SEC Launches Fake ICO “HoweyCoins,” For Educational Purposes

SEC Releases Scam ICO Website; That Aside, I’m Super Bullish on these HoweyCoins

The SEC launched a fake ICO called “HoweyCoins” to help investors understand what an ICO scam looks like. Red flags include phases, bonuses, claims of high and guaranteed returns, celebrity endorsements, claims of being SEC-compliant, the ability to invest with a credit card, and promises that the coin will be pumped.

Something like, phase 1 includes a 25% discount, X-boxer endorses this coin, and you’ll see 1% returns daily and no less than Y% returns by Z date. Just check out this excerpt from the HoweyCoins white-paper:

Getting in on the initial coin offering (ICO) for HoweyCoins is the only way to guarantee these massive cost savings. If you buy HoweyCoins later, the discounts will get smaller… <—- promising value is a giant red flag.

…The world is in the midst of a digital payments revolution that will cause greater disruption than that caused by the Internet over the last 30 years. Cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-driven digital tokens like HoweyCoins will piggyback on the ubiquitous communications of the Internet to transform how we pay for goods and services…. <—– this is meaningless marketing speak with the words internet, revolution, transform, and blockchain shoved in (think about how often you see this; scary, right?).

I don’t want to give away too much of the punch line, as the site is worth clicking around on yourself, but here is the deal.

If you go to HoweyCoins.com you’ll see a somewhat shoddy looking website with a countdown promising you the moon and shilling a token that sounds exciting in theory, but one could easily argue doesn’t need to exist in practice.

Then it offers a sort of complicated structure packed with incentives and vague promises.

This looks like many of the countless ICOs that have been run between 2017 and 2018 and that is the point.

Many ICOs are scams, while others are real but will likely end up being wastes of money for anyone who doesn’t have their EtherDelta game down (which I assume is 95%+ of crypto investors).

If you would try to invest in an ICO like HoweyCoins, or if you would seek out any scheme that promises you absurd things like compounding 1% daily returns (see the HoweyCoins investment ladder; AKA pyramid), then you should probably take a step back from buying into ICOs and click the buy button on the HoweyCoins website.

When you click the buy button on HoweyCoins you are taken to a page on HoweyCoins on investors.gov (the SEC’s advice site for retail investors) and taught about red flags.

The cryptocurrency space is like a sea of red flags on a good day, and ICOs and lending sites like Bitconnect have more red flags than most of the space. It is worth educating yourself if you have ever considered any ICO with a name like “Drone Blockchain Cloud token” or any site with a pyramid-like incentive structure (i.e. one that uses marketing gimmicks like HoweyCoins).

Check out the HoweyCoins website.

TIP: According to the SEC, and I concur, red flags include: Claims of high, guaranteed returns, celebrity endorsements, claims of being SEC-compliant, the ability to invest with a credit card, and promises that the coin will be pumped.

TIP: With most ICOs the best you are hoping for is for it to be pumped and dumped so you can cash out at the top of the pump and dump. However, the average investor won’t have the skills to pull this off, and thus will be REKT. Don’t get REKT, invest in top coins and be very discerning if and when you do take a moonshot on an ICO. Learn more about how to buy into ICOs without getting REKT.