Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmr
Why do you think he was conned? I assume his ambassadorship involved him getting paid, not him investing his own money in the company as a consumer.
Agree. And "conned" implies that there was some elaborate plot for which Polk fell prey, with Mark Lamb steepling his fingers in a dark room going "excellent... excellent..."
I got trashed for saying this 11 years ago, but there was an extent to which I defended Full Tilt Poker in that it did not set out to be a scam. Rather, it was simply a poorly run business that only later began employing many shady strategies – including that of a Ponzi scheme – to keep the lights on.
Similarly, it's quite possible that CoinFlex is not a scam and never intended to be one, but rather was a legitimate business operating on a rather precarious foundation. Or maybe it had a solid business plan, but it simply didn't work out. Crypto is still the Wild West. There's no go-to-market strategy that someone can have where people would think, yep, that's tried, true and tested.
It's an admittedly loose analogy, but this would be like someone opening up a store in Los Feliz, Calif. that specifically sells space heaters. Then they enlist residents Leo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling to become celebrity spokesmen for it. Of course, selling Laskos and De’Longhis in a city whose weather is warmer in November than London's in July is laughable. So don't be surprised when said business goes belly-up and declares bankruptcy before the end of the first fiscal year, leaving more than a few creditors holding the bag.
Would you think a little less of those two actors for putting their name on a business with so little chance to succeed? More than fair. But it would be an incredibly stupid leap in logic to say Leo and Gosling must automatically be scammers who are "worse than Lederer and Ferguson" and belong in jail.
That said...
I would be very interested to hear the answer to fast11375's question... what exactly
was this due diligence? Obviously, assets and liquidity had to be high on the list, but even if those are off the charts, it must be damn near impossible to ascertain the prospects of any business in this space. I know due diligence often entails little more than checking off some boxes that you can later cite to CYA.
Doug Polk is getting quite a bit of hate in this thread, but it's altogether likely that his ambassadorship of Coinflex came from a place of naivete or just plain gamble, but not nefariousness.