
NZ teen's $220m ICO venture triggers official warnings - spondyl
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11947186
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gthartley
Wow.

>Despite claims of enormous turnover and traffic, a search showed around only
400 listings in total, many up to four months old.

"A full 10 percent of listings of goods for sale on the site were found to
have been placed by Sharma and his chief operating officer and University of
Auckland student Dinyar Irani - the company's only two employees - with the
pair trying to sell a soft toy and their NCEA schoolbooks.

Alexa analytics, a service providing information on website traffic, shows
unusual results for Sell My Good. The vast majority of visitors - 99.96 per
cent percent - are reported to have come from only one country: Japan.

Despite this dominance, the site has fewer than a dozen sales listings from
Japan, and Google shows the site is only mentioned once in the country's
internet domain.

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tdumitrescu
"Sharma is presently a student at San Francisco's "Draper University of
Heroes", a for-profit bootcamp for entrepreneurs that is not accredited to
award degrees."

You can't make this stuff up...

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fvrghl
There was a reality-show about it once called "Startup U":
[https://freeform.go.com/shows/startup-u](https://freeform.go.com/shows/startup-u)

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wccrawford
>"They treated us as a joke. It's really bad, they think 'oh, he's a 19-year-
old kid who knows nothing," he said of the market regulator.

I would hope that the market regulator treats _everyone_ as if they know
nothing, and forces them to prove things. Not just this guy.

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askafriend
Honestly, I don't know what to say to this. It's pretty moronic at every level
but...it worked I guess?

Bleh, I'll just go meditate now. No use in getting angry.

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georgedotsmith
An update to this saga, "Teen's under-fire cryptocurrency offer withdrawn"
[http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&o...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11948672)

~~~
spondyl
Ah, thanks for the update! I figured as much, since the ICO site had been down
all weekend, but at least this trainwreck has been halted for now.

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magicfoxs
Makes us wonder how many of his previous 'achievements' were similarly
exaggerated.

~~~
georgedotsmith
Most, I'd say. He had another venture called "Share My Garage", which was a
rental site that he has since stopped promoting. Ashutosh made repeated claims
that Share My Garage had been accepted in YC when in fact it had not.

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cableshaft
Well he has a functional e-commerce website. Quite a few of these ICOs don't
even have a working anything.

But still, yikes. This is why you have to be careful around ICOs.

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wyqydsyq
The saying "Fake it 'till you make it" really comes to mind here.

The kid is hoping he can lie and scheme his way to success.

Sorry bud but that doesn't work with startups, maybe if you were already an
executive at a multinational corporation where you have little accountability
and any blame can fall onto the company, but if you lie as a startup founder
your reputation and that of all your future ventures will be ruined.

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Xeoncross
> This week he began accepting investor funds, hoping to raise $220 million

Do we have any proof that Ashutoush has actually raised anything?

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georgedotsmith
Their ICO website, which is currently down, had claimed that they had raised
$1 million in the first 6 hours of the eCash token sale.

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alexasmyths
Poster Child for the Era.

