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CoinList account trading: High investment due to the wealth effect

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A complete grey industry chain has been formed around CoinList accounts, from doing, raising and selling

原文标题：《 CoinList 账号灰产调查：做号、养号与转售 |链捕手》

By Richard Lee

Original article editor: Gong Quanyu, chain catcher

A complete grey industry chain has been formed around CoinList accounts, from doing, raising and selling.

As one of the most influential public offering platforms in the crypto world, CoinList has been a phenomenal event in the domestic crypto industry this year. Almost every new public offering launched by CoinList has caused a rush of investors.

Behind this phenomenon is the crazy wealth effect of CoinList's public offering. In the case of Flow, the project token was launched on CoinList in September last year at a price of just $0.10, and up to 10,000 can be purchased. The price reached $6 after the launch of the exchange in January this year, and peaked above $40 in early April. The highest return rate was more than 400 times. The return is still over 100 times.

For now,CoinList can be considered one of the few reliable channels for ordinary investors to get access to early investment opportunities in quality projects, and these early investment opportunities have indeed provided investors with considerable return multiples catalyzed by the bull market.In turn, more and more cryptocurrency investors are participating in CoinList's projects.

However, due to the platform policy that CoinList does not support mainland Chinese residents to register (they can choose Chinese nationality, but they need formal documents of overseas residence) and the limited and random snapping mechanism, a number of professional "newbies" who are specialized in buying overseas CoinList accounts came into being. At the same time,There is also a complete grey industrial chain from KYC data supply, account production and maintenance.

In the sale of finished product number, a KYC certification usually flows to multiple roles such as KYC certification provider, intermediate channel provider, final account seller and so on, and each link is extracted and divided. KYC is obtained from different sources. Some of them are "woolly parties" on overseas Internet platforms and overseas citizens who accept the promotion, while the other part of the information obtained in bulk is from more confidential sources, and privacy leaks and transactions may occur on the premise that the identity of the owner is unknown. When the project became popular, it was not uncommon for participants to say that the selling of invalid accounts, multiple resale of accounts and resale of accounts were common.

Account delivery is not the end point. The CoinList platform has its own risk control measures for account registration and multiple account use, making account maintenance critical. Account buyers typically pay a fixed monthly server rental fee to do so. Once the account is invalid, some accounts and their assets are permanently lost, and some sellers provide the so-called after-sales service of KYC traceability and help to recover the account, which is also a selling point for these merchants. However, due to the length of the chain involved, the actual effect can not be verified in advance.

Account demanders and suppliers, together with CoinList official risk management to form a game. Faced with a batch of blocked accounts, "new" can only guess the reason for its risk control, and then upgrade the maintenance strategy.

In the eyes of professional newbies, having dozens or hundreds of accounts is now the threshold to participate in the public offering of CoinList and the chance to win the lottery.

More broadly, CoinList's public offering of multiple accounts to one person has raised questions about the fairness of the platform among overseas users. CoinList officials have issued a statement warning of this, and participants say that centralized account closures have occurred from time to time, but there are still large numbers of controls.

"Do sign" : KYC information is mostly flowing in through grey channels

"To tell you the truth, five or six out of ten have to be lied to." Buyer Lin Fei thinks which seller is reliable is oneself "spend money to try out".

Lin fei, who considers himself a professional CoinList public offering participant, made his first large-scale purchase of more than 300 CoinList accounts through a foreign seller on Telegram in March this year, all of which were authenticated as overseas citizens.

When trading, Lin Fei placed a new order for hundreds of accounts, and the other party delivered the accounts in batches, each delivery of 10 or 20 accounts of the login email and password, and usually wait two hours between the last batch and the next batch. Lin fei is not clear about the source of the account and the production process, guess "otherwise they have a big organization, his own stock, or find to push."

CoinList's new account business is usually divided into agent registration and finished product number transaction. Agent registration means that CoinList supports mainland citizens to register accounts with overseas IP address and residence proof. Buyers can provide their identity information, sellers can provide overseas IP address and residence proof and other materials to complete the agent registration process. The number of the finished product is mostly the account that the citizens of the United States, the Philippines and other overseas countries have registered and verified. Among professional "new hitters", finished product numbers account for the majority of transactions.

According to "do" in a different way, finished products, the production can be divided into one-to-one registered, batch for KYC information, etc., which registered one-on-one way in the demand side and vendors are more recognized, namely with the KYC owner has link way, bulk registration is unable to find any KYC owner, follow-up more trouble.

A seller in the team responsible for "production number" members told the chain catchers reporters, the team through similar push "net push" way of mass production accounts, usually involving sellers, advertising alliance and other intermediary channels, "push hand" and account actual authentication and other links.The account seller will release the account demand to the intermediary channel, and then the channel will contact the "Push hand", who will eventually find group members in the operating community to complete the registration.

The intermediary channels are mostly platforms or community organizations called "advertising alliances". The AD Alliance, the member said, was a comprehensive term that would allow any demand to be posted on its platform for the right price. When such organizations receive a request, they will further post the specific information to the task-oriented "wool pull" website, or contact the "push hand" to further find the appropriate actual certification.

"Push hand" is the bottom link in the industrial chain. They operate their own groups on overseas social software such as Telegram and Whatsapp, and a community can reach thousands of people. According to the member, Push Hand will advertise part-time jobs on social media and other online platforms to attract overseas "wool party" to join.

"A copy of KYC information may be worth tens of yuan to the wool party, but the price to the user will be hundreds." The price the team can sell a CoinList account can fluctuate from 100 yuan to 300 yuan, the member said, with intermediary channels and "push hands" each taking a commission of about 30 percent.

Xiong Ying, from the retailer xiongying Community, said there are also a small number of fake accounts circulating in the market, which use THE PS software to modify the id information and then use the AI-generated image to complete face recognition. This kind of account has no actual corresponding person, once invalid, it is difficult to recover.

Real person KYC data may also flow in through grey channels.As a buyer, the reporter consulted an account seller, who introduced his account, KYC, as being from Yunnan province's Dituo, which helps local social security bureaus get cards for residents while secretly doing KYC business, often without the residents' knowledge. The team used the identity information of local residents in Yunnan, overseas IP, residence proof and other materials to produce accounts.

(The seller sent a video of a table lined with resident ids.)

In addition, the seller also said that one of the "benefits" of these accounts is that after the more valuable accounts are banned, the local promotion team can find a real person to help submit identification and retrieve the accounts by "making connections" with relevant personnel.

"Raise the number" : buyers, sellers and the official "risk control" game

After account trading, "the same day package" is a common rule in the circle.

Lin Fei introduced, the seller delivery is usually the account of the login email and password, after receiving the account as soon as possible to change the above information and standby email to their own email and password, otherwise the large probability of the account will be lost, the reason is that the original owner or the seller may inadvertently resell during the period. Once the login information is modified successfully, the account will be successfully attributed to the buyer.

But that's just the beginning. In March, player Meng Lu and his colleagues bought 50 CoinList accounts for amateur buying, but the batch numbers were all blocked, he guessed, because the ACCOUNT IP did not match the authentication address.

In May, he bought 100 accounts again. This time, he rented an overseas server to match each account with the IP address of the corresponding region. However, due to the large number of accounts and complicated operation, he wrote a script and used a computer program to complete the steps automatically, such as opening the server, logging in the account and snapping up the account.

All 100 numbers are still invalid.

Subsequently, Meng Lu again to buy 100 numbers and the use of "semi-artificial semi-automatic" mode, two computers each hung 50 numbers, 50 numbers hung 25 servers, a server on the boarding of 2, script run only for open server, the rest of the operation are manual. Meng Lu said that "slowly I have experience", so far the third batch of accounts have not been "risk control".

Risk control is a word that is frequently used by both players and sellers. After the account encounters "risk control", you can still log in, but you have no right to snap up project tokens.According to Xiong, common factors that trigger CoinList to implement risk control include non-compliance with registration information and IP, frequent IP use changes, serial email, robot or script buying and queue jumping.

CoinList officials don't typically specify the reasons for the closures, but when a group of accounts are blocked, buyers often use community communication to summarize the underlying factors for themselves.

In fact, CoinList makes it clear in the terms of its user agreement that opening multiple accounts, transferring account access to third parties, buying accounts, and using bots or scripts to snap them up are considered "abusive practices." In this case, CoinList reserves the right to cancel outstanding orders in the account and to deactivate or cancel the corresponding account. The user can transfer the assets in the wallet within 90 days after the account expires, but the project tokens and the right to snap up the account will be recovered.

CoinList said the decision to restrict access, suspend or close accounts was based on confidentiality standards that are critical to CoinList's risk management and security protocols, and that CoinList does not disclose details of its risk management and security procedures to users.

"Newbies," account sellers and CoinList officials are playing an opaque game.CoinList officials issued statements on Twitter in March and April warning of account buying and selling and bot buying, but have said little since. Both Lin Fei and Xiong Ying said there had been a large area of "risk control" in May.

"It's very loose in early March, it's a little tight in April, it's almost very tight in May, it's just the average person 'big', if you don't have a server and you can't manage it, you can't play it." Lin Fei said.

Players and sellers concluded that an account must correspond to an IP address of the authentication place in order to ensure that the IP address is fixed and not "risk controlled". The added cost of participation is a fixed monthly fee for renting overseas servers. In addition, some players consider snapping up efficiency, but also increase hardware equipment investment, improve computer configuration.

Therefore, the cost of participating in a CoinList public offering on a scale often includes account purchases, hardware investments, server leases, and project token investments. Meng Lu rent a server monthly cost of 248 yuan, a server hung two, each month to raise the cost of more than 10,000.

In addition, due to the time difference, most domestic participants in the public issuance of projects need to carry out in the early morning. For those with a large number of accounts, all operations can be completed at 5am or 6am, which also requires some time and energy.

The number of high resale, market heat has fallen sharply

After CoinList's public offering, the paper returns of project tokens often reach tens of times or even hundreds of times, which is a wealth myth attracting investors in the past year.

However, according to CoinList's public offering mechanism, successful project tokens purchased by investors typically require lock-in periods of 6-12 months and a long linear release period, meaning that such high paper returns are difficult to quickly cash out.

Given the uncertainty in the secondary market,Many successful investors prefer to resell their CoinList accounts at a discount, with the seller getting the future futures at a discounted market price and the seller getting the certainty of a high return at the discount.As a result, the over-the-counter market surrounding these successful CoinList accounts has been hot so far this year.

The winning accounts that Meng Lu's team grabbed were usually resold ten times. In June, the decentralized storage protocol Swarm project token BZZ was hot for Coinlist's public offering. More than 10 of the 100 numbers of Meng Lu's team were successful, and 10 of them were eventually sold. The investment cost of each account was $500, and the number was sold at 7900U, increasing the price by nearly 16 times.

Meng Lu to hold grabbed the token is relatively indifferent, he thinks should try not to leave their unstable factors, "can sell to sell". "Can I see what's going to happen next year or the second half of this year? You never know." He said.

Recently, with the decline of the market, the prices of most CoinList public offerings have fallen by more than half from their highs, and the CSPR has fallen by more than 95%, which has significantly reduced the demand for CoinList's number and further widened the discount. Of course, this also means that most of the people who bought CoinList accounts at high prices have already suffered big losses.

According to the reporter,Resale of CoinList numbers has fallen from 10-50 times cost to 1-2 times cost.

At the same time, the token market price of some public offering projects has fallen back to the public offering price, or even below the public offering price. According to CoinMarketCap, the price of Covalent TOKEN CQT, which went public in late April, has fallen to $0.34, slightly below its peak offering price of $0.35. Social token platform Rally, which went public at $0.60 in early April, has lost nearly half its token RLY at $0.37.

Given the current state of the market, professional newbies are increasingly demanding more enthusiasm for projects, rather than snapping them up as CoinList hits.

Lin fei said that CoinList would not participate in the recent two public offerings. "As you know, it is not possible to grab one for each number. If you grab one for ten, or even one for 20, your cost for 20 will be several thousand. You lose money."

Before the sale of the project, Lin does not exchange the forecast price of a project token with large customers, so as to decide whether to participate in the snapping up, and its core indicator is to see the current market conditions and project heat. "Some coins can be stolen, and some coins can't be stolen. Both issues are not very profitable." Lin Fei said.

Several sellers told reporters that a significant number of CoinList accounts are now controlled by mainland investors, some of which are personal accounts registered with overseas IP addresses and proof of residence, while the rest are "newbies" buying accounts in bulk and snapping them up on a large scale.

They have made a lot of money from this approach, but it has also raised questions from overseas CoinList users, many of whom have complained on CoinList's official Twitter account that the "multi-account" buying undermines the fairness of the platform. So far, CoinList has made no official statements about the situation.

In the whirlpool of wealth, for a long time, gray production and the development of the crypto industry, but also damaged the fairness and normal order of the industry, how to minimize the impact of gray production will be a long-term proposition and challenge that the entire industry needs to face.

(At the request of interviewees, Lin Fei and Meng Lu are aliases)