I’ve covered SoMee many times before. This is my final warning to stay as far away from anything related to SoMee as possible. Let’s dive into the details.

https://odysee.com/@ScottCBusiness:4/Somees-last-attempt:3

This is my 508th episode/article. I put a great deal of work into this content so if you find it valuable, please do like, share, comment and subscribe!

 

To be clear, I thoroughly used and tested SoMee for over 2 years. I was using it up until February 11th, 2022, when I decided I would put SoMee to rest as malicious and that they will never improve their platform or fulfill their promises. Their planned incompetence has gotten them very far, but it’s time to call it what it is and leave them for good.

*Note that the images to go with this were not able to upload properly and thus weren't included*

Previous Coverage

https://youtu.be/tMqY0ER_M14

My original concerns:

·         There was an ONG burn address that was never proven to have actually been burned – This has been addressed with the new token drop (which made everyone lose close to 99% of their value anyway.)

·         Their web traffic seems off (whether or not this was the case, their numbers on Republic confirm my suspicions covered later in this.)

o   They said 80,000 daily active users and then admitted that they only had 35,000 daily active users on the platform in 2020 listed on Republic.

·         The SoMee platform was full of spam. (This is fixed by those who are using Hive for the most part)

·         Since making that video, they disabled my access to my funds for about 10 months. Ironically, their response was during the time it was disabled.

·         I was concerned what would happen with Gbucks – They were just taken away and destroyed.

·         They significantly overcharged people to buy crypto that also gets locked and can’t be accessed due to wallets not be accessible and you still have to KYC.

·         They had you KYC to withdraw which you had to pay for with fiat and said it was mandatory by law. They now do not require KYC (apparently the law doesn’t matter now).

·         You could previously block people to prevent them from downvoting you or moderating the content in the community. – This has been solved.

SoMee’s CEO also did an “Honest Response” to my video here: https://youtu.be/rzsXfq3XXpM

He originally disabled commenting on the video, but the most important thing to note is that he only addressed the less important claims like showing their HTTP requests. He also focused the majority of the video on that one claim.

The majority of the claims like them overcharging, disabling access, requiring verification to access funds, and all the really important things I was concerned about were left unaddressed aside from mentioning they have to require KYC even though the majority of platforms don’t require it and somehow they now do not require KYC by using Hive even though they claimed it was required.

In the video they show that they have nearly 95,000 users while they reported only 51,200 users in 2021 on Republic. This is odd since this was from April 2021 and somehow, they lost almost half their users supposedly (or they weren’t real).

Influencers & SoMee Team

The team is listed here: https://somee.social/

This was their original team:

This is their current team:

Regarding the influencers that promoted and perpetuated this, I don’t think they were all malicious and I’ve seen several delete their old videos promoting SoMee (whether it was to not get caught or due to realizing it was sketchy is not clear). Either way, I will only cover those who still have content promoting SoMee or listed as advisors.

https://youtu.be/yXebaIL7Zjg - As seen in this video they have hired an array of lesser known actors to basically deliver “testimonies” that are more like ads such as Bejo Dohmen, Aramis Merlin, Rochone, Lynn Cao, Peter Ivanov, Phil Flock, Sapir Abir Lev, Bettina Habig, Essam Ferris, Paulina Michaels, Michael Jassin, and Roxana Cantini. The reality is that they likely know little to nothing about crypto and the blockchain and at the very least could not verify SoMee’s claims.

Crypto Crow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYVXF7L4AQ8 – Crypto Crow promotion – “Can These 2 Platforms Make You Rich?”

CryptoCrow’s SoMee account: https://somee.social/cryptocrow

EllioTrades

https://somee.social/elliotrades

https://youtu.be/NwSyfvAxtfA - The Trillion Dollar Question! Can SoMee become the first crypto social platform to go mainstream?

He perpetuated Superfarm amongst many other scams - https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1467926900806926339/photo/1

CryptoWendyO

https://somee.social/cryptowendyo - Bitboy was more active on SoMee but fell off after the failed Cardano launch with Cardstarter whom he is involved with.

BitBoy & Aaron Kesel (aka The Cat)

https://somee.social/bitboy-crypto

Aaron Kesel worked closely with SoMee and is the lead researcher for Ben Armstrong. I don’t know how deep Ben Armstrong aka BitBoy is into this, but he is smart enough to see red flags.

https://youtu.be/LLHc4SUfHoM - First SoMee promotional video

In this video Bitboy describes Aaron Kesel as someone apart of this “anonymous team” when it’s really his lead researcher which he later admits 1 year afterwards in this livestream: https://youtu.be/lIHL47m5DxM

In this video, you see Bitboy with his researcher, Chris and Phillip from SoMee and Ashwin & Brandon from Cardano’s Cardstarter. This is from over 8 months ago.

https://youtu.be/NwSyfvAxtfA - In 2020 they went on a paid tour on various influencer channels

There were a massive number of influencers that were obviously paid to promote SoMee given they didn’t really use it or understand it and they promoted features that never released (aka they were delivering advertisements with scripts).

https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1459285109408944133?s=21

While doing my research I realize that Bitboy is actual in the midst of a different scandal. Recently, he announced he would quit sponsored videos. The most interesting part is that I don’t see any of his videos disclosing that they were ever sponsored.

Just some alleged scams/pump and dumps/crypto that was promoted and not disclosed by BitBoy:

·         $MYX

·         DistX Token

·         ZAO Finance

·         $ETHY

·         Meridian Network

·         Cypherium Blockchain – the “slow rug”

·         Pamp Network

·         Pundi X

I think these videos are succinct:

·         https://youtu.be/D4zil4lKicI

·         https://youtu.be/9XYmITmZaF0

·         https://youtu.be/DibvroDcT88

·         https://youtu.be/SfnwHCeehBU

Ada Cardano Cardstarter IDO:

They raised funds with an initial DEX offering or IDO to get SoMee launched on Cardano and that never happened. By the way a DEX is a decentralized exchange. So what happened to the funds and this token?

https://pools.cardstarter.io/

They launched $SAT token as well on Uniswap as an ERC20 token around the time they were claiming Cardano was going to work with them. They deleted the one pager that linked to this and explained everything they were doing: https://devs.somee.social/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Somee-One-Pager-2.pdf  

This is the contract for $SAT - https://etherscan.io/token/0xc9F1016D336ef77AeE75Fc11Ad64C5Ecf9121332 

We’ve had this advertising token for almost 8 months with nothing to show for it.

In this amazing thread by ZachXBT: https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1443583283648872464 he eventually gets to Cardstarter here: https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1451627071034335246

Here he highlights Cardstarter and StarLaunchSOL as sketchy projects that contain mostly the same people who fund these projects and ruin retail investors.

BitBoy & Ran Neuner were also involved in propping up Cardstarter. See how everything ties together?

Note that $Stars and $Cards have almost the same tokenomics and the same price trends.

These are people who pump out rug pulls, pump and dumps, etc. all the time, even with their own coins. You can dive deep into this, but the Twitter thread outlines most of what you need to know.

Republic Private Fund Raise

https://republic.com/somee

On this page alone, they are using all of their old marketing which isn’t the case today meaning what they are promising is a lie and not real with this Republic project. They also claim have received grants from Amazon and IBM which I’ve never heard about before nor was I able to find any proof of.

Let’s cover some basic highlights one by one:

·         “SoMee Pays People To Be Social” – They do not. Currently, Hive pays you for your social interaction. SoMee is just a community on the Hive blockchain.

·         “They Earn Money From Their Content And Likes” – They earn them through Hive and only because of Hive can they also potentially earn in the SoMee Hive community. (so yes to some degree)

·         2020 ARPU Of $21.03 With 35,000 Users

·         2021 ARPU Of $38.78 With 51,200 Users

o   This proves that the user data they were sharing previously was a lie and inflated where they only showed web traffic in the tens of millions.

o   They also shut off access to funds in 2021, so their earnings going up was due to screwing their users.

o   More importantly, going forward their revenue will be solely from serving ads to people who use their interface. Likely these people will realize sooner than later that it’s just an interface and they can just use Hive.

·         “A+ Code built on AWS Hyper-scale network can scale millions of users” – This proves it’s not decentralized. SoMee is built on AWS while the underlying platform Hive that they use is decentralized and not using AWS.

·         “Expected 5 Million Users To Join SoMee By 4th Quarter 2022” – Literally impossible. Why would this be an expectation? There are 6,000 daily active users on Hive last time I checked with just under 2.4 million accounts. This means that either they expect to onboard 2.5 million users and get EVERYONE using Hive to use SoMee or they expect to onboard close to 5 million users which simply isn’t going to happen.

o   https://hive.blog/hive-167922/@dalz/hive-accounts-or-total-created-claimed-and-top-accounts

·         “Investors Receive Limited Edition NFTs as Perks (Limited Supply)” – Literally worthless

In their business model section, they only share outdated irrelevant information. Their “revenue comes from taking a premium cut of Power-Up Package sales” is a lie because power-up packages were discontinued a very long time ago and were very unethically priced, to begin with. They also say they expect people to buy into their adshare program which they had Gbucks and $SAT for which both are gone and worthless. “Another revenue comes from verification” which they’ve also discontinued because it was never necessary. So everything that generates revenue for their company has ended and is no longer generating revenue. How can they possibly make money then? They can’t. The only reason their earnings went up from 2020 to 2021 is that they disabled the ability to withdraw funds so they could continue earning while never having to pay out to users. 100% of their revenue was coming from taking it from their users who are now left with nothing.

One last note that I wanted to point out. It seems the exact same people who funded the Cardano Cardstarter for SoMee are involved in the Republic fund raise with 554 participants for Cardstarter and 558 for Republic.

The takeaway here is that considering this is an actual private company raise, the SEC should get involved because this is objectively misleading investors. As far as I understand, this is very clearly illegal and criminal.

GoFundMe Fund Raise

They also had people donate money to the project in one of their many unnecessary instances of raising funds. https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-somee-social

Some links for more information to compare with:

https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/489206-80#overview

https://www.facebook.com/SoMeeOfficial/

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ongsocial/

SoMee DAO

They also announced on January 4th that they were starting a DAO: https://devs.someesocial.com/somee-dao-agreement/. The reality is in the last 2 months, only 10 people have joined so it’s not like it’s got much steam, but this is likely another way for them to take your money that you should watch out for.

You can see it here on Snapshot: https://bafybeidlx2lkid4fdtao6licthhyihe573fqeqrlbszigimaxou4ioo3ry.ipfs.dweb.link/#/?q=somee.

$ONG to $SME

Aside from SoMee eliminating all our Gbucks, they also discontinued ONG. The original token had a value of $0.05103 when it was discontinued. Before that, it had pumped from $0.017 to $0.16 during the time everyone had their wallet access blocked off and presumably was a pump and dump by the staff and insiders.

 

When they actually did the token drop of SME on Hive, it was worth significantly less at well below 1 cent. It was clear that it was not a 1:1 drop especially with them admitting that ONG on the platform was diluted massively and the system was a fractional reserve. The irony is that fractional reserve banking is the exact thing crypto is trying to get away from and yet SoMee was happy to do it to pump their own bags at the expense of token holders. Not only that, but within moments of the Hive drop, everyone who wanted out previously dumped, and currently the price is now approximately $0.000145 USD. My $2,000+ worth of tokens were only worth about $20 by the time I sold.

Around the time the price started to spike is when they put it into an 8–9-month hiatus where we couldn’t access our funds. Clearly, the price was then pumped and dumped. Since it was a fractional reserve, they were then able to dump the rest of that on the investors who will then take on all the diluted funds which ended up being worth next to nothing.

As people claimed their SoMee they probably all sold since they’ve been misled and prevented from accessing their funds for many months. Like me, they just wanted to get back anything at this point, but not after I presume the staff cashed out first. So naturally, the price crashed. This price chart doesn’t even do it justice since every available order was extremely low and it was just the outliers that keep it up until it finally reflected its real value for what it actually offers.

Conclusion

For 2 years SoMee claimed they would come out with all these innovative revenue models and had all these MASSIVE influencers parroting these points even though none of it was ever real. None of them did their due diligence and this was amplified by massive influencers like BitBoy who failed to disclose that he was likely paid and more importantly that his lead researcher was working on the SoMee team until at least 1 year after his original post about SoMee. He is still listed as being part of their advisory board and on their team today. The real concern here is: was he complicit in one of the biggest crypto social media scams in history that are still underway?

 

Everything their marketing was based upon was simply celebrity influencers. Even BitBoy 2 years ago said they had people bigger than him coming in to promote the project which didn’t really happen and if you consider the small celebrities and influencers they snagged relevant, well it was clear they didn’t know what they were promoting either as they likely read off the claims SoMee promised from their paid scripts.

All of these people claimed SoMee had features and things that made it unique and different from everything else and it wasn’t true.

 

I want to be clear, this isn’t about me going after the influencers and people who promoted SoMee as even I had an interview with the CEO when I first learned of it. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something is bad, but it should be more than obvious now that SoMee acted out of malice and that continuing to passively endorse it with old content is wrong. Furthermore, they should all come out and apologize to the people who lost money and disclose how much they were paid in this whole mess.

 

Now SoMee is just a Hive community and nothing about what SoMee was claiming was done by SoMee, it’s just Hive which received no credit. They were also supposed to integrate with Cardano through CardStarter which never happened.

 

The scariest part about all of this is that the influencers never really used the platform and if they did, then they were lying to you. None of them mentioned that you can’t get your funds out, that it wasn’t really decentralized by any means, and most importantly, they weren’t really using the platform.

 

A quick check on any of the influencer accounts who touted SoMee as being so amazing leads you to find that they don’t really post or use the platform. If it’s the most amazing social media platform ever, then why aren’t they using it?

 

SoMee offered MASSIVE rewards for posting because the rewards weren’t real and thus were able to trick enough people into thinking they would get rich by using the platform. It’s also very important to call back to the massive amount of SoMee they had claimed to have burned. Luckily, they were able to get around this loophole as well as the mass amount of dilution and fractional reserves they had for ONG by doing an airdrop onto Hive with a new token that they could just put up with a completely new supply at a price worth a fraction of the old token.

 

In the nearly year-long period where users had no access to funds, SoMee clearly devised an exit plan to get their funds out without ever paying back or even giving access to funds to their investors, users, and paid influencers. Essentially everyone but the team was screwed in this process and lost almost everything. To this day, no one from the team nor any of the influencers has addressed what has happened and they are now raising funds for a private company that has raised over $250,000. This is still ongoing, and it is very likely a full-on exit scam now.

 

I was in several groups with early investors during a lot of this journey who were all very concerned about what was happening. These were the select few who were willing to pay $100 to verify in order to access their funds. They were all too scared to speak up and so I was doing that on their behalf publicly to the main group. Eventually, I was banned for asking too many questions. They may claim otherwise, but I didn’t insult anyone, I never cursed, I was perfectly polite, and only ever asked simple questions to be answered. The issue was that they believed the CEO’s word and ignored the red flags. Eventually, it was too late, and they were too deep to be able to get their money out and had to sit through like everyone else.  SoMee’s Telegram was shut down after too many people asked questions and wanted clarifications: https://t.me/onG_social

 

It may also be worth mentioning that when I wanted to verify, they required fiat payment processor methods and not crypto which I found very odd. I wanted to instead pay with crypto and while they claimed it was possible, they were unable to do it. So, they just instantly verified me even though they claimed it wasn’t possible and there were legal requirements around KYC which is why they had it in the first place. They continually blamed their old dev team which an insider has told me was their scapegoat on purpose all along as well as claiming that they needed KYC for legal compliance.

 

I think it’s important to mention this as it seems like to me SoMee did the slow rug pull where they simply continue making delays and raising money again and again which is exactly what they’ve done and are doing still.

 

This is one of the most iconic cases of not relying on “authoritative” sources or influencers to actually do their due diligence to look into this kind of thing. The people who endorsed SoMee barely used it and knew very little about it or they were malicious.

 

They raised funds and executed what appears to be an exit scam MULTIPLE times. They are now on one of their last iterations of this with Republic and likely again with their DAO and I’d like to protect as many people as possible.

 

It’s impossible to say how much was actually lost with all of these raises and coin conversions etc. But I think it’s fair to say that almost anyone who invested in SoMee lost money aside from maybe the staff and selected influencers.

 

This is my last post covering SoMee as I’ve already said everything, I can say about it on multiple occasions. However, while it’s clear that it is, I won’t definitively say it was a scam for my own protection. Watch out and I wish you all the best in your crypto ventures in the future.

 

Have you ever used SoMee? Did you invest in SoMee or ONG? Do you think I missed anything or got anything wrong? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!

 

*Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and is purely for entertainment purposes. What you see, hear, or read is my personal opinion, and any statements made are based on my views and should not be misconstrued as fact. My crypto portfolio may or may not be simulated*

 

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