I want to warn people about the team behind Friendz ICO. How they treat the community is just not right.
They startet their "power-hour" of their ICO on 28.02.2018. At that time they sold locked Tokens for a 40% discount. The Tokens are locked for 1 year and every month 1/12 of them can be sold. So a rather risky long term investment. That's why most people prefered to wait for unlocked Tokens. The power-hour took not place for 1 hour as normally, they sold the locked Tokens for a whole day. That alone confused a lot of the investors.
For the next day it was planned to start the unlocked Token sale at 11am UTC. The night before a lot of official Admins confirmed that time. Please have a look at the times.
Until late in the night they confirmed that the unlocked Token sale will take place the next day at 11am UTC.
Now the shady part. Shortly before the sale they changed the time for the unlocked Token sale to 12 UTC. Leading to a huge amount of people buying locked Tokens by accident.
And they even did not have a single announcement explicitly warning about that change. On the picture you can even see that they make wrong statements. Again, please have a look at the times.
Did you notice something? At 16:36 of my time zone they had the announcement that the unlocked Token sale will start in 1 hour. THEY EVEN USE CAPITAL LETTERS FOR IT. It was 09:36 UTC at that time. So 1 hour and 24 minutes before 11 UTC.
At 17:57 of my time zone, so less than 2 minutes before the original unlocked Token sale they had another announcement stating again that the unlocked Token sale will start in 1 hour.
Why the hell would people check for changes 2 minutes before the sale? Who would think of it? And why do they always only announce on Telegram? They did not have a single announcement or warning on their webpage. And even not in the dashboard, where you manage your account and buy Tokens.
A lot of people trusted their words. They woke up, went to work. They had their timers ready. So did I.
Shortly before the sale I was ready and prepared. I moved my ETH from Binance to my Metamask wallet. I signed in to the friendz.io dashboard and I saw that the power-hour timer there had stopped. So I assumed that the power-hour was over. I even checked the news in the Telegram group. There where no changes announced back then. That's why I thought that everything was fine.
Some time after I purchased the Tokens I went to the Telegram group. Just to check how long it will take for my Tokens to arrive in the dashboard. Then I already saw a lot of people raging and complaining about that misleading 1 hour delay. And I realised that I just bought locked Tokens.
There was a lot of rage going on in the group.
I understand why someone would become angry over this. An ICO is always a risky thing. You have a team that you want to trust and that you rely on. Some people invest money that they will need in the near future. They hope to somewhat solve their money problems with the investment. And if you can not sell your Tokens for a long time, you might get trouble with your finances.
So there continued a lot of frustration and confusion in the community.
Okay now we have seen a lot of people angry over this, asking for a refund or asking for their Tokens to get unlocked. We also saw a lot of people confused about the times, days and the whole situation. The whole sale seemed out of control.
And how did the Admins react? The team behind Friendz? Oh gosh, they kept being stubborn and some of them even got personal offensive.
Can you see how the Community Manager "Peter" manages the community? He insults people not to be stupid. He also accuses them not to be able to read. The Co-Founder Alessandro Cadoni does the same thing.
They break their own words but accuse people to be too stupid to read news that they only publish on a third party app and not on their own website. And that minutes before the sale.
Is that the right way to treat your community who is supporting your project, although they do not know if it will succeed?
Friendz.. a word derived from the word friends. Do friends treat you like this?
"NO! NO REFUNDS! GO AWAY! YOU ARE TOO STUPID TO READ! IT'S NOT THAT HARD! WE CAN NOT HELP YOU IF YOU SEND MONEY WITHOUT READING!"
Some people may ask themselves: "Why did they delay the unlocked Token sale for one hour?".
The team did not make a single statement regarding this last-minute change.
But we can assume together.
They had technical problems about the unlocked Tokens.
I do not know enough about the programming behind Blockchains and Tokens. So I do not know how likely this is. But I highly think that they would have explained it if the change would be based on a technical issue.The power-hour, or let's say power-day might not have been as succesfull as they hoped. They might not have raised enough of "safe" money, so they extended it for one hour. But how much of a difference can 1 additional hour after a 24 hour sale make?
...unless...!!!
- The Friendz ICO team did know for sure that promptly on 11 UTC a lot of people would want to buy unlocked Tokens ASAP. In fear of the Tokens being sold out. People would not wait and read announcements on a third party channel like Telegram. Because they would believe in the word of the admins who assured the unlocked Token sale to take place at 11 UTC. They could have planned this before, to make a lot of people buy locked Tokens by accident.
I will not tell which of these options I think is most likely. But everyone can think for himself.
I hope that 1 hour of "sneaky" locked Token sale was worth it for the Friendz Team. Because that made them loose some reputation in the community. Sure, they still have a lot of loyal followers. Because not everyone tried to buy unlocked Tokens ASAP at 11 UTC. Many people did not even understand why so many people complain.
After I posted the first picture of this post in the official Telegram group and after I told them to explain us again that they are not trying to trick people, they immediately deleted the evidence picture and kicked me out of the group.
But what is most shocking about the whole incident is how "don't care"-like the team handles their poor miscommunication. They do not intend to explain themselves. They did not apologize yet and I'm sure they will not. And even less they think about a refund or to unlock the Tokens sold after 11 UTC.
Imagine that you wake up one day and you just lost your house because your bank decided to change something overnight.
Oh don't be stupid, you could have read TELEGRAM 2 minutes ago! Your bank announced something there! GO AWAY!
Thank you for reading. I am not a native english speaker so I apologize for the mistakes that I make.
It took my some time to write all of this, so if you liked it please leave me an upvote, or share it with your friends. Maybe it will help someone to reconsider their investment plans.
And do not forget to always keep being critical!