Cryptocurrency Casino ICO Shows Signs of a Scam

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No matter if you’re a regular at Bitcoin casinos online or are just interested in the cryptocurrency gambling sector, you’ve likely heard the words Zero Coin and Zero Edge a lot during the past couple of months. Zero Edge is an online gambling company that launched an ICO campaign a while ago to gather financing for an online casino that would work on the Zero Coin cryptocurrency. But after the launch of a second leg of its fund-raising campaign, suspicions have arisen whether its investment opportunity is real or fake.

Second ICO Round Raises Even More Suspicion

According to gambling portal Calvin Ayre, Zero Edge could very well turn out to be another ICO scam launched to deceive investors out of their money. As the portal observes, the ICO campaign will be running its second round in June when its tokens will be offered at a 58% discounted price, which raises suspicion as to the real reason for such a large discount. There seem to be two viable answers: A) Its initial round didn’t sold enough coins; or B) the company is being forced to sell due to reports of the campaign being a scam.

The Zero Edge casino will reportedly offer a house edge of 0% and run on the Ethereum-based tokens the ICO was selling. However, the name of the casino was found to be a tad misleading as the information on the site showed that its slots had a house edge of 0.01% while its table games had to be played with “perfect strategy” to achieve the “zero edge”. If players couldn’t play with “perfect strategy”, they could “induce the house edge inadvertently”.

As the whole business model of the company is based on the casino making less money, some online members of the crypto-community have been wary of investing in Zero Coin for fear of being duped out of their money. And, as shown by a recent report on Medium, the whole thing really looks like a scam.

Report Suggests Zero Edge is a “Fake” ICO

Near the end of March, Zero Edge’s ICO campaign was proclaimed a scam by one Simon Casey who investigated the company’s crowd-funding campaign and website and published the findings in a report on Medium. As initial evidence, he provided the social media profiles of the CEO, CFO, and web analyst of Zero Edge, which all were relatively new and lacked information and two of them were even created under completely different names.

Casey also found that some of the listed financial advisors on the website had their names and identities abused without being related to the company in any way and that the site’s casino games were basically demos taken from elsewhere. Namely, when the reporter investigated the games, he found that they linked back to casinos and gambling portals online where they were offered for free and one even linked back to Microsoft’s web store.

Moreover, the casino initially had a Curacao eGaming logo which served to certify that it was licensed, but after investigating the license further, Casey found that it belonged to a different operator. It was subsequently removed. This just goes to show how careful you have to be before investing in ICOs, especially when 4 out of 5 could end up being a scam.