Update from i05,
From @Jeromeyrome:
Firstly and most importantly, rewards: Please do not lose focus on the fact that this project is underpinned by the variable rewards, these are the rewards that the majority of members qualify for. These rewards have, in the main been made on time, accurately and with a success rate of over 99%. Please also note that these payments have only been lower in value owing to the chargebacks made in the first weeks of the project once a number of users made ROI and above with the fixed rewards and the sink node bounties. We absolutely and categorically appreciate that the fixed rewards have been a mess but this mess will not be allowed to define the project either now or as it moves forward. Within the Discord there are 160 members who qualify for fixed rewards approximately, this is less than 0.5% of our overall customer base.
Secondly and in relation to Stripe. Very early on in the project Stripe decided to hold our payments for 90 days, this is a common practice from Stripe and a cursory web search would prove this to be factual. The owners of the company at this stage wished to pause all fixed rewards until the amounts were released by Stripe. The reason being that this increased our exposure to risk as we would now have to front the entire purchase of the hardware and also pay rewards with a major risk of chargebacks. It was me who personally intervened here to ensure that fixed rewards (and indeed all rewards) were paid with immediate effect, it was also me who encouraged the retention of Stripe as a payments provider, this despite the risk to the business in respect of liquidity. Had we wished to act fraudulently we would’ve a) Only used crypto payments or b) moved to only crypto payments when the hype was at it’s highest, but we did not. Stripe retain a connection to our bank account which enables them to make withdrawals as well as deposits and so even if they had paid out (which they have not) we would’ve still had the entire chargeback liability…
Thirdly, even simply totalling up the amounts posted in the “Flex” channel will give anybody a clear insight in to the value of rewards paid to date, this only covers a small percentage of the amounts paid as many do not flex or are not members of the Discord. Had we been inclined to try and “continue the scam” then we would’ve simply loaded the variable rewards with a high value to drive more uptake, thus continuing to give us liquidity to pay the fixed rewards as well. Fourth in respect of hardware variances, yes we are aware that the wearables are not as described. This is an issue we raised with the manufacturer and are waiting on a response which has been delayed owing to the public holiday in China. The wearables do still provide the network functionality we require however the additional functionality appears to be missing. Our remedy for this would’ve been and will be very simple, we will continue to ship the devices but would also refund the entire purchase price.
Fifth, the functionality of the network. Both myself and Maria have provided a number of documents outlining the channel frequencies on which DECT can operate, this includes the BLE 2.4GHz frequency channel as well as 16 others. I have long said to “not pay attention to the frequency” and instead the functionality of the multi-channel mesh network created by our devices. The sink nodes scan for devices on those channels every second and receive the data which is then committed to our GATT server. The GATT server filters by MAC address to obtain packets specific to our network. Sixth, you will note that in almost all instances where a refund has been requested or a chargeback issued we have made no attempt to request or try any recovery option for the rewards paid to date. In actual fact, the presence of the rewards being paid would, in most chargeback circumstances, be sufficient evidence to overturn any chargeback… continued
… that being said, we have no longer been challenging chargebacks on this basis, nor would we continue to do so. Seventh, paying rewards before hardware has been delivered was a choice we made ourselves in the creation stage of the project, despite the massive risk that this exposed us to, there are no other projects that offer this simply because of the risk exposure, we did so knowing that there were often major discrepancies in the shipping and manufacturing time of Chinese manufacturers as has been evidenced by the Helium problems amongst others. Eighth, the phone number on the bottom of our invoice, we acquired an english language outsourced customer helpline at the very start of the project, mainly because we were of the belief that this would better serve the majority of the customer base, that being said, this number was changed 3 weeks ago to our local Portugese number.
Ninth, I have seen some posts regarding “Bulgarians being blamed”. This requires some context. At the outset of the project I was approached by a member of the community to represent IO5 within a Bulgarian Telegram group for Helium. A large number of early adopters were from Bulgaria, mainly because of this. Unfortunately a number of members of this group took it upon themselves to conduct certain behaviour that caused significant damage to our project and it’s reputation, behaviour that we are still having to deal with the fall-out from. Some of this behaviour triggered a number of chargebacks which then flagged up with our Stripe Radar on a localised basis. There are a number of very positive and very patient Bulgarian members of the 1500 club who’s membership and participation we continue to value as highly as anybody else’s. Unfortunately the initial wave of chargebacks did eminate from there, hence why the Stripe Radar flagged the payments retrospectively, that is all. We do not believe that this contributed to chargebacks from other countries…
Save for when false information was shared with SMOKLM along with the users of this group in the early hours of this morning. Tenth, we have been unable to engage in certain activities to drive the uptake of the project, such as social media, marketing and the full press release of our investment because of the sheer volume of background noise, perpetrated by certain individuals who I won’t name, but you are all aware of who they are. Likewise plans to place employee information on the website was scaled back after a number of issues including the abuse Ava received and also the sexual comments that Maria has to endure on a daily basis.
Eleventh, there has been a monumental amount of FUD regarding our downconverter device. Firstly and for absolute clarity, a device that converts BLE to LoRa is not a technology that we have created, it exists in multiple forms already and the chipsets are produced by all the leading LoRa manufacturers including Semtech and RAK. I am personally staggered that so called “experts” have staked their entire reputation on discrediting the device without even bothering to conduct proper research or indeed ask us direct questions. We have offered the device to the main protagonists for free, however we have not yet had any word back from them. Likewise, COTX publicly verified that the device was transmitting packets to their open server, the reason we did not progress this further as of yet is because to comply with COTX requirements for the public display of this data we were required to provide information that fell within the scope of our IP, namely our message parser, we had to seek legal advice on this before being able to commit to providing the information and I don’t think that anybody with any knowledge of COTX’s history would be surprised with our caution at this stage. Twelfth, my now apparently infamous trip to China. I am staggered that this created as much noise as it did…
I was there to co-promote with a new supplier a range of additional devices for our network. Yes Discord is banned and yes a VPN is required however a VPN use would prohibit my ability to access other company functionality that was deemed as more crucial at the time. So where we are: 1) Anybody who wishes to obtain a refund can do so and, providing they go through the correct channels they will not be penalised in respect of us attempting to claw-back any rewards paid to date. 2) Anybody with a device that has shipped who wishes to leave the project can note that refunds, by law are allowed at any point up to 14 days after you receive the device and at any point up to the shipping notification actually stating movement. The only time a refund cannot be processed is when the package is in transit however providing you either refuse delivery or request a refund upon receipt this will be of course granted without penalty.
Anybody who received a device that did not comply with the description online when ordering can obtain a refund and retain the device providing you go through the proper channels. If you choose to chargeback then we do require the device to be returned to us. 4) Back-dated fixed rewards: The plan to deliver these via Coinbase has not changed, I apologise that these did not go as stated yesterday however this is a project that Maria wishes to be responsible for and see through from start to finish, it was me who basically forced her to go home yesterday as she was threatening to miss her youngest child’s birthday, I apologise that this was not communicated to you and for the distress that this caused, I was not aware of how specific the timeframes had been communicated. There is no lie in respect of how long it took us to clear the funds to Coinbase nor the additional KYC Coinbase required after we deposited an amount greater than our maximum daily deposit value… continued
Obviously the issue we have now is how many people waiting on fixed rewards have chargedback overnight when the server went in to a full meltdown. 5) Fixed rewards contract, as most of you know this is an outsourced task (partly because of our lack of crypto knowledge and partly from a legal perspective) we are provided with a timeframe from the dev team which is essentially when it will start and when they expect it to finish, we have always been told “at least 24 hours”. They have told us that the contract has started when it was supposed to and I have asked for an updated completion timeframe, this would be the point at which we would welcome queries over missing payments etc, this is how it has always been.
So how are we moving forward: Firstly we will be continuing with the Coinbase drop and this will now initially be limited to users within the 1500 group whom we know for absolute certainty have not started a chargeback. Secondly, the fixed rewards contract is ongoing, anybody who has charged back overnight we will ask for the most recent fixed rewards to be deducted from the value, note this is not all fixed rewards received to date. Thirdly, there are changes afoot within the business. The first is that I will begin to lead only the technical team and a COO will be installed to deliver the distributed hardware side of the project. This individual is coming from a company whom we now share some ownership with and is vastly more experienced than I at the consumer facing role. The second is that we will be allowing purchases from manufacturers directly so as to eliminate issues relating to shipping, these manufacturers will be represented within the Discord for direct questioning. We have brought onboard a social media executive who is currently curating our “look and feel”. She will be responsible for our strategy on all platforms including a video series and a properly managed Reddit account. Continued… We will be using a portion of our investment to support marketing activities to grow both sides of our business and you can expect us to become much more prominent across a number of platforms.
Our bluetooth marketing side of the business will be spun out and be headed up by an experienced executive with a strong background in the field and she will be bringing with her a number of country specific BDM’s to grow the sales of this particular section. This will hopefully deliver some “quick wins” that will be used to grow the treasury and improve variable rewards. We are working with some industry leaders to deliver some specific whitepapers relating to the BLE-LoRa technology so as to add some gravitas and social proof to what we are doing. So ultimately my message is this: If you have lost faith in the project then that is absolutely understandable and providing you obtain a refund through the correct channels, we will not seek to recoup any rewards paid to you, this leaves everybody in a position of positive return. If you have retained faith then firstly thank-you so much, I assure you that we will make this right, we will overcome these teething problems and we will deliver the network and rewards mechanism that we have promised.
That’s the current update @everyone (edited)
