Zipett History X: What happened with Bartercoin?
IMPORTANT NOTE: The information discussed below is a personal honest opinion that has been developed as a result of both research of publicly discoverable information and conversations with people involved in the matter. Take this as an honest personal opinion and form your own opinions based on the arguments and points presented below and your own critical thinking.
In case you haven't already reviewed our previous expose on all things Zipett / BART / Rob Tidy, please go and review it here: https://www.insightmedianow.com/is-rob-tidy-from-zipett-guilty/ that way you're completely up to date.
Key Points
- Bartercoin token was created on the 9th of November, 2017.
- Between creation and ceasation of activity, the main storage wallet did 846 transactions and went from 1 billion tokens down to ~277 million (09/11/17 to 23/08/18).
- Sources state that millions of dollars were raised from ordinary mum/dad investors.
- Bartercoin tokens appear to be privately sold beyond June, 2018 (last 100k token movement from main storage wallet was on 23rd of August, 2018 - That wallet still has all 100k tokens in it).
- Bartercoin listed its token on South American Exchange (South Xchange) without telling their investors the token was live on the exchange.
- Review of the South Xchange blockchain transaction relating to BART tokens, show activity starting on the 1st of January, 2018 and last proxy wallet (connected to company) activity being 20th of June, 2018.
- Almost 95% of transactions on the South Xchange are in some way, shape or form, related to the Bartercoin team members.
- It appears, in my humble opinion, that the Bartercoin team unethically ran their own LEGACY into the ground by over promising, under delivering and sucking all the liquidity from the exchanges forcing the price well below 1 cent.
Recap
For those who lack the motivation to review the post above before diving into this one; let me give you the 60-second elevator pitch.
I came across the world of Rob Tidy and Zipett due to a friend being aggressively pitched to buy a crypto from Rob called ZIPC, a product of Robs Zipett business.
As a result, I did some digging and found some very questionable things about Rob online, which led me to do a full investigation, which included vigorous research and conversations with victims of Rob's misdoings.
The pattern uncovered was: Hype around a game-changing product, money being taken from investors with a knowledge deficit, shady activities occurring in the business followed by a fall out between rob and team, Rob casting all the blame on the team before phoenixing into a new project to string desperate investors along, and maybe even getting a little extra money out of the ones he really has sold on his "VISION".
As I dug deeper and published articles online, disgruntled acquaintances of Mr Zipett came out of the woodwork to share their bad experiences - which often correlated with what others had shared.
During this research, I uncovered suspicious activity around Bartercoins blockchain transactions on the exchange they secretly listed the token, meaning without informing any investors of the listing, and that is what we will be covering today.
Basic Understanding
Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this article, we first need to cover some basic technical information so what we cover makes sense.
In case you were not aware, we now have a technology called blockchain, which is effectively a way to store data in blocks, which get chained together when they reach capacity, and are unchangeable records.
Often blockchain uses distributed ledgers, which just means that instead of there being central storage of the ledger (blocks of data), the ledger is actually decentralized and accessible on any device that uses the blockchains software.
This allows anybody, anywhere in the world, to see a current version of the ledger and all its validated transaction records - importantly, these records can not be changed by anybody.
This means you can go back and see every single transaction that a crypto has ever done and sometimes, put together pieces of a story that shady actors may wish to keep hidden.
So that's blockchain in general, next you need to know there are applications called blockchain explorers that allow you to do as much research as you like and you can even create tags on wallet addresses, something very convenient for trying to make sense of the nonsense.
Starting At Genesis
Genesis 3:1 - Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
We are about to start moving into the rather peculiar case of Bartercoin transactions, now if you'd like to play a game and follow along at home, use the link below this paragraph to explore the BART tokens transactions for yourself.
BART Transactions (South Xchange): https://etherscan.io/token/0x3989167193214886330c3e4b5535428e168cf6bd?a=0x324cc2c9fb379ea7a0d1c0862c3b48ca28d174a4
Start on page 4 and work your way towards page 1.
I have successfully linked, what appears in my humble opinion to be:
- 16 cash out wallets
- 3 market-making wallets
- 3 random transaction wallets (would be used to loop funds around different connected wallets above)
- 3 burner wallets (similar to the above wallets)
- A number of storage wallets also
What makes these wallets stand out, was not obvious until I started to inspect the exchange (South Xchange) that the Bartercoin team decided to secretly list on... by secretly, I mean, according to sources, they neglected to inform their investors of their live listing status. (Honk honk ethical business practices no?)
See, when I looked at the South Xchange transactions, filtered to BART tokens, that is where we started to find patterns and wallets that were suspicious.
So let's get started!
BART Initial Wallet: 0x5e42fb4bba1966d977b327951134c80aca124ed2
BART Contract Address: 0x3989167193214886330c3e4b5535428e168cf6bd
BART Storage Wallet: 0x026a8711fdd0f40c171e5dd11f8f2aedffe7fcd8
As we can see, there are 976 transactions on this address and 20 pages of records... however, we are interested in the genesis records.
We can click that wallet address and we can then see that the BART Initial Wallet sent 999M tokens to BART Storage...
From here, when we inspect this wallet, BART STORAGE, we can see 800+ records, 34 pages, and more than 200M BART still remaining.
If we go to page 34, we can start to pull at the string and see what is connected to where - keep in mind, this wallet now holds virtually all the tokens.
Now it took me getting all the way to page 19 before I discovered my first breadcrumbs in the form of a linkable wallet address - see the 50,000 transfer at the top of the image below.
As we can see, this record opened us up to many more connected wallets - from here it was just the process of clicking from record to record, applying tags, and then comparing them with the South Xchange records.
If we keep progressing through the storage wallet and around the listing date (April / May) we see cash out wallets start to appear:
As more time passed (short intervals mind you) we see more and more linked wallet activity from the main storage wallet.
We can start gaining a more full picture when we click on some of these wallets, for example, let us check a cash-out wallet shall we:
How about another...
More?
How about market-making wallets, what were they doing?
Looks like it would purchase tokens from the exchange and then send the purchased tokens to cash out wallets - I wonder what happened at those wallets?
Let us check cash out wallet #10 of the date 03/06/2018 @ 12:58.
Inbound of 2,500 tokens at 12:58 as mentioned above and cashed out on the exchange 45min later.
Z4Life..? A new standard in scams 🥳
Is this the behavior of people trying to ethically run a business and do the right thing? I will leave that up to you to decide.
This suspicious pattern is repeated across over 20 different wallet addresses and if you want to look at them all yourself, I have given you the way to do it.
To put the whole scam into a high-level perspective let's quickly check the South Xchange records.
I think you get the point yes?
Conclusion
Ecclesiastes 7:8 - "The end of a thing is better than its start, and a gentle spirit is better than pride."
It is in my humble opinion, that based on all observable metrics, the team at Bartercoin did not have the best intentions for the investors they took money from and effectively rug pulled their own LEGACY.
This is clear to see even for Stevie Wonder.
Now I reached out to Bartercoins recorded CFO, Kym Gallagher of Viva Leisure (ASX listed company) for comment, as according to sources, Rob says Kym controlled these wallets.
However, Kym has not gotten back to me.
Did Kym control the wallets? Who controls Kym? Who was the diabolical puppet master pulling the strings of Bartercoin and ripping countless people off?
It is a great mystery, one that I certainly have my assumptions about.
What is undeniable is that Bartercoin was not run with integrity or ethics in mind, something that appears to be a feature in all things that Rob Tidy touches, in my humble opinion.
It really makes you wonder about all the poor people that got sucked into this Ponzi scheme.
Because even right towards the end, there were big outgoings of BART to what can only be assumed are unrelated buyers (The criteria I set for the unrelated buyer was they received tokens and had no interactions with previously established proxy wallets and never interacted with the exchange)
Look at this person who bought 500M right towards the end (page 1)
It really is sad to see that nobody was held accountable for this and we can only live in hope that one day, justice will be brought to all the victims of these petty financial crimes, committed by narcissistic children.
Over the next few posts we will move through 434u and Zipett Poker.
With love of tacos,
Debunk El Funk
