Is Polybius.io Scam?

Polybius.io is an Estonia based team that claims to be a croudfunded website which aims to become a bitcoin bank (or cryptocurrency bank).

Well, they might become that too, however my review is suspicious about the site. Lets get deep into it and see the reasons what make it unreliable.

Here we will analyze the polybius.io project and see if it appears to be a scam or legit site that can be considered trusted and reliable or it’s untrustworthy and unreliable.

Note: Polybius = HashCoin = HashFlare, all are the same team and group apparently.

Review from The Financial Supervision Authority of Estonia

This is what Finantsinspektsioon has to say about Polybius.io:

Finantsinspektsioon about polybius

Translated from: http://www.fi.ee/public/hoiatusteated/20170606_Hoiatusteade_Polybius.pdf

Evaluating the domain

  1. The domain name was registered in 2016, yet nothing exponential has been done which is done in case of serious teams and companies
  2. The domain was registered for one year only in may 2016, if they were serious, they would have registered it for 10 years
  3. The domain was renewed again in may 2017 for one year only, if they were serious by now they would at least renew it for next 10 years

Now we do understand that many websites and companies don’t register or renew their websites for 10 years, but they usually don’t ask you to trust them with their payments too.

If a team is claiming to be managing such a big project, they can at least afford 150$ at once for registration of a domain for 10 years.

Evaluating the Customer Support System

When giving money to some firm or group, their customer support system is highly important. How will they respond when there is any issue and do they really care about helping the customers or not.

The support system used by polybius.io is provided by intercom.io

And the support system includes only a chatbox on right bottom or email id at the footer to send email to.

Now upon evaluating the intercom.io chat, these are my findings.

Using trial or lite version

When we start their support chat, it shows the branding of intercom.io, saying we run on intercom.io.

we run on intercom io

Which means they’re using either the trail version or else the base lite version. How can we prove that and what does it mean? Well, the proof is on intercom.io site, check the features difference between lite version and the standard version:

Intercom.io Lite version pricing

intercom io lite version branding

You can see that the unbranding messaging option is not available in Lite plan for intercom.io

The price for lite version is 53$ per month, for 250 users. While the pricing for the standard version is $79 per month.

intercom io standard plan price

Assuming that they’re a big setup as they claim, they must be having more than 250 visitors per day, so if they can afford that high for lite version, they could easily get the standard version and get rid of branding.

However, that brings us to the option that they might be using the trial version. The trial version is for 14 days only, but we can re-register for trial version using another payment method or card and we’re good to go! This is just a speculation though.

HashCoins and Polybius

Polybius logo

HashCoins is the company or group which has started polybius project.

  1. Both websites have the same contact cell phone number. Which means no seperate dedicated team is for these two projects.
  2. Last tweet by HashCoins on their twitter account was on 19 Apr 2016, more than a year from now!

So if the parent company or group is so much dormant and sluggish, how can we expect their child project to be something extraordinary!

 

Conclusion

Polybius might not be a pure scam, but it’s not a reliable team either as their is no promising future. Their past don’t seem interesting and promising either. So in my opinion it’s better not to indulge in this project as they are at least not serious about their own project apparently.