The Wolf of Wall Street: ICO is the biggest scam of all

Former stockbroker / Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort determined ICO (Initial Coins Offering) as "the greatest scam". A new form of fund-raising, ICO is, in fact, the sale of cryptographic tokens by start-ups in exchange for financing with the help of crypto currency, such as bitcoin and ether, to attract funding in the early stages. Earlier in September, the project of decentralized data storage Filecoin set an ICO record, raising $ 257 million. According to one tracker, the collection of funds by the ICO method in 2017 exceeded $ 3 billion.

Jordan Belfort, a former Wall Street speculator who pleaded guilty to stock market fraud, suggested that the current admiration for the surrounding ICO would end up in such a way that many would go bankrupt. Speaking to the Financial Times, he said:

"This is the biggest scam, such a huge gigantic scam, on which many people will be ruined. It's much worse than anything I've ever done."

Belfort claimed that the ICO promoters used the "pump and dump" tactic, pampas and dumps (pumping the price, after which it crashes), that is, an aggressive promotion tactic to interest investors before selling all the tokens before the price collapse.

"Promoters [ICO] perpetuate a huge scam of higher order," Belfort said. "Probably 85% of people have no bad intentions, but the problem is that if five or ten percent try to deceive you, it's a devil, a disaster."

Belfort continued to compare the current ICO boom with "blind pools" in the 1970s and early 80s, when brokers attracted investors' funds without revealing how the money would be spent. Brokers earned large commissions before these trading "pools" were dissolved without a single investment.

Belfort added:

Absolutely everyone now wants to jump there. I'm not saying that there is something wrong with the idea of ​​crypto currency or even about "tulipmania". These are people who will get involved there, and then they will kill the idea.
Belfort also recently criticized the Crypto currency, agreeing with the notorious statement of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, that bitcoin is "fraud".