Crypto Wars Ch. 2: Exit Scams, Savedroid, Prodeum and the $660M Vanishing Act
From Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption by Erica Stanford (ISBN 9781398600683). This is a chapter retelling, not a substitute for the book.
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Chapter 1 showed how easy it was to raise money in crypto. Chapter 2 asks the obvious follow-up: what happens when founders realize they already have your cash and don’t need to pretend anymore?
That’s the exit scam. Raise funds. Build hype. Disappear. In the 2017-2018 ICO bubble, it was almost expected.
Savedroid: the $50 million “prank”
In early 2018, German ICO Savedroid raised $50 million promising an AI-powered crypto savings ecosystem. Then the CEO, Yassin Hankir, tweeted “Thanks guys! Over and out…” with airport selfies and a beach beer photo. The website became a full-screen South Park meme: “AANNND IT’S GONE.”
Blockchain consultant Theo Goodman visited their Wiesbaden office. Empty chairs. Monitors still plugged in. Leftover pizza. Classic exit scam vibes.
Then Hankir came back. He claimed the whole thing was a PR stunt to warn people about exit scams. Investors were briefly relieved. Then furious. The token crashed about 98%. Within months, the $50 million in value was basically gone. A class action followed.
Stanford’s read is fair: Hankir had a point about scam culture, but faking an exit scam to teach a lesson still cost investors real money. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Prodeum and the $5 body paint
Not every exit scam was a blockbuster. Lithuanian vegetable ICO Prodeum paid Fiverr workers $5 each to write the company name on their bodies and pose as fans. A BuzzFeed reporter traced the photos in minutes.
Prodeum raised under $100. Small win for sanity. Then the team replaced their entire website with one word on a white background: “penis.” That was the whole goodbye.
When exchanges exit too
ICOs weren’t the only exit point. Crypto exchanges held user funds centrally, often with weak security and anonymous teams. White-label exchange software meant anyone could spin one up fast.
QuadrigaCX in Canada gets a preview here (full story in Chapter 6). Founder Gerald Cotten allegedly died with hundreds of millions locked away. Many users still want his body exhumed because they don’t believe he’s dead.
Pure Bit, a South Korean exchange, raised $2.8 million in 2018 even though ICOs were already illegal there. The team drained everything into one wallet, shut the site, kicked users off Kakao chat, and posted “thank you.” Standard exit scam playbook.
Plot twist: the CEO felt guilty within a day and started returning some funds. Stanford notes this was rare. Most scammers didn’t look back.
PlexCoin: predicting the future to the cent
PlexCoin aimed to “reinvent the global financial system” with debit cards accepted everywhere, adapting to any local currency. No bank or government has solved that. PlexCoin claimed they would.
Red flags everywhere. No team identities “for security.” A mystery Visa “sister company.” Whitepaper dropped hours before the sale so nobody could analyze it. They even criticized other ICOs for fake team photos while hiding their own people.
The wildest part: PlexCoin published exact future token prices. Buy at 13 cents, they said, and it hits $14 by end of 2018. They promised 1,354% gains in under 29 days. Guaranteeing prices like that is illegal and impossible. They still raised $15 million of a $249.5 million target.
The SEC stepped in. Founders got a two-month jail term and $100,000 fine. Charges included spending investor money on daily living and home renovations. Assets frozen. Investors mostly wrote it off.
Shopin: shopping with other people’s money
Shopin claimed it would build personalized shopping profiles on blockchain. Fake partnership claims. $42 million raised. The founder allegedly spent at least $500,000 on rent, shopping, entertainment, and a dating service. The platform never shipped. He was fined $450,000, which Stanford points out is less than what he reportedly took.
The $660 million Vietnamese exit
The biggest pure exit scam in the chapter is Modern Tech out of Vietnam. Two tokens: PinCoin and Ifan. Combined take: $660 million from 32,000 people. Crypto transactions were illegal in Vietnam, so investors were already breaking the law.
PinCoin promised 48% monthly returns plus 8% referral bonuses. Classic Ponzi math. The site looked polished but said almost nothing concrete. PinCoin paid out at first, then switched payouts to Ifan tokens, then stopped paying entirely. Seven nationals fled the country.
Stanford ties this to the same greed engine behind OneCoin, Bitconnect, and Plus Token. When returns look life-changing, some people stop asking basic questions.
Why exit scams worked
The pattern repeats. ICOs handed founders millions upfront with no milestones, no escrow, no board oversight. Exchanges pooled user crypto in single wallets. Hacks and “technical issues” were so common that a shutdown could pass for bad luck.
My take
Chapter 2 is where the Wild West stops being funny. Prodeum’s one-word website is almost comedy. Savedroid’s fake exit is performance art with real victims. Modern Tech is just theft at industrial scale.
What stuck with me is how little creativity exit scammers needed. Thank-you tweets. Guilt posts. Frozen whitepapers. Promised Visa cards. The tools were basic. The money was not.
If Chapter 1 was about how tokens got funded, Chapter 2 is about what happened when founders realized nobody could stop them from leaving. That’s the bridge to OneCoin, where the exits get bigger and the founders get bolder.
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