A new initial coin offering (ICO) called Miroskii hopes to build a ‘decentralized bank’ by utilizing blockchain technology. Looking at the white paper and the website, it appears to have solid ideas and even a nice looking team behind the project. However, looking a bit closer at the team shows the ICO’s ‘graphic designer’ just happens to be a stock image of the Hollywood actor Ryan Gosling. In fact, after inspecting further, the entire team seems to be phoney and randomly chosen business types who have nothing to do with this technology.
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This ICO’s Graphic Artist Is a Stock Photo of the Hollywood Actor Ryan Gosling
There’s been a lot of ICOs over the past year and these blockchain projects and ERC20s have raised billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies. Many projects have raised millions without producing a single thing except a website and white paper. Months later many of these projects still haven’t produced anything and a number of them are pure vaporware. It’s not easy to figure out whether or not some of these ICOs are legitimate. However, some of them are extremely easy to spot and Miroskii is one of these projects with a team made up of entirely fabricated team members – but the ICO has still raised over $800,000 USD so far. Miroskii also plans to host another funding round next week.
A Great Majority of the Miroskii ICO Team Members Are Phony
So why is this project so shady? It all comes down to the team behind it or rather the lack thereof, because most of the team seems fake. The biggest indication of this is Miroskii’s artist ‘Kevin Belanger,’ an “experienced graphic designer with a clear focus on identities and illustration,” who looks just like the actor Ryan Gosling. In fact, it is Ryan Gosling’s stock image that’s used heavily by newspapers, magazines, and advertisements. It seems that Miroskii’s graphic designer really needs to up their game because the entire team is stock images of random business people (some well known) who have nothing to do with blockchain or cryptocurrencies. However, nobody noticed the phoney team until the creator of Dogecoin Jackson Palmer tweeted about the project.
According to the tech publication Cnet, the entire team is fake and the story was initially exposed by the Twitter handle Cryptoshillnye. Another Twitter handle called Claus Wahlers explains that the team’s ‘Perry Henderson’ is supposedly a CEO of multiple firms but really Henderson is a real-estate agent from Texas. Miroskii’s ‘Joel Hermann’ is the ‘Founder of Mysterium Network’ and a “huge technology fan” is really Ben B. Rubinowitz, an attorney from New York. The Twitter personality Cryptoshillnye has revealed the entire Miroskii team is fake. The Miroskii website was not operational at the time of publication and hasn’t been up for hours.
