TrueChain EXPOSED #FRAUD #SCAM: The Archetypal Chinese Crypto Scam

As a foreword, I want to make sure that this post is in no way a condemnation of Chinese culture, people or even business and cryptocurrencies that come out of China.

What this is, is a write-up that exposes how another China-based project has taken advantage of the vacuum that has been created in crypto as well as the thriving Chinese population in order to perpetuate yet another scam in the crypto space.

In the same way that Panama’s banking issues had no bearing on how one should judge the character of a Panamanian citizen, I want it to be clear that the character of a Chinese citizen cannot be judged according to these crypto scams either.

TrueChain: Crypto Hustle

So, I ran into TrueChain via an individual named ‘Wen’, whom operates in the main chat (English version) for them.

This individual is also the administrator of this Telegram chat: https://t.me/truechainglobal

This individual requested for more ‘Western exposure’ and begged that I write an article at her behest under the agreement that I would receive 1000 True tokens.

I obliged. However, I noted that the reviews that I write of any project will always be factual in nature. I’m not someone that can be ‘bought’.

When I finished my analysis, this administrator was obviously quite mad. That’s when they demanded that I make certain changes (which I will post in here, in full) before releasing the article.

I found that dishonest, so I told them to kiss my ass that day.

Here’s what I tweeted that day:

Because we never compromise at CryptoMedication.

So Why is TrueChain a Scam?

You’re probably expecting me to give you the horror story of them running off with a bunch of investors’ money from an ICO. Or you want me to tell you how they secretly exited out of the project, dumping all of their coins in order to dupe followers.

But no.

The scam here is a bit more elaborate than that. However, it’s actually the most common scam in all of cryptocurrency.

Here’s How it Works

1. You create a blockchain/token of some sort.
2. Gather up a team full of individuals that no one has ever heard of or seen before. As long as you can create adequate enough LinkedIn profiles and have one of them show their face somewhere every once in a while, that will do.
3. Completely obfuscate the members of your actual technical team. Refer to them with some sort of vague terminology like, ‘our coders’, or ‘our tech guys’ so that people assume that you have a fleet of real engineers working for you.
4. Come up some sort of grandiose idea that solves a non-existent issue.
5. Create an implementation of blockchain that is based falsehoods and half-truths, but present it in a way that makes it seem as though it is a clear upgrade over Bitcoin.

Those five tenets are the primary ingredients for a cryptocurrency scam in the market these days.

Out of all of those numbers though, #5 is probably the most important because this is the ‘gotcha’ for most projects.

Scams Thrive Because of Low Understanding of Blockchain Tech

Let’s face it — blockchain is not an easy thing to understand and unless you’ve seriously sat down and researched how Bitcoin works and broken down each separate element until you understand how it functions at its minutiae, you really won’t ‘get it’ in the way that you need to in order to make a smart investment in this space.

Just knowing the ‘general idea’, is not good enough.

• You need to know what Satoshi means when he says the ‘random walk’ probabilistic distribution is part of what makes it difficult to compromise the chain.
• You need to know that the concept of ‘Proof of Work’ is what makes the random walk valid in the example that Satoshi gave in his whitepaper.
• You need to understand how mining works on a deeper level than ‘Oh, transactions are stuffed in a block and then the winner gets to mine it!’.
• You should have an understanding of how Elliptic Curve Cryptography works and why it was integral to the design of the coin addresses on the protocol and the prevention of collisions.
• You absolutely must understand how hard and soft forks actually work. In theory and in practice (that means study up on your history).
• Understand mathematically why a 51% attack would render a chain vulnerable
• Really understand why Satoshi advocated for a ‘trustless’ protocol (hint: It was not to stick a middle finger up at banks and make a dominant universal currency).

And those are just a few of the concepts that one must undertstand before they can seriously approach blockchain technolgy.

However, most people do not know these things and crypto projects in this space are aware of that.

Crypto Scam Projects Take Advantage of an Ignorance on How Blockchain Works

As much as I hate to say it, Chinese projects are the primary culprits. Often, there will be some grandiose language on the websites of these projects or in their whitepaper that makes assertions about their consensus algorithm that’s entirely false.

There are typically logical fallacies in the ‘argument’ that they present for why their project is ‘better’ that could be spotted a mile away from people that aren’t even well-versed in blockchain technology.

They know that what they’re saying isn’t true or that the plan they’ve proposed isn’t a viable one given the limits and nature of blockchain technology (i.e., calling a blatantly centralized protocol, decentralized).

However, they are also aware of the fact that they just need to ‘sound legit’ and most people will probably buy it without a second question and take the project’s word for whatever they claimed.

TrueChain is No Exception

And they may perhaps be one of the more egregious projects in the space when it comes to this.

Not only is their technological basis entirely fabricated but so is their:

• Alleged Team (None of the partners are the individuals that they claim they are with unverifiable identities)
• Fake volume (they’ve engaged in illegal wash trading on multiple different exchanges)
• Rebranding from a previous scam that they tried to launch that was unsuccessful (Truechain.net) into the TrueChain that you see today — truechain.pro (LOL).
• No deployable code on their GitHub at all.

We’re going to go ahead and work through all of the fraudulent activities of TrueChain though, from top to bottom.

#1 — TrueChain’s is a Rebranded Scam

This is the original TrueChain project:

truechain.net

Notice anything different about them? If not, I’ll point it out for you.

Their original premise was to: ‘

1. Build a “Quantum-Immune Transchain Platform”
2. Provide ‘security’ and ‘privacy’ on the chain as well.

This project obviously didn’t work out (which is why they scrapped it).

However, look at the reaction of the lead admin when I wrote about it anyway:

What the administrator of TrueChain said

However, here’s what I found:

1. Go to their alleged home website (truechain.pro)
2. Click on ‘GitHub’ at the top
3. Click on ‘TrueChain Consensus Protocol’ ; the link is also here directly: https://github.com/truechain/truechain-consensus-core
4. Click on the pbft folder.
5. Then check out this commit here: https://github.com/truechain/truechain-consensus-core/commit/238aef526882f2c469066aeb321c48cf67e4d12c

Guess What You Find!

There it is, bright as day.

So, this really begs the question of why a Chinese team is so adamant on claiming that they are from India…

The Lies That TrueChain Wanted Me to Publish

So, for those that are wondering — I’m referring to this article right here that I published on July 7th, 2018:

TrueChain Review
_So, a project that has caught my attention in recent days and weeks has been TrueChain._medium.com

In it, I give an honest opinion, hold no punches and remain critical of the project.

They actually ported the article release into a word document and then sent it to me directly.

Below are screenshots of the edits that they sent (in blue) that they demanded I include within the article (I didn’t).

#1 — First Lie That TrueChain BEGGED Me to Tell Everyone

TrueChain is distinctly Chinese. In fact, their main website’s default language is in Chinese.

Their primary Telegram group is in Chinese as well:

[TrueChain官方中文社区
"https://www.t.me/truechain")

It has 22k followers in it.

The English version only has 5,000 in it.

They have no other channels in any other languages.

Here’s a look at their team as well:

All of their listed developers AND advisors are Chinese as well.

There is only one Indian person on the team.

So, Why Are They Trying to Hide Their Identity in India?

Who knows.

#2 — Second Lie That TrueChain Wanted Me to Tell Everyone

• There is no information about their foundation being registered in Singapore or even existing. Once again, they seem to be adamant on obfuscating their primary location. This is more than likely to avoid any law enforcement because they’re an obvious scam.
• I never saw more activities in TrueChain’s English group. In fact, on numerous occasions, I saw quite the opposite. It also does not seem they are ‘recruiting community nodes worldwide’, especially seeing as they don’t even have an actively launched platform.

TrueChain Actually Makes a Bold Confession

Wait, There Was No ICO?

Yup. You read that right. All of their investment came from ‘private investors’ that are, of course, undisclosed.

And that’s what was up for grabs. The team already owns 55% of all tokens.

From their whitepaper

They own the “Foundation”, they are the Team, and they own TGE as well. The private ICO also included “Community and Nodes”.

Altogether, that accounts for EVERY SINGLE TOKEN ON THE PROTOCOL. So That Means THAT EVERY SINGLE TOKEN Could Theoretically Be In Possession of the Team

But then again, that would explain the wash trading volume on OKex

Remember, the stuff that they wrote in blue and sent to me, was what they demanded that I redact and add.

#3 — Third Lie That TrueChain Wanted Me to Tell

What they wrote above in blue, once again, simply is NOT true. They do not have a high frequency of GitHub updates. In fact, it’s alarmingly low for a project of their market capitalization rank.

#4 — Fourth Lie That TrueChain Wanted Me to Tell

I could never include some concocted bullshit in any article of mine like this.

TrueChain Engages in Heavy Wash Trading!

Remember when I wrote:

Altogether, that accounts for EVERY SINGLE TOKEN ON THE PROTOCOL. So That Means THAT EVERY SINGLE TOKEN Could Theoretically Be In Possession of the Team

In reference to the fact that they own 55% of the total tokens to ever be distributed on the chain and they also “sold” the remaining 45% to “private investors”, they could theoretically own all of the tokens and we wouldn’t know.

In fact, we wouldn’t even know that a private ICO was held, because they do not divulge that information ANYwhere on the site!

And, as I also mentioned, this would make wash trading more than convenient and easy to do. Check out their traded volume right now:

Their market capitalization is only $37M, yet they somehow have attracted $77M in traded volume. That’s a lot for a coin of this size.

To put this in perspective:

They are currently ranked 17th among ALL coins in total traded volume (note how 95% of it comes from OKEx with barely any interest anywhere else).

Yet, they are ranked #181 out of all cryptocurrencies.

Notice how no other coin close to its rank has anything anywhere near this value:

Yes, this volume is astronomically high for a coin of this market cap. Especially when there’s hardly any interest for it outside of one exchange.

Below, you’ll see they’re ranked 7th on OKEx currently in exchange traded volume and OKEx is #1 among all cryptocurrency exchanges.

Keep in mind, this is a ranking of ALL traded pairs on an exchange. So

TrueChain Blockchain is NOT Deployed And it Appears They Are NOWHERE Close or Near Doing So! [Project is COMPLETE Vaporware]

If you go to the alleged Truechain home website (truechain.pro; you’ll probably have to have it default translated from Chinese), you’ll see this:

Don’t take my word for it, let’s check the GitHub, shall we?

Here, you’ll find a breakdown of the entire team:

[TrueChain
(https://github.com/orgs/truechain/people "https://github.com/orgs/truechain/people")

Here are some screenshots of these individuals below as well:

I noticed that the first guy, Archit Sharma has worked extensively on TrueChain.

Here’s how they have him fixed on the website (notice he’s the only Indian person on there):

I decided to do some more digging and found his Twitter profile:

Archit (@arcolife) | Twitter
_The latest Tweets from Archit (@arcolife). BlockC Borat @truechaingroup, Software Dev[oops], ex-perf&scale…_twitter.com

You can read through and make your own judgments about it.

From that point, I found his LinkedIn profile:

Archit Sharma - Head Of Engineering - TrueChain初链 | LinkedIn
_View Archit Sharma's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Archit has 7 jobs listed on their…_www.linkedin.com

Apparently, he’s been the “Head of Engineering” since April 2018, which is just 3 months ago.

Here’s an interesting tidbit that I found there:

Hmm.

OpenLab Summer Student doesn’t seem to = “Researcher at CERN”

Also, according to his education, it appears he was still in college at the time. So, maybe he was 20 when invited over there? Sounds about right.

Now, like me, you’re probably wondering, “What the hell is an OpenLab Summer Student?”

Great question.

Check out this link:

Applications open for 2018 CERN openlab Summer Students | CERN
_Are you a bachelor's or master's student in computer science, mathematics, engineering, or physics? Do you have a…_home.cern

From their website

This appears to be far cry from “Researcher at CERN”

In fact, it appears he has ZERO affiliation with Cern other than attending some sort of summer camp for computer science majors when he was a junior in college.

This is a guy that followed this up with a minor internship after college then worked at some collective called ‘RedHat’ in India for 4 years before suddenly stumbling on crypto 3 months ago.

That’s right.

The Lead Developer of This Project Didn’t Know or Do Jack Shit With Crypto Until Three Months Ago

But that would explain why nothing has been successfully deployed.

He sure does sell it well here though, doesn’t he?

The Remaining Profiles on the GitHub Have Little to NO Activity

Yup, you read that. The remaining ‘contributors’ have done little to nothing.

Feel free to go by each profile and check if you’re in any doubt.

Let’s look into their alleged ‘founder’.

His name is “Xiaoyong.Cheng”

Here’s the part of the site that this information is on: https://www.truechain.pro/en/news_detail/155

I managed to track down ‘his’ Twitter:

Xiaoyong.Cheng (@XiaoyongCheng) | Twitter
_The latest Tweets from Xiaoyong.Cheng (@XiaoyongCheng). The founder of TrueChain. TrueChain is the pbft+pow hybrid…_twitter.com

(Notice the exact same picture)

There are only 4 tweets on his profile and it appears that he got started right after the team “announced him”.

Coincidentally, this is the same month Amit got started with them as well!

I also found out where that stock photo got lifted from too: ‘

One World Blockchain Alliance - Crypto Forum in Davos, Switzerland
_Davos, Switzerland DAVOS LOCATION: Hard Rock Hotel Join us for a series of immersive talks, panels and engaging…_oneworldblockchain.io

GitHub Code for TrueChain is Trash

If you’re waiting for this to deploy, you’ll be waiting forever.

Check this out:

This isn’t code, but I found this redaction to be hilarious

TestNet Never Used

xiaotiansky/truechain-testnet-core
_GitHub is where people build software. More than 28 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over…_github.com

Hardly Any Development Activity

ZERO releases

Only 50 commits.

Conclusion

TrueChain is the archetypal crypto fraud/scam that you’ll run into these days.

Sure, they won’t go ROB you of your money directly (like projects that ICO or exit scam), but they will do it in a very ‘indirect’ way by asserting things that are demonstrably false in order to garner your investment.

I hope that this article has proven effective and that you all stay FAR, FAR AWAY from TrueChain!