In the world of initial coin offerings, there are plenty of scams to be wary about. No matter how legitimate a project may look, there’s always a real chance the team will run away with your money. It seems that is exactly what has happened in the case of Prodeum, a recent Ethereum-based project. Either its website was defaced, or the team simply performed a clever exit scam. It’s another warning sign as to why people should conduct their due diligence first and foremost.

Prodeum ICO Turns Into an Exit Scam

It is neither the first nor the last time we will see an ICO project defraud investors. Even though Prodeum seemingly had an interesting future ahead, the team has apparently pulled a very quick exit scam. The project itself involves tracking produce on the Ethereum blockchain, a mission that will certainly find a willing audience given enough time and effort. Unfortunately, we will never know if this project could have ever amounted to anything, as the team is long gone.

About a week ago, the team opened its first thread on BitcoinTalk announcing this project. It became evident rather quickly that there was hardly any professional effort made to back this project, as the thread itself was very bland and the whitepaper seemingly provided very few details that made Prodeum stand out from similar ventures. Their mission to overhaul the price look-up process altogether was very ambitious, but it is evident that there will never be any such effort moving forward. It’s an unfortunate development, although one which expert traders had seen coming from miles away.

Moreover, there is always the question as to whether or not such ventures really need their own digital tokens. In the case of Prodeum, all of this could be achieved without creating a token which no one asked for in the first place. At the same time, it’s impossible for a company to host an ICO without issuing its own tokens; otherwise, people wouldn’t need to invest any money. In this case, investors were supposed to have obtained Dual ERC-20 tokens, which is rather interesting.

More specifically, this ICO involved the PITT currency – which was issued to crowdsale investors – as well as PRDM tokens, which supposedly served as the backbone of the entire Prodeum project. The PITT tokens were designed to be exchanged for PRDM tokens in late March at a 1:1 ratio. Unfortunately, that will never happen, as the Prodeum project page has disappeared completely. It is unclear what is going on exactly, but an exit scam seems to be the most plausible explanation.

As one would expect from such half-assed projects, there is very little proper feedback on the Prodeum Bitcointalk thread. All of it merely pertains to shilling the project as well as adding the site to people’s ICO-related platforms. Any real questions asked by others were never answered properly, which further confirms the team had no intention of ever going ahead with the project. With so many new user accounts commenting on this project, we can only hope most experienced ICO investors steered away from this venture.

For the time being, it remains to be seen if the Prodeum website will ever come back. At the time of writing, the site showed a blank page displaying the word “penis”. It’s a “dick move” by the team; that much is evident. It is still possible the site was hacked, though, as multiple ICOs have suffered from similar issues in the past few months. Anyone who invested in this project has – most likely – lost their money due to the shady nature of Prodeum. It is the umpteenth ICO to either suffer from site issues or pull an exit scam.