 that will be “the new bitcoin alternative”. Fitrova is a simple ERC20 utility token on the Gym industry : (https://medium.com/@TwilxSEO/fitrova-review-the-best-ico-for-2018-a6590ca075cf)
[10] Response of CRUNCH team (main partnership as indicated in Fitrova website) :
If you want to join the telegram channel that has been investigating the scam : https://t.me/fitrovascam
End of TL,DR
Our joint investigations were triggered when a community member joined the official Telegram of FRV and asked these simple questions:
[1] Tyrone Campbell’s profile on the site says he “developed prior competitor tokens with different metrics in the past”. What token was he involved in?
[2] LinkedIn icons on the team members names do not work. Isn’t this misdirection for the customers if their LinkedIn profiles aren’t publicly available?
Instead of addressing the legitimate questions of the community, the admin in the FRV channel banned the user instantly and deleted his message. At this point, the red flags started flashing and we decided to dive deeper into this case.
Following are the points one by one which makes us believe that FRV is likely not a legitimate project:
The Team of FRV:
Is Non-Existent, except for the CEO there is no information on the internet about the other Team Members. Not a search via their names or reverse image search brings up any information about them. We have tried Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Soso, Meta search engines, and nothing comes back on names and images..
The only information available is regarding their CEO and founder (Bryan Seiler). The small response from this issue by the FRV team is the following one :
“Because within our Anti-spam policy, Google has removed all instances of team member images from any other website. Only Fitrova images remain.”
Obviously, the response is not appropriate, we are not able to reach any of those fellows and they are not in the telegram group of FRV.
One of our community members was saying that it was not relevant at all :
”I’m a developer, my whole existence is having a good resume and credentials. Unless I work for the military on AI projects, I will list my skills. If I’m a blockchain dev, I need to list those skills. No project will hold my name on the internet.”
So this is a dead end, but let’s dig a bit into their CEO (things are getting interesting):
Bryan Seiler is the owner of several companies and sells himself as :
“A sales leader and entrepreneur by nature, Bryan has an extensive sales background with a proven formula for success. The key ability to win new business harnessed with a positive attitude and consistent execution strategies sets in place the foundation for his personal success. With a skill set comprising of direct leadership, people management expertise and ongoing training and development strategies, Bryan sets the bar high with full knowledge and proficiency in what it takes to run a business. His ingenuity and experience in developing multiple businesses from the ground up coupled with belief and a ‘never say never’ attitude sets in motion the cog work for inspired action, in return gaining measurable results.”
Impressive right? Well, his proven formula for success is debatable, on his LinkedIn you can find that he is the director of Twilx (the only online partner of Fitrova by the way, according to their website).
But the reviews of Twilx aren’t that good :
So it’s easy to see that apart from fake reviews his other firm is also a malicious one, and even on the company profile, you can find this poorly photoshopped office picture :
We are also trying to reach Mazhar Shah to gain more info on Bryan Seiler and his work agreement with him.
You can also go to the following reddit post that shows the office of Fitrova is likely not existing and this is just a mailbox paid address (less than 200$ per month) :
2. How questions are handled in Telegram and the famous “no dump policy”
Yes you read it right, in Fitrova website you can see that hey have a special feature that allows them to control the price :
Well, crypto is a free market so it’s not possible to control the price and this just tricks the investors that are not educated.
After the beginning of our awareness campaign about this potential ScamCoin, the price dumped massively :
Well the price here is not important since we just want to spread awareness around about this malicious project, but the saddest part is when you read in their telegram channel, innocent investors actually fell for their trick and believed that the price was being controlled by the “anti dump policy” :
Well, they are hardly responding to any concerns within their community and if someone starts asking questions about specific matters, he/she gets banned.
Recently, a fellow FRV investor got banned because he was worried about the recent massive dump (causing FRV price to plummet -75%) and was asking a question regarding the “Anti Dump Policy”.
Their telegram chat seems to be fully manipulated by the team members because only shilling messages allowed there. If anyone starts asking questions then he/she gets rewarded with an instant ban. FRV community managers seem to have zero tolerance policy for criticism about their project. Even if the community concerns are genuine, they’ll ban you and delete your entire chat history if you are not praising FRV but only asking questions about them.
Surely any investor will be worried when his token value drops -75%.
And the last thing in this world he expects is to get banned by the community manager for asking a question about that.
Anyway let’s move on to the next subject: the fake article and spreading malicious info on socimediaias from the Fitrova team :
3. The malicious info spread by Fitrova
Let’s begin with a big one: https://article.wn.com/view/2018/03/06/Billionaire_Sam_Zell_says_Fitrova_is_the_Next_Big_Thing/
“Fitrova is making giant leaps and bounds in solving the most common problems found in health and fitness clubs today”, Zell said.
For those of you who are not familiar with stock markets and well-known investor adviser, Sam Zell’s a multi-billionaire ($5B) and he his the chairman of Equity Group Investments. You can see him a lot talking about the markets on CNBC. Well, he is not known to be bullish on crypto, but to be a contrarian in the stock market. So this fake paid article is a huge manipulation from the Fitrova team. By releasing fake news like that, they are are going one step deeper in the “Scam Crypto Environment” but let’s call them a malicious project for now. This interview cannot be found online and the video link (with a play button) in the article is just an image file.
On Twitter, they also used a well known growing recent project (Pundi X) to promote their Fitrova Token. Well, this is what everybody is doing out there anyway but it shows that the way of doing things of the Fitrova team is shady. (Wait… is there even a Fitrova team?… Or is it just one guy? You already know the answer if you read this article from the beginning).
4. Suspicious price predictions by their admins
The Fitrova Support is also acting in a corrupt way on telegram. The way they are promoting their company is fishy because the admins themselves are making extravagant claims and insane price predictions to lure people into buying their worthless tokens. As stated earlier, they are also limiting free speech of the investors to zero level unless it’s a shilling statement on behalf of Fitrova.
5. Fake Partnerships
Regarding fake partnership, we can find on their website the following companies were you can use your Fitrova Token:
After asking companies about the partnership, we received the following answers :
Regarding Crunch partnership :
Regarding the partnership with SNAP Fitness 24–7 :
Regarding the partnership with Planet Fitness :
Regarding Crunch partnership (weeks before lawyer awareness) :
Regarding Fitness First partnership :
Regarding the online partnership of Fitrova
The first partnership is the company that is already affiliated to Fitrova, the Founder and CEO of Fitrova is indeed working at Twilx as Director.
Regarding the partnership with OptionMag.fr, it’s a French website that is spreading awareness on trading and they also have a crypto channel. We sent a message to them and are waiting for an answer to know if Fitrova has an effective partnership with them.
LinkedIn profile of the CEO of Fitrova (Bryan SEILER)
Be aware that after the beginning of our investigation the Fitrova “team” have been modifying the website by changing several elements, for example they changed “Our partners” to “Where Fitrova can be used”…
X. What future for FITROVA ???
Fitrova is highly likely to get delisted from Coss.io (A great exchange that wants to be fully compliant at all times), have a look at the following statement by Fitrova :
As you can see, they’re not being very professional and they have been changing their opinions over and over again in their announcement channel (but you already have a picture of what they are trying to do anyway).
There’s a high chance Fitrova will be delisted from COSS as COSS has also stopped the ongoing trading promotion of Fitrova.
So far, there have been no official statements given by COSS, but it’s highly probable we might see FRV delisted from COSS in the upcoming days.
FRV is currently trading on the following other exchanges:
Bancor Network
Coinexchange
TokenStore
Systemkoin
FRV is also going to be listed on CoinSuper exchange soon, according to the Fitrova announcements.
We might also see these other exchanges conducting an investigation and taking action to delist FRV to maintain the reputation of their exchanges.
We’ve contacted all these exchanges and reported the issue about FRV and so far we have received positive confirmations from the team members of those exchanges.
Regarding Bancor Exchange:
So if we look at Bancor Network, they have been very professional and responded to our community in a great way after we explained to them why Fitrova might be a SCAM.
Here is their response :
Regarding CoinExchange:
We have contacted CoinExchange and they also have been very professional by responding to us very quickly:
Regarding SistemKoin:
We have been in contact with Sistemkoin Destek and they are aware of the situation, we will follow up on them with additional information.
Regarding TokenStore:
We have spread awareness in their telegram group and are waiting on follow up by their admin but at the end, they just asked us to: “Knock off the fud”.
We will forward this post to them in order to spread awareness to their community as well.
The important point now is regarding the CoinSuper exchange!
Fitrova has been saying that it will be their main exchange and they have guaranteed volume from that exchange (which is not something possible unless by using wash trading techniques).
So we reached out to the CoinSuper exchange to warn them on the malicious scammy Fitrova and the admin of CoinSuper banned all the people and erased every message that informed them to be aware of what is going on with Fitrova.
They are just erasing all the evidence which we have provided to them.
So CoinSuper might list a Scam on their exchange, maybe because they have already received the payments to do it and they don’t want to lose money.
Well, it’s very simple, if an exchange cares more about money than protecting a community of investor it’s a real problem that has to be addressed to the community.
That is the deleted conversation on Coinsuper Telegram below, which was saved by us:
This conversation was in the Coinsuper telegram group (An exchange that is going to list this malicious coin Fitrova soon)
Fitrova Support has deleted those messages already (but we are quick and organised so we have saved screenshots) where you can see that they are not responding to the issues raised (we got banned off their channel so we had to find a common channel where they cannot ban us for asking questions). You can see how unprofessional the team is by calling people “turkey”’s. The Fitrova Support is saying they will provide no response and they also requested the admin of the Coinsuper group to ban us. After a few minutes without any admin response, Fitrova Support deleted every message written by him.
On the same CoinSuper Channel, the CEO of Fitrova (BRYAN SEILER) came and every warning message got deleted and our accounts got banned for no reason other than asking legitimate questions.
If you are part of any of those exchange, please share those information and this article to them to be able to protect investor from investing in a Scam. You can reach us by using the following telegram link and speak with admins : https://t.me/fitrovascam
Interview with the CEO of Fitrova Bryan Seiler
To finish this post, we just have been able to talk to Bryan Seiler and he kindly answered every point raised by the community. Below, all the points raised by the community are arranged with their respective responses from CEO of Fitrova himself :
[1] Team members have no traces on the internet other than Bryan Seiler. His image is the only one that does not look like a stock photo downloaded from the internet. LinkedIn Icons on the team members names do not work. This is a visual deception to the customers if the linkedin icons are shown but the LinkedIn profiles aren’t publicly available. (Fitrova has just removed those icons today)
[2] None of the partnership gyms have acknowledged or posted anything to confirm FRV partnership. Fitrova team says they are under Non Disclosure Agreement, while at the same time they are able to disclose these partnerships.
[3] Tyrone Campbell’s profile on the site says he “developed prior competitor tokens with different metrics in the past”. No response on what tokens he was involved in.
[4] Joseph Lampton supposedly worked for Wells Fargo. No one named Joseph Lampton comes up in relation to Wells Fargo though.
[5] Partner company Twilx is also owned by Bryan Seiler CEO. A review from a web developer there implied 100,000 usd in unpaid work with no resolution. The other is just a French crypto news website.
[6] Instead of answering these questions when raised by less than two dozen people in a telegram chat — Fitrova decided to delist from the exchange the questioner’s traded at, which cancels a trading promotion, and threatened legal action. Anyone questioning these things and not accepting a vague answer or “google it” is instantly banned from FRV telegram
[7]https://article.wn.com/view/2018/03/06/Billionaire_Sam_Zell_says_Fitrova_is_the_Next_Big_Thing/ This article states Sam Zell endorsed Fitrova on NBC news, but there is no video. The video is actually just a jpeg. (My own digging shows Sam Zell doing many interviews with NBC on finance, however none related to Crypto, and the last one was in January).
[8] FRV admins have given crazy price predictions, guaranteed volume, and stated on their website that they can prevent price dumps from happening by having exchanges limit the maximum daily FRV that can be sold. This is price manipulation.
Analysing the medium post made by the CEO of FITROVA (Bryan SEILER) on the ICO :
https://medium.com/@TwilxSEO/fitrova-review-the-best-ico-for-2018-a6590ca075cf
This is aggressive marketing with wrong informations… Let’s try to analyse them point by point :
“Need to know the best ICO in 2018? A perfect response would be to tell you about Fitrova and the big opportunity that lay underneath the new bitcoin alternative.”
An ERC20 is not a new bitcoin alternative, Fitrova is a utility token and not a decentralized currency. So no big opportunity here, just aggressive marketing.
As you continue on reading this article, this is a price oriented written by the company that have created Fitrova (Twilx).
“ Going by this, this article introduces you to a coin that is frankly promising and might definitely become the big one in the Ethereum ERC-20 group of Bitcoin alternatives. ”
ERC20 tokens are not a decentralized currency alternatives like Bitcoin, they are a way of tokenize the economy of a project mainly run by a company. There is no Company behind Bitcoin or any other decentralized currency project like DECRED, Zcash, etc.
“The Fitrova FRV token would unarguably be the next big one in the cryptocurrency market. This is not another way of convincing you to invest in any of this but the innovation of Fitrova is something anyone with an instinct for future profitability should look at.”
“Fitrova and its FRV tokens are the next generations of the blockchain and Bitcoin alternatives.”
We are arguing on that yes ! This is a regular ERC20 this is not a tech next generation project. It may sounds stupid to making a point here but people are really believing that Fitrova is an innovative company because it’s a next generation blockchain company. This is a random ERC20 token like thousands of other in the crypto space ! Fitrova is using an open source code to create a new ERC20 token. Anyone can do so in 20 minutes, creating a ERC20 token is very easy.
We are not gonna discuss the utility for the Gym industry to use Fitrova token, everyone should be able to determine if there is an actual need for this business.
Let’s now move on crazy numbers…
“The Fitrova ICO or crowd sale kicks off with a set maximum hard cap of $326 million and a soft cap of $71 million. A 50% discount would be available during a pre-ICO period for 8,000,000,000 coins, while the actual ICO will take place in four rounds. The first round of these would offer 6,000,000,000 FRV tokens for a 45% discount. The same number of coins would also be offered in subsequent rounds for the first round discount less 10% in the second and 5% in the third and fourth round respectively.”
Yes you read that right : a hard cap of 326 million dollars for a utility ERC20 token on the Gym industry. If you are new to the crypto sphere you may not realise how big and crazy is that number but it is. If you compare to other project like EOS, ICON and other at their ICOs you will realize how big those numbers are…
The soft cap of 71 million dollars is a funny one too of course but I think you get the point already.
In fact we believe that Fitrova didn’t even finished their pre-ICO, as they were asking for 8 billions coins at a discount of 50%, they have today a total supply of 7.5 billions coins.
So the ICO was obviously not the 2018 best ICO, but this kind of failure has repercussions on how the token is distributed between users. You get it, few people have a lot of those Fitrova, it is highly concentrated :
So we can clearly see that this is an highly concentrated project and by analysing those addresses, they have a common link so some of them might be owned by the same person. The top 20 of those address represente 83% of the total Fitrova token:
This is a major concern because in case of exit scam, it can be done very quickly. Let’s go on and go through the rest of the medium article regarding their ICO :
On the day of the ICO completion May 30th, 3.5 billion Fitrova were transferred to this wallet (transaction id). This is 45% of the total supply. This would make sense for an ICO distribution or a coin burn, however this wallet has proceeded to make small withdrawals to many different wallets continuously for four weeks and is now empty. The white paper states 90% of the supply was to be allocated to public token sale. Exchanges source their coins from user deposits or perhaps from the marketing supply of the team for promotions. One wallet should never hold 45% of the total circulating supply. According to the team their wallets are all locked, and the coins are not staked as they are now moving freely through the market.
“Fitrova’s stake allocation is another testament to its uniqueness as a bitcoin alternative. Thirty-three percent of its stake allocation is set for research and development. The allocation follows a decreasing order to the market acquisition and team partners finally with 11%.”
The stack of 33% is not visible on the top 20 token holders, and let’s be honest : does a ERC20 token need to stack 33% in Research and Development ?? Well, they are in the ethereum blockchain, the research and development is not needed by Fitrova team !
“There is no way this is fake but you would be on a better side of everything if you get FRV tokens now than you would ever be if you wait to regret.”
“Try to make the best decisions while you can as there is no reason to doubt Fitrova.”
Well just by seeing those lines wrote by the founder of the project regarding the fact that Fitrova is not “fake” and “there is no reason to doubt about Fitrova” should raise a Red flag to anyone reading this. ERC20 token are easy to make (20 minutes), investors should be careful, here is a link to a SEC awareness spreading project regarding fake project.(https://www.howeycoins.com/index.html)
Fitrova didn’t reach the ICO goals (71–326 millions dollars) so they continued the project so far but we have in this article gathered information that this project can turn RED very very fast and investors are not safe.
Author’s Final Thoughts:
Well that’s it for today, We hope that this community work has been helpful to some investors. We will report in here every new aspect of this investigation. Feel free to leave any comment below and if you want to join the Scam Fighting Squad you are welcome on board ! See you guys until the next SCAM !
We are the SCAM Fighting Squad and we hope that this will bring more knowledge to investors that are doing their investment research.
If you want to join the telegram channel that has been investigating the scam : https://t.me/fitrovascam
This article was created with the joint investigation and efforts of several community members who have invested hours preparing, proofreading, editing and verifying the information presented in the article. We posted this article first on Medium (https://medium.com/@youself4568/fitrova-a-not-so-well-hidden-scam-65d52766e4b) and we're posting it here now because we believe this news should be shared everywhere. This is a note to the spam -bot owners on Steemit platform that this article is not copy pasted here to spam the platform but to create awareness so please don't take this down as this might save a lot of people getting scammed from this malicious project!
Hey, I am thinking of producing a video on this scam, I would love to talk to you about all the research you've put in. Is this possible?
Hello brother @fezphotographer , Our team is open to help anybody who wants to participate in the community action to bring down this malicious project. Just today another youtuber contacted us for it too! Please join our telegram channel for further discussions and more info: https://t.me/fitrovascam