How an ICO can easily get stolen and tips for protection. Lessons from Superior Coin

An ICO or Initial Coin Offering can be stolen easily if the right measures are not in place. Recently I ran one for Superior Coin with disastrous results.
You can see the way the theft has been carried out by the comments on this post. A group of about 10 thieves have created dozens of accounts in an attempt to carry out the theft by trying to make people believe that my database, my savings and my business did not even belong to me. They have left my wife and I with our clothes and our laptops and now they have to try and get away with it. In broad daylight. It is amazing to watch. Look at their repetitive and completely empty accusations and comments. I have not even bothered to use their down voting methods to try to get them removed from Steemit.

So some tips
The most important thing is to show zero trust in anybody in your team. I trusted and I just lost several million dollars and several years work and investment. Luckily for my wife and I we were not in this for money so will continue on our path to helping the environment and people's health. We are still in a daze about having everything taken but we still have our clothes and laptops and will recover.

So some random tips.

1. If possible to not begin your public blockchain until after the ICO is finished. This will greatly diminish the chance of all your money and all your coins being stolen together.
2. Divide tasks. If possible do not allow anybody access to anything but if this is not possible make sure of these things. Do not allow one programmer access to both coins and money. Especially do not allow them access to your database or your social media accounts.
3. People nowadays have the attitude that if they can get away with stealing something then they somehow deserve it as their own property. People now barely care about wrong or right and in general will not support you when you are stolen from. They will gravitate towards supporting the thief as the thief is the one who now has the means to pay them.
4. Do not expect help from the courts or the police or enforcement authorities they simply will not care.
5. It is not much help to have built a community around your project if you are stolen from. The community will immediately side with the thief making the recovery of your property even more difficult. People will just go where the money is.
6. If possible tell nobody your business plan as the thief will simply steal it
7. Use cold storage wallets to store your crypto currency do not keep it on an exchange it is too easy for the thief to get at.
8. Use double factor authentication wherever you can.
9. Do not be lulled into giving even the slightest bit of trust even if a team member lives in your house for 8 months as Nathan Senn did with me. It is possible that he had this planned for as long as 2 years since he first started working for me.
10. Keep your premined coins or your tokens in a wide variety of secret places so if say 90% of them get stolen you will at least be left with something.
11. Nobody in the crypto currency world will care less about you. It is a cold, evil jungle where everybody is out for themselves. Accept this and deal with it.
12. Forums such as Bitcoin Talk and Facebook are pay to play. Administrators and staff are routinely bribed so do not accept assistance. My Superior Coin Facebook page was stolen by Nathan Senn gaining remote access to my computer and making himself an admin and then deleting my wife and I. After promising initially to immediately reverse this Facebook then went cold. The people there had obviously been bribed. We are having to take Facebook to court to recover our stolen page. A huge hassle and would not have happened on Steemit. Of course the thieves Colin Sydes @sydesjokes, Joan Stewart @joanstewart and John Gentry @exploretravel and others are blocking any adverse comment or questions on all posts there.
13. Bitcoin Talk will delete any posts you try to make if you are not paying them hefty bribes. I have several instances of proof about this. I have a list of 8 consecutive deleted Bitcoin Talk posts and several people in our growing team of supporters are finding that their posts are deleted too. It is amazing. I have had several Bitcoin Talk admins and early users contact me and seek bribes. They will do nothing for under $10,000.

1. Do not rely on anybody to help you you are on your own.
2. Learn as much as you can about servers and online security. Knowledge is power.
3. Have a Plan B. My wife and I were completely cleaned out so have found it very difficult to recover
4. Be extremely vigilant every day it only takes a few seconds for a thief to strike.
5. Do not give programming staff any coins for free they begin to think that they are start of the business
6. Get copyright or at least make applications
7. Avoid people with a previous criminal history
8. If stolen from take huge action on the first few days. We expected that reason would prevail but instead several of our staff turned against us when they saw the chance of money and assisted in the theft
9. Be careful where you base. We were in Taiwan which is pretty much a country without laws so it was difficult to get an official stop order at the airport. We were promised it by the court and our lawyer but still Nathan Senn managed to escape

How these people who have run off with our business hope for a minute to get away with it is completely beyond me. I still retain enough hope in humanity to believe that one day somebody will do the right thing and stop this.

Read more starting at the bottom the end of the orginal Bitcoin Talk thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1974261.0;all
Please comment here on the fake Bitcoin Talk thread and watch your post get quickly removed https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2088169.new#new

Twitter is at https://twitter.com/thesuperiorcoin

Good luck with your ICO. I will keep updating on our daily efforts to catch these thieves.

Michael