ICO Scam Flees After Naming Ryan Gosling Part of the Team

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 1 min read

Another initial coin offering (ICO) pulls an exit scam after putting the picture of a Canadian actor Ryan Gosling to the name of “their” graphic designer, Kevin Belanger.

The ICO, called Miroskii, claims to have raised more than USD 833,000 from 389 contributors. It was discovered by Twitter user @CryptoShillNye, who was perusing through ICOs when he came across something unusual.

While Kevin Belanger looks like he may make better money as a body double for Ryan Gosling than as a mere designer for a tiny ICO, developer Claus Wahlers dug a little deeper and found that the rest of the team is just as fake as Mr. Gosling 2.

Some of the images are stock photos, others have been stolen from social media profiles. Interestingly enough, all of them share two things: they are men, and they are all at least somewhat attractive.

This, however, wasn’t the first red flag potential investors should have noticed. An archived version of the now-shut down ICO website is littered with wild claims and typos. This self-proclaimed “Bank without bankers” claimed that, “MRC payment processor and pre-paid card is being issued by Visa, Master Card [sic], Maestro Card, American express [sic] and many more.” Also, according to the website, Miroskii Coin (MRC) was in the process “to get regulated under the EUROPEAN [sic] Union.” Third, Miroskii claimed that MRC had already been “tested, approved and accepted by most of the industry giants who has [sic] already started using the MRC in their closed B2B sector,” even though this has nowhere been reported, which makes it an extremely unlikely scenario.

Also, “whitepaper coming soon” was quite a lazy idea, since better thought out scams at least plagiarize someone. The only hope remaining is that the amount of USD 833,000 raised according to them is as fake as the rest of their story.