Hello Polkadot community,
I’m reaching out to all of you to inform you of a project that has been making false claims, disingenuous marketing, creating false X accounts to shut down critics (by orchestrating heavy reporting) and flying the Polkadot flag/branding to gain notoriety and approval. This project is called [Neurolanche Labs] @ neurolanche on X/Twitter and lives on the Astar Network with claims of also utilizing Phala, Manta, Aleph Zero, Polkadot and so on.
You can get the sense of how they “market” with this X post of theirs: “Onboard millions, etc.”
It only takes reading a few post and seeing team members comments, to realize that there is something off. We began digging in to pull info for your consideration. Lets look at for example: the “game studio” that is behind their projects: Illumate. This is the “world renown” game studio producing this “revolution” (founders words).
- Twitter/X: @ IllumateStudios: 6 followers
- LinkedIn: illumate-studios: 10 months old, 10 post.
Myself and a few others (we’ve been around for a 2-3 years, but of course not as OG as Bill and his tattoo) have been conducting research on potential teams and projects that smell fishy. To get to the point, there’s clearly some projects that make too-good-to-be-true promises, setting out the grand rug for you know what, and/or doing the smoke and mirror bit. We have seen our fair share, some of us burned, and we have learn. Now its time to prevent. We think its only right to raise concerns, point out red flags, educate new users on how to DYOR, and just asked the end user and investor to make their own conclusions.
We’ve seen some great activity around the “influencers” proposals in opengov. While that deals with the treasury and has its many protectors, we should also not forget the projects on the ground who aren’t involved with opengov … yet. We want to take preventive measures to avoid headaches down the road.
Through our DM’ing, discord sleuthing, and personal relationships in this ecosystem, we’re learning how the project labeled Neurolanche Labs has conducted its affairs in a rather meticulous and convincing fashion. Besides the walls of text in their social post to give the illusion of seriousness and professionalism, they’ve also slowly convinced, onboarded and are paying reps/ambassadors of both Polkadot and Astar to carry out the mission - along with the fake social accounts. We can get into the ethicality of this later. We want to spread awareness of all their tactics as we continue to investigate the project and its founders. We aim to post our findings here for all to make their conclusion.
To add, as we presume they are reading this, recently a X account we created to start detailing the findings and process of how they manage to grow into the 7 headed “project” and their road to their $NEROX token sale, was suspended. We assume that the projects army of fake accounts, team members and ambassadors reported it in mass. Regardless, we live another day and won’t let this derail us from our mission: to question, prod, and inform.
We will be taking this all to multiple parachain forums, discords and other platforms to provide our findings, and provide what we hope are sources for you, the community, to consider. Especially as the Neurolanche team gears up to sell their token $NEROX to the public (intentionally mention twice in this post because this is where great danger can arise).
If anyone has other information they would like to share with us, related to this project or any other they suspect, please feel free to email us at: dudediligencenow@gmail.com
We will conduct the deep dive and do our best to communicate it in a fashion that is informative. If you feel compelled to, please share this post with others to get the word out.
Thank you for your time.