Hi everyone,
I work as a PM at a large tech company and as part of my job it's important for me to understand major technology trends and tech companies. I put this post together to share some key takeaways I had from looking at Airbnb's S-1 filing. If you found this post valuable and would like to read more please let me know. I'm thinking about writing like this more often if it's something people get value from. Thanks
On Monday November 16th, Airbnb filed to go public. While a target IPO price has not yet been set, Airbnb looks to be aiming to raise about $3 billion dollars at an analyst-estimated valuation of $30 billion. This is up from Airbnb's most recent valuation of $18.1 billion in April of this year when it raised a total of $2 billion in debt to cope with the Covid-19 crisis.
Airbnb is a remarkable company. What started in 2007 as 2 friends renting out airbeds in their apartment to attendees of a conference has, 13 years later, grown into a company operating in 220 countries with over 4 million hosts who have cumulatively earned over $110 billion. In 2019, there were 327 million nights and experiences booked on Airbnb. Nobody could have predicted those numbers in 2007. Airbnb has defined a brand new travel category and become a standard part of our vocabulary, much like Zoom. As they state in their S-1:

" “Airbnb” has become synonymous with one-of-a-kind travel on a global scale."

But, while Airbnb is clearly a remarkable company, is it a good investment? That’s the question that this post aims to answer. Here are some key takeaways from an analysis of Airbnb’s recent S-1 filing:
(*Note: In case you’re wondering, an S-1 is the document that a companies files with the SEC when they plan to go public)

1. Airbnb is a resilient business

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on Airbnb’s business. Gross booking value (GBV) in March was down 127%. Due to cancellations and alterations, Airbnb actually lost money on bookings in March. However by August, GBV was only down 14% when compared to August 2019. This impressive recovery shows how strong Airbnb’s business is.
For the 9 months ending September 2020, Airbnb posted a revenue drop of 32% when compared with the first 9 months of 2019. While this is a concern, the cut to sales and marketing expenditure at the same time points to a business that is quite resilient - In the same time period that revenue dropped by 32%, Airbnb cut its sales and marketing spend by a massive 54%. The ability to cut sales and marketing spend by over half while only having a revenue drop of 32% (in the middle of a pandemic) points to a business that is highly resilient with strong brand and customer loyalty.

1. Post-Covid travel patterns may benefit Airbnb

If we compare the gross nights and experiences booked on Airbnb to Airbnb’s gross booking value (GBV), we see an interesting pattern. Gross bookings in August are down 28% YoY while GBV is only down 14%. This means that the average spend on an individual booking has actually trended up this year! To further validate this point, long-term stays were down only 13% this year, compared to 81% for short-term stays. There was actually YoY growth for long-term stays from May to September. The importance of long-term stays is highlighted by the quote below:

“We believe the long-term stays category represents a different use case than leisure travel, and as a result, was not as impacted as dramatically by COVID-19.”

Long-term stays are a distinct competitive advantage for Airbnb and if trends continue they could drive a lot of long-term growth.
Airbnb has also highlighted a number of other categories that have performed particularly well this year. In particular, ‘domestic travel’, ‘short-distance travel’ and ‘travel outside top 20 cities’ have performed very well. For example, short-distance travel grew a whopping 38% YoY in September.
No doubt these trends will reverse somewhat as we exit the pandemic. However, it is unlikely they will reverse fully. If these trends maintain decent momentum, they represent a shift in travel patterns that uniquely benefits Airbnb and provides a significant competitive advantage.

1. Strong customer retention and brand loyalty

One of the most striking figures from the S-1 is that 91% of Airbnb’s traffic is organic, coming from direct and unpaid channels. This is very impressive. Airbnb has built an incredible brand and clearly has strong brand loyalty.

“Our strategy is to increase brand marketing and use the strength of our brand to attract more guests via direct or unpaid channels and to decrease our performance marketing spend relative to 2019.”

Customer engagement and retention are also impressively high on the platform. In 2019, 68% of guests left a review of their stay. 69% of revenue generate in 2019 was from repeat guests.
Airbnb also has very strong retention among their host community. In 2019, 84% of revenue came from people who had hosted in 2018. This shows that the majority of hosts are staying on the platform and continuing to earn money through Airbnb.

1. International expansion is a big opportunity

Airbnb’s revenue growth has slowed over the last three years. It grew by 32% in 2019, down from 43% in 2018. While slowed growth is never great, 32% is quite healthy.
It remains to be seen what the impacts of Covid-19 will be on growth over the next few years. However, there seem to be big opportunities for international expansion which would allow Airbnb to maintain (and possibly improve) its growth rate.
Airbnb believes that its total addressable market is a whopping $3.4 trillion. While you can always take these predictions with a grain of salt, it is clear that Airbnb believes that a big part of this market opportunity lies outside the US and Europe. They highlight international expansion as a key part of their long-term growth strategy:

*“*Expand our global network. We plan to expand our global network in the countries in which we already have a deep presence, as well as to expand into markets where our penetration is lower, such as India, China, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and tens of thousands of smaller markets and remote areas around the world.”

There are some encouraging signs that Airbnb has the potential to grow their international markets. They operate in 220 countries and importantly, 86% of their hosts are outside the US. International markets have also seen an increase in GBV and average nights per booking. In fact, Latin America has the highest average nights per booking of any region, at 4.1 nights. (North America is 3.7)
The strong customer loyalty previously mentioned, significant host presence in international markets (86%) and changing consumption patterns towards longer stays means that Airbnb has the potential to unlock a lot of value as they focus on international markets.

1. Regulation is a big concern

Regulation is a big risk for Airbnb. 70% of the company’s top 200 largest cities (by revenue) have implemented some form of regulation on short-term stays. For example, London has put a 90 nights per year limit on short term stays for properties without specific planning permission to do so.
Airbnb make it clear in the S-1 that the evolving regulatory situation is a cause for concern:

“We are subject to a wide variety of complex, evolving, and sometimes inconsistent and ambiguous laws and regulations that may adversely impact our operations and discourage hosts and guests from using our platform, and that could cause us to incur significant liabilities including fines and criminal penalties, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition.”

Airbnb makes sure to point out that they are not dependant on any one city, region or country. For example, the US is the only country that represents over 10% of Airbnb’s revenue. While this may be true, the evolving regulatory environment does not seem to be going in Airbnb’s favour.
Investment Plan
Please note that this is just an explanation of investing decisions for my personal portfolio and not a recommendation to anyone to buy/sell any stock.
To make a decision on whether or not to invest in Airbnb, I believe there are 3 important questions to answer:

1. Does Airbnb have good upside potential?
2. What year should conclusions be based on?
3. What is a fair valuation?
4. Does Airbnb have good upside potential?

Although there are regulatory concerns, based on the above analysis I believe that Airbnb has strong upside potential.

1. What year should conclusions be based on?

The Airbnb S-1 is primarily focused on 2019 numbers. Airbnb believes that 2019 figures are the fairest reflection of the strength of the business. They believe that 2020 is a highly irregular year and that the company will rebound quickly post-covid. Investors should come up with their own conclusion on that but I agree with Airbnb that 2019 is a fair reflection of the business.

1. What is a fair valuation for Airbnb?

This is where things get tricky. In some ways, Airbnb doesn’t have any direct competitors to compare against. They are similar to both OTAs (online travel agents) and hotel chains like Hilton but obviously quite different in a number of ways too.
In my opinion, an interesting comparison is with Uber. While not exactly the same, Airbnb and Uber have a lot of similarities. They are both semi-marketplaces (Airbnb is closer to a true marketplace). Uber connects drivers with riders while Airbnb connects hosts with guests. They have a similar business model in that they both take a % of each transaction on their platform.
Obviously there are quite a few differences. In particular, Uber drivers are far more commoditised than Airbnb hosts. Uber also has more direct competition (Lyft).
Looking at 2019 figures for the fairest comparison, Uber is currently priced at roughly 6.33 times 2019 revenue. If we go with the analyst expected valuation of $30 billion, Airbnb would be valued at roughly 6 times 2019 revenue. Uber grew revenue 26% YoY in 2019 while Airbnb grew 32%.
With all of this in mind and particularly considering that Uber’s model is less defensible, I believe that the analyst-estimated $30 billion valuation represents a very good price for Airbnb.
What’s my plan?
My plan is to wait and see what happens on IPO day. If analysts are wrong and the stock pops above $40/50 billion, I won’t be purchasing and will wait to see what Airbnb’s performance is like over the next few months. If the stock settles at or below $30 billion, then I will definitely be adding it to my portfolio.
What’s your plan?
Are you considering investing in Airbnb? What did you think of my analysis above? Anything I missed? Let me know your thoughts.
And please let me know if you found this post valuable and would like to read more. Thanks

Well, I have been trying to write this from long but my current job was not allowing this. Luckily I left the job and all the miseries associated with it. Anyway, Just a little background, I am an ex-banker and been in crypto from past few years; Have seen ups and downs, pumps and dumps, all the HODL MOON and rekt, and what not. Lately, I am getting lot of requests from people asking about cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin in general. So, I am writing a fully fledged guide here on how you buy, store, transfer and make money out of cypto; Last part is very subjective though..hahah.
Just to be clear, I will focus more on providing relevant resources to learn rather than bullshitting my own advise.

Why Crypto?

Biggest question is why one should ever buy crypto. why one should spend money on something that they can't even touch or feel.
Well, before answering that, let me tell you that we do not live in an Utopia. We live around mean and selfish people, corrupt politicians, filthy rich people who wants to control and peek into every aspect of our life. And Our current system consists lot of intermediaries which result into extra cost, time and chances of fraud.
Bitcoin just came to get rid of such people. It works on a decentralized mechanism where we cut the middleman or centralized institutions out of the system and transfers the trust from humans to computers(nodes), rendering the chances of error and fraud while offering secure and seamless transactions.
Imagine sending millions of dollars from one country to other in real time with fees as low as few dollars. Not to mention, payment is only one use out of thousands that the underlying technology of crypto-currencies blockchain offers. Besides, in terms of investments, it has outperformed every other asset class imaginable in the last decade.

• If you want to dig deeper into technological aspect of bitcoin, there is free online course by Princeton University on youtube- Princeton-Bitcoin
• Also look at the work of Andreas M. Antonopoulos, he is highly sought expert in bitcoin and blockchain technology, known for making complex subjects easy to understand-Aantonop crypto
• If you're a book person- Books to lean about crypto

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How to buy Bitcoin

Now that you know bitcoin and how it works, how do you become part of this revolutionary currency. There are crypto exchanges in almost all the countries and it's easy to buy from your native currency-I am going to list some of India's most popular exchanges:-

Wazirx

( Signup- wazirx.com )
Well, this is my personal favorite. CEO Nischal Shetty is an amazing person. It was the only exchange that was running during the hard times of 2018 when RBI brought circular prohibiting Banks to provide services to individuals or any company dealing in crypto-currencies, especially exchanges. Started it's legendary P2P service during the ban and soon outperformed the every other exchange in terms of users and trading volume in India. Ban was removed and wazirx emerged as a unconquered champion. Currently Wazirx is acquired by Binance and leading as biggest crypto-currency exchange in India.
Step by step guide to sign up- wazirx guideHow to deposit INR- Wazirx deposits

Binance

( Signup- Binance.com )
Binance requires no introduction. It's the biggest crypto currency exchange in the world in terms of trading volume. CEO Chengpeng zhao is a visionary person and is one of the fastest person to become Bllionaire on face of the Earth. It has also launched its p2p trading service in India where people can buy major cryptocurrencies through INR. Without a shadow of doubt, it's the most trustworthy and credible exchange out there. It also offers various other products including Margin trading, futures & options, staking and other investment instruments. Won't be wrong to say, it's a complete crypto ecosystem on it's own. Not to mention, native exchange token BNB( used to save fees) has skyrocketed 150 times from $0.5 in 2017 to $75 recently. Educate yourself with binance- Binance Acadamy

Zebpay

( Signup - Zebpay.com )
Zebpay is one of the oldest crypto exchange in India. Started back in 2015, it used to be one of the most popular exchange in India. Although they ran away with their bag and baggage in 2018 after the govt. regulations but they got back in business recently. Well, Zebpay is not my first choice but it's still better than some other shady exchanges. Besides they have a decent looking app with easy interface.
Not to mention, having an account on multiple exchanges might come handy in a situation of arbitrage. Indian exchanges tend to provide lot of such opportunities ,especially in days of volatility. Step by step guide- Starting with Zebpay
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p2p Exchanges

singnup- Localbitcoins.com
There are people basically who don't trust exchanges and rather prefer to trade more privately. On LocalBitcoins, you are dealing with humans. Unlike centralized Bitcoin trading websites, LocalBitcoins allows you to trade directly with another person. It allow users to create advertisements where they can choose the payment method like CASH/PAYTM/IMPS/NEFT and their own exchange rate for buying and selling bitcoins from and to other LocalBitcoins users. LBTC acts as an Escrow and protects both buyer and seller by keeping the bitcoins safe until the payment is done and the seller releases bitcoins to the buyer. This is very popular among Tax evaders..lol! Just an tip, always choose a safe public place when dealing in cash.
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Before moving further, you should be aware of public and private keys at-least.
Public key- It's large string of alpha numeric key that you use to receive funds. It's called a public key, simply because it is meant to be shared publicly and enable you to receive funds. Private key- A private key is a sophisticated form of cryptography that allows a user to access his/her cryptocurrency.
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How to store crypto currencies:-

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1. Exchange Wallet

This is most widely used and convenient method of storing crypto. You buy from exchange, you let it stay there, sounds very easy. Only downside here is that it is risky. As the history dictates, exchanges are no immune to cyber attacks and there were instances of fraud and robbery with mainstream crypto exchanges like Mt-gox, Bitfinex, Bitgrail, DAO, upbit, where billions of dollars worth of bitcoin were stolen by hackers. So, it really make sense to look for safer alternatives, isn't it? There is saying in crypto, You own your bitcoin only when you have access to your private keys, and in this case, exchanges have it. Although, Exchange wallets poses incredible convenience if you're an active trader and don't want to get into hassle of transefering crypto back n forth.
Most reliable Exchange wallets- Coinbase( works under SEC regulations) Binance(more suitable for altcoins)
just my 2 cents, always have your 2fa enabled for withdrawls.
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2. Hardware wallets

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This is one of the safest way of storing crypto-currencies. Hardware wallet is basically a USB device which saves the private keys securely in an offline manner. It has serious advantage among others because it never allows your private keys to come in contact with internet connected computer or any vulnerable software or attack. Ledger and trezor are some of the most reliable and popular brands, you can also look for Mycelium and
Electrum.
Ledger-https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-nano-s
trezor-https://shop.trezor.io/
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3. Paper wallet

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The idea of a paper wallet is very simple. You set up a wallet offline while following some simple instructions and then you simply print out the private and public keys in a piece of paper. The keys will also be printed in the form of a QR code which you can scan in order to get access to your funds. If you use your crypto fairly regular, go for hardware wallet. However, if you are planning to just store your funds for a long time without much interference, then, without a shadow of a doubt, paper wallet is the way to go. There are two paper wallet sites that we would like you to check out:
Walletgenerator.net
MyEtherWallet.com
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How to transfer crypto from one exchange to another:-

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Well, it's the simplest part considering you don't do any mistakes. To transfer any cryptocurrency all you require is the destination wallet address (deposit address). No matter which exchange you wish to transfer your funds to; the exchange will provide you with the receiving address. Make sure that you’ve copied the right address of the coin that you are looking to transfer. Sending coins to a wrong address will result in loss of coins and you have to depend on mercy of exchange to get your coins back.
In general here are the steps to transfer coins from Exchange A to Exchange B.
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1)Go to Exchange B and head to Funds >> Deposits / Withdrawal section.
2)Choose the coin and copy the deposit(receiver) address provided by the exchange.
3)Now come back to Exchange A and head to Deposits / Withdrawal section.
4)Choose your coin that you are looking to withdraw. Then paste the recipient address that you copied from Exchange B.
5)Next enter amount to send and click withdraw. Now you’ll be asked to complete the validation process. It can be either OTP/2FA or email verification depending on what you chose for your account security. Once this step is complete your coins will be sent to Exchange B.
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Ways to make money out of crypto:-

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HODL

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Most easiest way to make money in crypto is simply buy and forget you ever had bought anything. HODL or Hold On for Dear Life is coined for long term investors who beleive in underlying technology and won't sell until the mainstream adoption. It's not just a notion, actually it holds a strong premise. Speaking of which, no one has ever lost money by holding crypto in long term. It's the most volatile market ever existed and can drive people nuts, but only the visionary people with strong will power gonna survive in this mayhem. God bless panic sellers and faint hearted people, bruh this market is not for you.
you bought the peak of 2013? no problem, it made another one in 2017. Now you bought at 20k and crying over your miserable life, no issues it doubled again in 2020. If you really believe in a decentralized society where no one else controlling your money but you , then you're a true hodler.
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Trading crypto

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Well, this is tricky and I won't suggest you to jump into this right away. As the trading is slightly different from conventional markets and highly influenced by sentiments, news & events, supply ,adoption, unlike other markets where fundamental and technical analysis plays a major role. It might as well seem a bit confusing initially but believe me this market offers plethora of opportunities, only if you have the patience and determination to find any . I will try to enlist some steps that can come handy in the process.
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1) Picking an Exchange- It should have the maximum trading pairs with highest liquidity. Binance certainly rings a bell in this category. It's way ahead of it's competition. Some of the major trading exchanges:-

• Binance
• Bittrex
• Kucoin
• Huobi
• Bitfinex
• Wazirx-Indian

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2) Finding an information source :- It's imperative to have information about the coin before jumping into the buying spree. It really boosts the confidence and prevent panic selling in days of bloodbath. Not necessarily to become a blockchain expert here but fundamental knowledge of the premise behind a coin, need it serves, supply and knowing about it's use case would suffice. Listing some of the major information source:-
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• Coinmarketcap - It's a go to place for all the crpto information. A website where you can find information on every coin and token available. The data includes market capitalization, supply, trade volume etc. It also show you the historical data and a link to the official website of the coin. So the site can even be used for cryptocurrency comparisons.

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• Coindesk - One of the major crypto news source. Cover all news around bitcoin and aother cryptocurrencies. Be it events, adoption or a recent rally, coindesk writers will always keep you updated.

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• Coinmarketcal- CoinMarketCal is the leading economic calendar for cryptocurrency news. It covers all events that help crypto traders make better decisions. There are events in a coin life like supply decrease, coin burn, major partnership, product releases that could have imapct on its price action. So, coinmarketcal lists out all such events and allow traders to speculate on price around these events. Kryptocal is another website for the same purpose.

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• Reddit- Without a shadow of doubt, it's a great place to find information and hangout with people having mutual investment interest. Every coin have their official subreddits (can find the link from coinmarketcap) where people talk and post about the things happening around the cryptocurrency. Just to let you know, sentiments plays a major role in deciding the price for a given cryptocurrency. Positive sentiments alone could take a coin to MOON. Look what happened to GME and XRP.

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• Twitter- Since the price is highly influenced by the news, Twitter would definetely keep you up to date. All the crypto currencies, exchanges and their Founders have Twitter handles where they post about all the major updates including partnerships, new releases, upgrades, personal opinions and what not. Always turn on the notification for the coin you're trading. No matter what strategy you were building, a single tweet from their founder can change it's price action beyond imagination. Doge is the most recent example for this correlation. A single tweet from Elon Musk took the coin price up 50% in minutes.

Now, just a tip- Don't chase pumps and dumps. They might look fascination from the surface but beleive me, it's a slippery slope. If you entered at the bottom, then it's well n good, otherwise just be a spectator.
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Passive income from crypto

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• Staking- Staking is the most simple way to earn passive income, as the market pays you for holding cryptocurrencies for a certain period of time. Let me explain you this a bit. All blockchains have one thing in common: transactions need to get validated. Bitcoin for example does this in a process called mining which is known to use a lot of electricity (Proof-of-Work). There are other methods that are used for validation. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is one such consensus mechanism where people get decesion power in the network by staking coins. By staking , you gain the ability to vote and generate an income. It is quite similar to how someone would receive interest for holding money in a bank account or giving it to the bank to invest. There are plenty of coins to stake with variable rate of interest. Checkout- https://www.binance.com/en/pos

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• Airdrops, forks, and buybacks-
  Airdrops-This is cheapest or free way to earn money from crypto. The concept of airdrop refers to the widespread distribution of cryptocurrency in free to the public in order to gain the userbase. Recently Binance airdropped 100 TWT tokens for all the holders which is around 50 usd as of now. Even the popular coin TRX was given as airdrop which now worth in thousands of USD. You can keep track of Airdrops here:- https://airdrops.io/
  

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• Hardfork- Hardfork happens on blockchain. Sometimes it's hard to put an update on existing chain due to the lack of consensus. So developers split a totally different chain and investor receives equivalent holdings on the new chain. (it’s like benefitting from an error). Ethereum classic forked from Ethereum. BCH for example is the biggest of it's kind, which is forked from the Bitcoin and given as free in same amount to people as per their Bitcoin holdings. They keep happening from time to time and even have positive impact on price action.

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• Buybacks or coin burn- It means a cryptocurrency is bought to be destroyed or ‘burnt’ afterward. It decreases the supply and hence directly increasing the price. Basically it was brought to adjust with the inflation. BNB coin burn is the classic example. Read here- coin burn

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So that's it guys, hope you've learned something here and wish you good luck in your crypto pursuit. And feel free to drop any questions or suggestions.

GEVO and AMTX – a long case for both
First: Why renewable energy?
Biofuels are a hot sector that have been overshadowed by EV and have proven profitably. Renewable Energy Group is a $4.4B market cap company founded in 1996 that just became profitable this year with a 7.3x PE, earnings are forecast to grow 9.4% per year, has 11 biorefineries in the U.S. and 2 in Germany. REGI shares have returned 301.3% the past year and has an excellent balance sheet. It was trading at $26 in Mar 2020 and now trades at $111. Valuations range from $84 to $135 with 1 extreme bull DCF out there for $336.04 https://stocknews.com/stock/REGI/.
Second: Why not just invest in REGI?

1. You can and that’s great; it’s still a growing company in a high demand sector (biodiesel has seen a 600% increase in consumption the last 10 years). However, It’s no longer a “penny stock” and further along the growth curve where stock price is concerned but I would still recommend this stock to my dad.
2. They provide LOWER carbon (88%) transportation fuels (biomass diesels) using fats, oils, greases which is good, but newer break throughs with superior carbon reduction are available.

Why GEVO?
Because the co-founder is on the Biden science won a Nobel Prize? Absolutely NOT.
Frances Arnold was with GEVO 2005 – 2011 which is less than half the lifespan of the company and she didn’t win the Nobel until 2018. In 2017, a Seeking Alpha article called GEVO “a hot mess” and a "compelling short". GEVO is a different company now than it was in 2017 and a different company than when Dr. Arnold worked there 10 years ago.
Gruber is good. The current CEO was the other original founder. He’s passionate, charismatic, ambitious, and a highly accomplished scientist who helped them pull out of their financial tailspin, but he doesn’t have Joe Biden or Dr. Arnold on speed dial. You can get to know him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb931oqyfPU
GEVO’s cornerstone is carbon capture from soil while crops (mainly corn) are being produced. Applications are zero carbon or better biofuel, feedstock, and food production. REGI has proven they can scale, but can’t do zero carbon because they don't have the patents. GEVO needs to prove it can scale.
GEVO has a market cap now of $2.195B, which by some standards means they’ve graduated from being a penny stock and recently trading near $15 and the highest bull target I’ve seen is $16.50 but I won’t be surprised if it trades higher at year end given the current momentum and online awareness among retail investors.
GEVO’s upcoming Net Zero 1 plant will produce 45 million gallons of biofuel per year. The U.S. uses 390 million gallons per day. Let's put the demand in perspective, it would take 16,425 Net Zero plants to produce 45 million gallons of biofuel per day. You could multiply that by 8.7 and still only be able to supply the U.S.
From GEVO’s own web site, “GEVO is just one company”, https://gevo.com/carbon-neutral-fuel/carbon-sequestration/
Why and who is AMTX?
Aemtis/AMTX is building a Carbon Zero 1 plant (sound familiar?) Like Gevo, they have their own exclusive patents that reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Earnings are forecast to grow 61.7% https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/energy/nasdaq-amtx/aemetis Market cap is ~$200M and it's still a true OTC penny stock. Trading recently in the $7s with a year end price target of $10 from Amita Dayal, the #16 analyst on Tipranks. I'm not saying he's Stock Jesus or anything, but there are 7,280 analysts ranked lower and he's ranked 23 out of 15,238 overall experts.
AMTX CEO Eric McAfee is the original founder with degrees from Stanford and Harvard. 1 of the 6 other companies he’s founded, Pacific Ethanol, has $1B in revenues. Probably not the most exciting speaker by today’s make money already mentality, but this old TED talk explains how AMTX is not only zero carbon, they actually remove carbon from the atmosphere https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX-okYScFzc.
Other notables on the Board of Directors
Fred Barton, former CFO of AMD, chemical engineer
John Block, former Secretary of US Department of Agriculture
Dr. Naomi Boness, Managing Director of the Natural Gas Initiative at Stanford with experience in geophysics
Lydia Beebe, current counsel with Silicon Valley law firm and previously spent 38 yrs with Chevron. GEVO's Dr. Gruber talks about how he has to work with big oil to advance his objectives (this is the same interview linked above) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb931oqyfPU
GEVO is trying to expand into India. AMTX already has a biorefinery there. Advanced Fuels Expansion Project with Dairy Renewable Natural Gas System in CA generating $30M per year of EBITA http://www.aemetis.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Aemetis-Corporate-Presentation-2020-10-29.pdf AMTX has pipelines with 17 dairies . . . out of 1,300 in CA so obviously there’s room to grow here.
"Major differentiator between AMTX and other ethanol producers. Producers are required to transport alcohol for sanitizer from the Midwest to California using fuel ethanol trailers and rail cars which are often contaminated with benzene and other dangerous chemicals. AMTX arranged a $2.1 million lease purchase of 15 new bulk trailers with their trucking company to be used solely for the transport of Aemetis high grade alcohol. AMTX can deliver up to 30 loads per day of alcohol to California blenders and bottlers from their Central Valley plant without using any trailers that carried fuel ethanol or gasoline. AMTX’s California high grade alcohol plant location is significantly closer to customers in California than Midwest ethanol producers. Aemetis has a permanent cost advantage over Midwest ethanol producers due its close proximity to Western US markets. Particularly when government agencies restrict the use of rail cars and tanker trucks that have previously carried petroleum products."
AMTX has announced $2B in offtake projects being negotiated, which as I understand it is agreed upon sales over time. The ink isn’t dry, but no other potential competitors are mentioned in the press release.
GEVO and AMTX
Ground transportation is the largest source of carbon and we are 10+ years before full conversion to electric. Even if we were 100% EV today, the remaining addressable market for bio renewable energy with liquid fuel for aviation/shipping/aerospace, feedstock, and agriculture has a demand that exceeds the supply of both these companies combined. Why now? Governments such as the U.S., India, and China are heavily focused on planetary sustainability. Does that mean everyone’s a tree hugging hippy now? No, it means someone backroom bean counters figured out sick people suck as employees and dead people don’t buy things.
Concerns - GEVO
Dr. Patrick Gruber only owns 0.83% of his company which I wager was necessary in order to save it. Any of the 5 institutions that are larger shareholders might have more say in the future of the company than him. Gevo is running up fast and their Net Zero 1 plant hasn’t been completed. When Tesla brings FSD to market, drone delivery interest increases, satellites catch fire (not literally), or another shiny stock takes off, how much pull back is there going to be from traders? Energy is infrastructure and building facilities and pipelines move slower than downloading a software update.
Concerns – AMTX
No one credible is talking about them right now on social media. Penny stock pumpers ran it up 100% in 1 day and day traders seemed to have moved on. Not sure what they can do here. Would a Superbowl ad for hand sanitizer or jet fuel make sense?
Closing Thoughts
This is not a winner takes all sector and these companies don't come across as competitors. Tax credits and advances in biochemistry are making bio-renewables more cost competitive than ever. Musk's XPrize is offering $100M/$50M/$20M to the top 3 companies to deliver zero carbon solutions in the next 4 years. It seems like these are the 2 front runners and I can't even name a 3rd place. Ultimately, the world needs tens of thousands of bio-refineries to solve the carbon problem and do that bio-renewable companies need tremendous capital to expand. Legacy oil, prior to big tech, were kings of the financial food chain. Rather than go quietly into the night as the world moves away from fossil fuels, could they partner their capital with or acquire innovating companies such as these to remain relevant?
If you own GEVO, why not hold with a promising year-end target of $16.50?
If you believe in and want to enter a position in the biofuel sector, starting AMTX in the $7s and ending the year at $10 would be a good year - assuming you can park money and wait that long.
​
About me/my biases
I'm an amateur investor bullish on Tesla, try to steer clear of companies that compete against Tesla or SpaceX, and have a professional background in IT Analysis (not-financial)

Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

Fascinating piece published today by NY Times Magazine on scammer call centers in India. The reporter even tracks one scammer down, travels to India and confronts him. Link and article below:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html

NY Times: Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.

I understand a lot of you people are pissed off that you "missed the boat," so to speak. Then again, there are 311 people online here, so "so "many of you" is a relatively tiny number.
I myself got into bitcoin late. If I had trusted my guts and bought bitcoins when I first heard of it, no doubt I would be a billionaire by now. All this to say, I understand your frustrations quite well.
We'll start with some of the ideas this sub gets right:
1) DeFi is garbage - this is correct, this entire market is a scam, I have no idea who borrows money using their Eth as collateral for instance, or how they are going to allow you to borrow ETH using your house as a collateral. A lot of it can't or won't work.
2) Eth 2.0 is a scam - this is correct, PoS will kill ether because a lot of miners will just dump their ETH and never think of it again. PoS puts all the power inside the hands of a little "clique" that was lucky enough to receive FREE ether when it started. Also doesn't solve any scaling issue, is riddled with bugs, and won't pay enough to make it worth for small players to be in.
3) The Lightning network is a joke - again, correct. Nobody is going to use that shit. Bitcoin was never designed to be about quick and small payments; if anything, it was designed to be used more like gold. It's been two, three years and no one gives a shit about it, and no one uses it, because it sucks.
4) All bitcoin forks are worthless - correct.
5) Mining bitcoin is now a sinkhole - again, correct. It's just not worth it, in terms of time and efforts, for any small player (i.e. less than a million invested in mining equipment) to mine bitcoins. You are much better off buying stocks and/or investing directly.
Now, for what this sub gets wrong - really, really wrong.
1) Bitcoin is worthless because it's not backed by anything tangible - In order for me to agree with that point, you would have to agree USD, CAD, EUR is all worthless, because those also aren't backed by anything. No, they aren't back by a country's economy, because that country can print as much as they want, and print they do. US printed $800B so far in 2020 ONLY. That's 25% of all USD notes in circulation. And they are not done. Over time, money lost 99.9% of its value.
With that in mind, bitcoin IS backed by something. Those people who buy $2,000 Antminer S19 don't seem to think bitcoin is worthless. People buying cloud mining don't seem to think so either. People buying Bitcoin for $23,000 USD a piece right now certainly aren't making a donation. People who tade bitcoins in Vietnam, Brazil, India, Venezuela etc certainly don't seem to think bitcoin is worthless neither.
Bitcoin has value because it can be traded for very low price ($1.40 to send $165M recently) anywhere on the globe, to anyone, without the need for any third party to authorize the transaction. Take PornHub and how easily Visa/Mastercard blocked them. Is that really the kind of world you want to live in? Where two companies can destroy your ability to process payments forever?
Bitcoin also has value because of its limited nature. US Debt has now ballooned to 30T and that's only the public debt, and what we know of. By the end of Corona, I am fairly certain it will be at over 50T. If they can print 20T USD, they can print 200T USD. However, you cannot print bitcoins. At least not any more than are made every ten minutes, and that number is going down.
2) Bitcoin hard cap of 21M is going to sink it eventually
A common misconception I hear here is that bitcoin is doomed because eventually, there will not be any more bitcoins to mine, and miners will not mine bitcoins anymore. Bullshit studies from so-called "pros" (who dismissed bitcoins ever since it hit $1.00) claim that eventually, the hash network will simply die.
The simple counter argument is that transaction fees are going to ensure the network continues working, even after all bitcoins are mined (in 2140, btw). People are going to keep transacting and sending bitcoins; in fact, just look at the mempool and orders coming in.
If mining isn't lucrative some some miners, yes, they will stop, and yes, transactions fees will go up. But people also forget that bitcoin prices will go up over that period. Overall, we will reach an equilibirum between electricity cost, transaction prices and bitcoin price. And again, this is only happening in 2140.
So far, we had 4 of those halvening, and bitcoin has only gone up (and a lot). There is no reason to think otherwise for the next 4 or even 40 halvening.
3) Bitcoin is vulnerable to a 51% attack
Even if someone could reach that level of attack, it wouldn't be worth it to them as they would crash bitcoins, making their investment worthless. A common mistake I hear is that government have the resources to run that kind of attack. But in order to achieve that level, they would need to buy every single bitcoin chip that is made for over a year, and then run them perfectly. Even if earth had that kind of products, there are other companies who need silicon products made.
And even if a party somethow managed to achieve that, there is no guarantee it would kill bitcoin. ETC has survived multiple 51% attack (with much lower hash rate, and an easier algo to hash).
Of course, forks could also be envisioned in the worst-case, catastrophic scenario, but no one really has an incentive to run a 51% attack on bitcoins. Even if they did manage a double spend, bitcoin would crash, making their huge invesment in that 51% attack worthless. Even with the ETC double spend, there simply was a roll back. Exchanges put high number of blocks confirmed to really "confirm" a transaction.
4) Bitcoin will be outlawed by governments.
Even if it is, people can still trade bitcoins person to person. "You fix my fence, I'll give you 100 satoshis," that kind of thing. Of course, government has no intention - or no right, at least in free countries - to outlaw bitcoins. Banks in the US have already attempted to block crypto transactions, people only found workarounds.
5) Too many bitcoisn are lost! Eventually ALL bitcoins will be lost! Already 4M bitcoin lost!
This is by far the dumbest "argument." Even if 99.99% of bitcoins were lost - which is unrealistic - bitcoins are divisible to one satoshi. Right now, a satoshi is worth roughly $0.002. If that many bitcoins were lost, then a satoshi would be valued at $2. That's it.
With that in mind, people aren't exactly losing a lot of bitcoins all the time. Sure, a certain portion are lost in accidents, people dying, forgetting their keys, etc., but trust me, most people watch their bitcoins like hawks. I'd be surprised if, right now, more than 10,000 bitcoins are lost per year (real number is probably way lower). That would be around 1M more bitcoins will be lost in the next 100 years, for a total of roughly 5M bitcoins. We can live with 16M bitcoins
6) Some people have way too much bitcoins! Satoshi has 700,000 - this means he has $14B right now!!!!!!!!!!!
And Bezos has $50B+, Bill Gates $60B+, Warren Buffet...
Your point?
7) Bitcoin is a "le bubble muh tulip ponzi blah blah"
People often misuse terms, and those are no exceptions.
Let's start with the bubble. Tesla right now trades at a $600B valuation (much higher than bitcoin btw). Tesla can print infinite new shares by the way and sell them at a discount; they give their employees free or cheap shares year after year. Tesla barely sells any car at all and barely makes any profit, yet is valued at more than Ford+GM+Volkwagen+Honda+... together. Those are all profitable, established, well-rounded companies, and tesla is valued at more than ALL of them.
I would argue that tesla is a bubble. So, are you going to short the stock (bet it will fall)? I know a few people who shorted tesla when it hit $300 per split. They lose years of profit.
Again, if you look at the stock price, the only conclusion you can come to is that Tesla is a bubble, not backed by anything tangible. No amazing earnings like AAPL, no revenue growth like AMZN, etc. Yet it only ballooned higher. There is no doubt in my mind Tesla will break the $1T market cap soon.
Just because you think something is overpriced, and just because something IS overpriced, doesn't mean it will crash. Sometimes it does, sometimes not.
In this case, bitcoin's total valuation - $450B give or take - is not much higher than Paypal, and I would argue bitcoin is WAY more valuable than Paypal. Paypal is ONE company processing payments, bitcoin is global and independent.
Now as for those accusing Bitcoin of being a Ponzi - a Ponzi happens when you take person A's money, then take person B's money to repay person A, then repay person C's money to repay B, etc. This has nothing to do with bitcoin at all. When you buy bitcoins, you have bitcoins. Something real, and limited. Not even slightly resembling a ponzi.
8) Le bitcoin is doomed!
Yeah, for the 2000 times. I remember when bitcoin crashed from $1,000 to $200, everyone said it was done.
Right.
There, that's it. Feel free to argue or discuss my points. I see a lot of misinformation and I felt it was my duty to counter some of it. It's not just you guys, even a lot of so-called "professional investors" get it totally wrong.
Thanks for reading, take care.

Read full story: medium.com/verasity
On the 4th of February, we hosted an AMA with Verasity Founder R J Mark. Thank you to everyone who joined, we answered a lot of community questions in depth (39 in total!). If you missed it, below is the complete transcript. Exciting information in this, make sure to read it all. 👀
Hello Verasians. I am Bhav, the marketing manager at Verasity and I’m joined by R J Mark, the founder of Verasity. Thank you for joining us for this AMA! :smile:
Mark: Hello everyone.
We will be answering all of the pertinent questions that the community have sent in throughout the week. Once these questions have been answered, I will open up the chat so you can ask further (non-repetitive please) questions, the chat will then close once more for Mark to answer. The transcript of this AMA will then be posted on our Medium.
Let’s get straight into it!
Q1) There will be no deadline on the swap so there is no rush and no fear of losing your tokens. They can be swapped at any time. Is that right?
Absolutely right. There is no deadline on the swap For more details read:
VRA Token & PoV update
Q2) Regarding the ERC777 Token Swap, you don’t need to withdraw to VeraWallet on the day of swap? Can I do it later?
Correct, take your time, there is no rush. You can do it at any time. There is no deadline or end date for the swap. We are making this as seamless and easy as possible for everyone.
Seamless and easy. That’s the way forward ✅Q3) Will we see more movements from the Foundation wallet. What is this about? The Swap?
That is correct. In anticipation of the swap company wallets’ tokens are being swapped via VeraWallet. See the article about this:
VRA Token & PoV update
New Foundation wallets will be created to replace the old ones.
Q4) Any plans to keep staking beyond the 31/12/2021 deadline?
We have not made a decision yet but liquidity mining is very much in play and could replace staking after Dec 2021. We will announce mid-year.
Q5) All the tournaments are free to join. How does that help the company to generate revenue? Is there a place or example where users/players are actually using the VRA token to get a product/service?
_Great question!_The tournaments are free to join since we are focusing on adoption and scaling the number of users we have globally. Bringing as many people to the platform is our priority right now. As we expand and offer user-generated prize pools we will take a commission on the total jackpots as a revenue stream. In addition, other revenue flows will become available to us as we build our user base and launch our video player this Q1.
We will monetize our esports content through our video player within Esports Fight Club by serving ads from our ad partners:
Advertiser Partnership Update
Esports Fight Club will require players to use VRA to purchase subscriptions via several payment systems: VeraWallet, PayPal and Credit Cards (although some tournaments are free for promotional purposes). Winners receive VRA for winning tournaments. Soon players will also be rewarded VRA for watching ads. Verasity profits from the purchase of game credits, subscriptions, tournament prize pools and ads. This is an entire ecosystem all within Verasity.
See our revenue forecast here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Adoption and scale are key to the success of Esports Fight Club. We’ve made a lot of progress on the platform and are confident we will continue to see further growth in terms of users and a ton more exposure to the platform, and our token $VRA.Talking about adoption and scale… the next question will answer that!~Q6) What is the current Marketing Strategy? How do we differ from other tournament websites?
After creating mass-scale events around the world, we are focusing on adoption and community this year. Spending $10,000 on a big one-time prize pool to attract 1000 teams sounds good in theory. But, after careful planning, forecasting and testing, the results show that the best way is to spread the tournaments out so we reach a larger number of audiences. This consistency and large reach will attract much more than just 1000 teams over a period of time. The best place to do this is by sponsoring streamers and influencers, who each have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of fans.
For the past week, for example, we’ve been running a Valorant Community Tournament with Esports Fight Club’s first partnered streamer, Mika Daime. The turnout has been massive! Qualifier 1 was filled up with the max slots so quickly, that we had to create a Qualifier 2 just to fit all the teams in.

1. Most streamers we aim to partner with can easily bring in 64 or 256 teams to a community tournament hosted by Esports Fight Club, for a fraction of the price
2. With the same budget as a big tournament, of the $10,000 we would have spent on a single tournament, we can obtain approximately 540% more users by repurposing that budget for the influencer and streamer tournaments.

For a full list of upcoming features such as the Marketplace and VoD section read our full Marketing and Adoption post:
Marketing, Adoption, Tournaments 2021 (Updated)
It’s key for people to understand what we aim to do with the tournaments in terms of marketing. We read a lot of comments about the “low prize pool” when we announced the Mika Daime tournament, hopefully the answer Mark provided sheds light on that!Everything we do at Verasity is calculated. 😊Do check this out if you wanted a full read on our Marketing and Adoption post for 2021. 👍🏼If you think you’re good at some of the games we have available on Esports Fight Club, join in! The partnered streamers we have will be hosting a lot of community tournaments, such as Mika Daime!Q7) How often shall the revenue estimates (status update) be updated and is there any new estimation?
We will update the community every six months on revenue forecasts. There are no updates from our last announcement which can be found here
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter with notifications turned on, so you can get all the updates as they come through!https://twitter.com/verasitytech
Q8) Have you changed your business model? Because at the beginning it was mainly about publishers.
Our fundamental model has not changed: Video publishers attract audiences to watch video content and ads. Users are rewarded for it, thereby increasing engagement and monetization.
This model has not changed. What has changed is the type of video publisher we are pursuing. Prior to COVID-19, we pursued traditional publishers. With COVID-19, we saw the opportunity to pursue gaming publishers and more specifically esports publishers. More importantly, we created our own tournament platform: esportsfightclub.com. This allows us to control our own environment, launch our own proprietary video player, own our video content, run ads on our player, and charge subscription fees as well as take tournament fees.
But actually publishers and content are publishers and content whether it’s gaming or news.
It’s great to see how Esports Fight Club will have it’s own video content up on the website so that users will be able to watch the content to earn $VRA by using our own video technology, then use the $VRA to join tournaments, or buy hardware from trusted partners 👀Exciting stuff!Q9) Where can I find info about the Founders token unlock schedule?
Tokenomics and Founders token unlock schedule can be found here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Q10) Does VeraWallet speed handling withdraws scale up painlessly when user amounts boom? And shall there be enhancements to user experience if we for example have tens or hundreds of small reward withdraws daily?
We are adding automated withdrawals for small amounts to the roadmap but first have to complete the swap and add the security protocols. We won’t risk our users’ investments.
We simply don't want to risk our secure environment.
Q11) Are there any plans for compounding rewards for the VeraWallet staking?
No, absolutely not. The simple interest we are paying now is already high.
Q12) Bit confused about the VeraWallet staking rate after March. Can you clarify?
The staking reward rate is 0.1% per day (36.5% per annum) until 31 March 2021 when it becomes 0.07% daily (25.55% pa) until 31 December 2021.
Q13) When can I instant stake with BTC?
Good news, BTC is already available in VeraWallet for Instant Stake together with ETH, BNB and USDT.
Try Instant Buy and Stake out for yourself here:
VeraWallet - Official VRA Wallet
Instant Buy and Stake has been a really popular update to VeraWallet. Great to see the community loving it. 👍🏼Q14) With the recent developments on Cardano, and the ease in which ERC-20 tokens can migrate to this superior to Ehereum platform, are you considering following suit of great projects like Celsius to move VRA over to Cardano? I know we are still a bit hurt with Binance VRAB. I understand it is not an easy decision. Just interested in what you think about the future on Ethereum.
We gave this a lot of thought and investigation and as the community knows we have experience with token migrations :)
Please see our latest update on the VRA token swap to ERC777 and Proof of View:
VRA Token & PoV update
As to Cardano — the liquidity is really small compared to ETH alts. For example on Kucoin it’s volume is less than $2m per day. Even on OKEX it’s only $3m. 50% of Celsius’ volume is on Uniswap which is the majority of the liquidity and is not on any Tier 1 exchanges. Aside from the lack of features that we need for PoV, after our last experience, we are very reluctant to join with mainnets that are generally illiquid. Celsius’s solution is to provide the liquidity themselves through Uniswap which is limiting in our view. We believe sticking with Ethereum is the right way to go and the market seems to agree with this as well.
Q15) The new VOD platform, when is it going to be finished and in use?
We are working on it now and expect it to meet the roadmap target of Q1: see verasity.io for the roadmap.
Can’t wait for it to be released! 🚀> Yes, this is a huge milestone for us and opens us up to so many possibilities.Q16) Is liquidity mining still in play? Will this replace the staking rewards after December 2021?
Good question. Yes, liquidity mining is very much in play and could replace staking after Dec 2021. We have not made that decision yet but will announce as soon as we do.
Q17) Are there new partners/publishers in the trend of gaming for the ad stack?
Yes, FB, Google and others. Please see:
Advertiser Partnership Update
In total 17, many specializing in gaming.
I don’t think today there are many ad networks that are not into gaming. It's such a huge audience sitting at home during Covid.
Q18) Micro tournaments: could you arrange tournaments yourself, like a national tournament for example?
The Esports Fight Club platform is fully self-managed, so yes, you could set up large tournaments and be the admin and sponsor. We would definitely like to see this happen by our community members. This quarter, our admins and developers are focused on A/B testing different tournaments with multiple communities to see if we are missing any critical features demanded by gamers. An article will be coming next week about micro and partnered tournaments. We will explain how these increase platform adoption which benefits both influencers and Esports Fight Club.
If anyone does host some tournaments, message me! I’d be happy to join a few… dust off my skills. I heard Rob (Our Finance Director) was a bit of Counterstrike wizard in his day… 😂Q19) Why are the tokens bought via the instant buy taken from a pool which dilutes the total supply? This is like raising new capital for $VRA at every buy instead of us token holders getting a price increase.
These are not purchased from a pool. If you mean that Foundation tokens have been transferred to VeraWallet, see the article:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
In the Total VRA Supply, line 9, this VRA is already taken into account as part of both total supply and circulating supply. It does not increase either. I think this is really clear.
Q20) Asking about the “Instant buy and stake feature”. If someone buys $VRA using this system, there is no transaction on the blockchain. You say you buy directly on exchanges but no proof.
Buy backs of VRA do not happen instantly and we don’t announce buy backs in advance to avoid speculation. We don’t share our VeraWallet addresses as we have stated before. We are not going to provide speculators with tools to make a margin on each purchase.
Q21) Do we stay on the Ethereum network?
Yes, see the article:
VRA Token & PoV update
We are swapping our current ERC20 tokens to ERC777 which is essentially an upgrade to a more modern and fuller feature set Ethereum token.
For anyone just joining the chat, make sure you read the article above! Tons of important and exciting information.Q22) From the Foundation wallet tokens have been unlocked in the last 50 days and added to the circulating supply. How is our token deflationary?
If you mean that Foundation tokens have been transferred to VeraWallet, see the article:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Foundation tokens are not locked and the article clearly states they are unlocked. In the Total VRA Supply, line 9, this VRA is already taken into account as part of both total supply and circulating supply. It does not increase either. We specifically provide for ALL Foundation tokens, allocated and unallocated, as part of the current circulating supply so this is NOT adding to the circulating supply.
Q23) Asking about adoption figures. You claim to have had 8M people looking at your gaming videos (mostly fakes views as the counter earned millions in hours).
The adoption figures were not fake or exaggerated, it is important to understand that this number is a combination of different metrics, all of which ensure one thing: People viewed our live tournament page. This number includes:

• Unique gaming viewers landing on our page to be able to find the stream in their native language (English, Korean, Hindi, Mandarin and Nepali)
• Social media followers and curious gamers who landed on our page after subscribing to our contests, looking for airdrops or just by following our different marketing campaigns. These account for the steady and regular growth of our landing page as we ran these campaigns all-around the globe and 24/7 at the end of the tournament. The livestream was embedded onto the homepage of the website, so everyone who visited our website was also able to watch the tournament
• Lastly, the contestants, productions and influencer’s traffic from sharing our streams was what mostly caused big traffic, especially during the play-off and later stages of the tournament.

Although it was difficult to collate all the viewer statistics we believe them to be accurate and fair.
To see the full statistics of Ultimate Warrior Showdown 1, read here:
Ultimate Warrior Showdown Tournament Round-Up and Adoption
Hope that clears up some FUD! 👍🏼Q24) Asking about partnerships. You say you have partnerships with
Stripe, Tencent Games, PayPal. The truth is any website can integrate these payment/connexion modules without partnership. You just need to read their website and implement it on your website.
Of course, you can add Stripe and PayPal to any website, but try adding them to a crypto-based website and see how far you get. There are no crypto products websites or related services (other than specific financial services) that are supported by Stripe and PayPal because they are not allowed. To obtain these payment services, you need to have special permission and follow a rigid protocol. And Stripe expressed interest in working with Esports Fight Club to reach out to video publishers with EFC to give us access to video publishers worldwide.
As to TencentGames, you need to get their specific permission for certain tournament events and follow their rules. We would be unable to use their logo and name in our marketing material without this. It’s not simply signing up for them. So yes we consider this a partnership because they plan on additional events with us which they now support.
Working with major brands including PUBGM, Tencent, Athena Gaming and Warmania gave us the clout to include major esport teams in our tournaments who will participate in future tournaments as well: FaZe Clan, Orange, T1, Elementrix, Nova, Onic and others. And now because of the history, Blizzard is prepared to provide licenses for all their major games.
We are also in discussion with peripheral manufacturers to support our marketplace launch later this year. As soon as agreements are reached, we will jointly announce sponsored product peripherals that will be rewarded in our tournaments.
Q25) Some things on your roadmap get pushed forward. Why did do you do this?
Our development team has been together doing projects for over ten years. This is normal in large scale development projects. For example, we decided after the large Esports Fight Club tournaments we put on that we needed to finalize and launch the Video sharing platform prior to some other features on the roadmap because without it we would not be able to take advantage of many opportunities including monetization opportunities of the exclusive VOD content that only we could re-publish and add ads to. This pushed certain product features into Q2. Another example is PoV. Initially we thought we would go with proprietary blockchain because there was no other solution that would allow us to support PoV. That changed with the release by Ethereum of ERC777. As a result PoV timeline targets changed so that it corresponds to the release of ERC777 as well as the ability to use it for the Video sharing platform. So in effect, the video-sharing platform came in _much earlier than expected_which pushed out other features/products to accommodate this change. Business decisions and external events impact on the roadmap and it would do Verasity and the community an injustice if we just blindly followed a roadmap that becomes slightly outdated every quarter and greatly outdated every year. It is this flexibility that allows Verasity to take advantage of new information and technologies in real-time. And to push out new products earlier in the roadmap such as the video-sharing platform.
Q26) Proof-of-View™️ so nice!
When will it be a Patented POV?
The average time for a patent to be granted is 3 years. We’ve just started our third year as a pending application so we hope it will be in 2021, however our patent lawyers have told us to expect further delays due to covid. Fortunately this won’t stop the release of Proof of View which can go ahead with ‘patent pending’ protection.
Update: The patent was granted a few minutes after the AMA ended!
— @verasitytech
Q27) Will there be an app for download on your phone soon? For Staking. Feeling a little insecure have it online on your website
Actually, our mweb and web applications are much more secure than a mobile app. Mobile apps are much easier to hack. Although we have not been hacked, some users have been hacked via their mobile phones but because we have a manual delay, we were able to stop the loss of tokens. The good news is that now with the swap to ERC777 we can disable any wallets that have stolen VRA and return the VRA to the original user. We do have mobile apps on the roadmap but won’t likely support staking because of the security issue and it is not a priority for us.
Q28) Not try to fud here, but would like to get an answer in AMA to suppress all fud in the future 😁
Financial status company. There have been coins sold for listing on an exchange (still to come?). Was this something that was not planned (like extra opportunity to get listed) or are funds becoming empty?
Current resources held by Verasity fund the project roadmap for the next 12 months. We forecast reaching profitability in 2021 which will finance the continuing runway thereafter. As you point out not all listing opportunities were included in the forecast and we stated that: “In the future, additional listings and expenses may require sales of VRA from the Foundation Reserve”. See the funding update here:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Q29) The VoD update is a little bit unclear for me. Maybe you can tell some more about it. To the looks of it, it is a mix between YouTube and twitch but with PoV to earn $VRA.
PoV on VODs is a key feature for us and for our large ad-stack network. While we are growing our partnerships with community tournaments and adding more games and influencers on EsportsFightClub: we want our reruns to be monetized, available at all times on our proprietary platform and browsing page. Think of it the way Twitch highlights previous streamer’s lives automatically but on a larger and customizable library for viewers to earn VRA and for Verasity to monetize via its ad stack.
And we own several terabytes of gaming and esports video content which will launch with the new video platform in Q1. This is actually massive, because on launch we will have a ton of video content to monetize!
Q30) You seem to have many products but I don’t understand how they work together?

• The Esports Fight Club platform — lots of features already available including global and tournament chats, user created tournaments, detailed tournament customization options
• Proprietary video player — in internal beta for launch Q1
• Proprietary ad stack — in internal beta for launch Q1
• Our own esports content — all the content rights from the tournaments and other gaming content owned by EFC &Verasity — this VOD will be monetized on launch of the video platform in Q1
• Our belief that we can drive large streaming numbers via esports tournaments
• Rewarded Video for these users to watch our content and ads on Esports Fight Club and not on YouTube or other platforms by utilizing VRA to engage and monetize
• A large number of ad networksthat include Google AdMob — Signed on
• Proof of View smart contract view verification (on-chain) — now a reality with the swap of ERC777 to fully build out PoV with all its features on the network.
• VeraWallet as a payment system (together with Stripe &PayPal) throughout the Verasity network.
• In Q1’2021, we will put many of these parts together to start scaling our own video player with our ad stack, producing ad revenues in addition to our other revenue streams.

Q31) What games does Esports Fight Club support now?
PUBG mobile, Free Fire, Counter-Strike GO, Valorant, PUBG and Ludo is about to be launched.
🚀🚀🚀 Great game selection, so far.Q32) Any near-future plans to expand your marketing?
At Verasity, we have a large marketing team that devotes itself behind the scenes to increase our awareness in the cryptocurrency community and reach as many people as possible.
Although we have community groups in more than 10 languages, our local group managers translate all the news, updates into their own languages and publish them in local forums and groups in real time. Thus, we significantly increase our chances of reaching communities that do not speak English. Verasity Spanish, Verasity Korea & Verasity India are already large groups and growing.
We will continue to use media sites, influencers, and all other advertising sources to spread our news in the future as in the past. Gamification marketing opportunities are very important to us as can be seen in LunarCrush.
In return for these efforts, we have gained a great community support that grew slowly but surely. Our marketing efforts will continue to scale. Our goal in this regard is to continue without stopping until every individual in the cryptocurrency community speaks about Verasity.
Our social media metrics have seen a consistent and phenomenal increase over the past year due to our marketing efforts, read here to find out more in detail:
Verasity Social and Adoption Metrics
For us the most important metrics to see how we are doing in socials is LunarCrush:
VRA - VERAsity Insights | LunarCRUSH
LunarCrush Altrank is the best stats measure of Alts social marketing success out of 2100 popular Alts. We tested many marketing ploys to rank highly. When something works, it’s clear in LunarCrush. Competitions like AltWars simply work. This is the meaning of crypto exposure when the Altrank increases in LunarCrush which measures all social volume, % change per 24 hours, and social score. Even with our volume which only ranks 550 out of 2100 Alts, our Social Volume pushes us in front of much bigger tokens such as OMG, DOT, LINK, CHSB and others. Clearly our marketing is working.
The community support has been phenomenal. It’s been great to see how supportive the Verasians have been. We wouldn’t be anywhere without you guys! So thank you from the team.Especially during the AltWars contest recently… we owned! 👍🏼 Power of the Verasians. 🤝Q33)Have you heard about gaming projects Exeedme and Crowns and how can you compare them to Verasity?
We did! Exeedme is an exciting project revolving around gamers personal skill and players betting against themselves (user-centric) that is just at its very inception. They are not competitors as our model (Community, content and tournament centered) has broader purpose and we dont and wont support betting because it will be rejected by many of our partners.
Crowns Token, from Seascape, is a DeFi economy blockchain made for developers building their own online games but who cannot/don’t want to focus on the technical transactional side. Although they are very promising for simple browser and other types of games, they are just not targeting the Esports market and offer, at best, support for upcoming indie-browser games studios.
We would not be able to partner with Exeedme because of betting restrictions but Crowns could be interesting if the games developed are popular with our viewers.
Q34) Are there any plans in the near future (next several months) to list on an exchange that allows full KYC trading for US citizens (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Binance US, etc.)?
This is hard for us. The regulatory environment in the US is not friendly. Since we are not regulated in the US, the risk of listing on a US exchange and the SEC bringing a claim is quite high. At this time we are avoiding this. Lets see what happens with the new SEC Chair who is quite familiar with blockchain. Should he articulate straight forward rules that can be followed and which will not be changed every couple of months, we will consider it then.
Q35) What is:
1. Business structure
2. Marketing plan for next year
3. Customer acquisition costs
4. Execution plan on tech side to deliver
Business structure of Verasity:
Development team structure is flat with these functions:
Blockchain developers, Backend developers, highload & security developers, Full stack Developers, web/mobile frontend developers, mobile only devs, Testing & QA, Finance.
For more about the Verasity business model and forecast see:
Tokenomics , Forecast, News Update
Marketing plan for next year can be found here:
Marketing, Adoption, Tournaments 2021 (Updated)
Customer acquisition costs
We will provide CAC when we are profitable.
Execution plan
See the roadmap on verasity.io
And finally. the last question on the list…🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁Q36) Do you have an update on exchanges? The one that was hinted end of last year and more to come?
Very important issue for us and the community. We fully appreciate the necessity for additional volume and liquidity. After the last exchange hack and issues with OKEX, we were thrown off balance but had expected to list on a new exchange by now. Mistakenly we announced prematurely and then ran into the necessity of completing the VRA token swap before we list on a new exchange. Obviously, we want to now avoid having to swap tokens on a new exchange. So right after the majority of the current exchanges we are listed on complete the swap (this month), we will continue with our listing plans. We are well on the way with 2 exchanges but don’t think it’s prudent to provide more information until they announce the listing themselves. The expectation is still for at least one exchange in Q1. Please bear with us on this. We will get there.
Been a great AMA so far. Cleared up a lot of questions and hopefully made you all as excited for the future as we are. Tons of great new updates to Esports Fight Club coming this year and a prosperous year for Verasity is definitely ahead.Thank you Mark!Will be now opening the chat for the Verasians to ask some additional questions.Will be closing the chat shortly after and we can get some more answers out. The gates are opening! 😁
Additional questions
Q37) When the Verasity Game Jackpot price will be held again? We are waiting for so long.
New jackpots are coming onto the platform but for upcoming games like Ludo which will be announced later this month.
Q38) Is it possible to create something like a create your own tournament where I can play a 1vs1(or 2v2 5vs5) against another player(s) in any game anytime (like in 30 minutes) and where I can set for example a winning price of 100k VRA. and both players have to send 50k before the game to a smart contract and afterward it automatically gets sent to the winner?
Esports Fight Club allows users to create their own tournaments choosing from the available games list. We are constantly working on expanding the list of available games and are open for suggestions. The players deposit VRA to the Esports Fight Club account and use these funds to send money to the prize pool. It's quite simple to set up and you can do it for any amount and any number of players and as admin, you have complete control of the size of the pot, how it is shared in % for winners when to start, etc. Its a fully self managed platform that works now. Just go in and set it up today!
Q39) Hi Mark, regarding the plans for in-game advertising and in-game rewards this year, could you describe your vision on this? Is Verasity currently discussing this topic with certain game companies, and how exactly would it work in practice once achieved? Any details you can share with us would be highly appreciated!
The way we view in-game ads is our ability to provide our logo or some other image that would be part of the game interface, such as the floor or walls. This already exists and is popular. We are in discussions now with game developers to add Verasity/VRA. This is a high powered marketing tool that will get our name into many gamers’ faces. These are native images in effect. For advertisers that want to use native images inside our broadcasts or VOD, they get stitched into the ad server in parallel to the stream and we get paid for the ad inventory. In-game rewards are still in development but the vision is for users to be able to click on an object in the game and get rewarded for doing so, not dissimilar to clicking on an add and getting a higher CPM.
About Verasity.tv
REWARDS BASED PLATFORM FOR ESPORTS, GAMING AND VIDEO ENTERTAINMENT
Verasity provides proprietary technology uniquely rewarding gamers, viewers and publishers. Verasity is a crypto-based platform with the VRA token that aims to revolutionise the online advertising business. With its innovative Proof of View system, advertisers are able to guarantee their video ads are seen and not ignored thanks to smart contracts on the Ethereum chain, while viewers are able to earn VRA simply by watching the content they already consume. Verasity has a focus on gaming publishers and esports.

• The first platform to provide user-generated esports and prize pool tournaments supported by both Fiat &Digital Tokens.
• Video gaming content monetized by Verasity Ad Stackand Proof of View (PoV)
• Enables tokenized rewards(VRA) as well as loyalty schemes within the video player VeraWallet
• Supports over 2 million video publishers with our SDK products(overlay on video players) to increase engagement and revenues by 35%. See example publishersand videos here.

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AMA with Verasity Founder, R J Mark was originally published in Verasity on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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