The Bitcoin and cryptocurrency space is a magnet for scammers and frauds, like the light is to the flies, and it can be hard to figure out who can be trusted. Even for us. This is an article about a Vietnamese “crypto exchange” operated by a rogue ex-employee of BitcoinVN impersonating individual members of our company but also fraudulently appropriating the history and reputation of BitcoinVN, the first Bitcoin exchange in Vietnam.
Founded a couple of months ago, the company of our ex-employee Phung Thi Huyen Trang recently launched a white label instance of the exchange platform built by Expread, a Chinese software company owned by Leo Liu (刘永哲) who previously worked with us but ended our partnership under more than dubious circumstances (but that’s for another article).
Trang joined our company in late 2017 as the Bitcoin bull market was ramping up. Initially focusing on customer support and e-commerce management, she quickly started to jump in and out of roles within BitcoinVN, sometimes without our knowledge.
Our relationship finally came to an end after she felt comfortable enough to give herself the title of “COO of BitcoinVN”. We want to make clear that she was at no point the COO of our organisation.
During or even before the time she absurdly presented herself to the public as the “COO”, she began making plans to launch her own cryptocurrency exchange brand (BVnex) that would awkwardly attempt to hijack the reputation of BitcoinVN and our actual COO, Dominik Weil. On the BVnex website, Dominik is shown as one of the “co-founders” and as “brand founder” of BVnex along with the suspiciously impressive sounding bio description of Trang, shady Leo and other team members whose actual involvement in this satire of a startup remains unclear.
We feel honored and amused by their desperate attempts to lend credibility to their operation by using our names and personalities, but neither Dominik nor BitcoinVN are in any way involved in this “business” and we hope nobody was misled by the questionable individuals behind BVnex into thinking they have any sort of reputable history as a result of silly statements on their website or in person.
The otherwise laughable strategy of BVnex is to act as some sort of successor of BitcoinVN in order to fool gullible buyers of their IEO token and possibly other investors into thinking they’re dealing with a trustworthy exchange business, when in reality they’re forking over their money to a group of nut jobs.
Sounds crazy, right? But this is the comical state of the “blockchain” industry in Asia and BVnex is one of many bizarre instances of smoke and mirror ventures spawned for the sole purpose of helping folks with a rather high risk tolerance getting rid of their hard earned money.
In the most lazy manner possible, they simply copy-pasted our history into their website and they seem so committed to the fantasy, you’d get the impression they actually believe their own nonsense.
We repeatedly tried to convince the “CEO” of BVnex to leave our names out of this dumpster fire, however she stubbornly refuses to give up on her derangement she mistakes for a genius masterplan. But then again, given her history of inflating her own importance we can’t really be sure about her actual position in this strange racket.
To top it off, the hallucination of an enterprise calls itself an upgrade to the BitcoinVN brand. At least this is what you get to read when you manage to navigate their website littered with fake news in broken English. But there is good news: We did not suddenly turn into BVnex. We’re BitcoinVN and we want to urge everyone to take promises of buzzword slinging crypto startups with an extra grain of salt.
Stay tuned for more insights from the crypto clown world.
