E-Coin: Pump and Dump Scam Coin or Misunderstood Gem?

A relatively unknown cryptocurrency called E-Coin just recently experienced a massive pump and dump event. According to coinmarketcap.com, the prices on February 6 were about $6 each and following the pump at its peak, the price went all the way up to $280 over the course of about two hours before crashing back down to $3 again.

Following a short two day period of no changes, E-Coin seems to be moving upwards again and is currently sitting at around $60 each, 10 times the normal value. So what is E-Coin, and what are they trying to do?

What is E-coin?

It appears that following the pump and dump process, the website for E-Coin has gone offline. The most recent available backup on archive.org is from early January of this year.

According to that archive.org page, E-Coin appears to be a business-focused cryptocurrency that targets itself at HR, manufacturing, recruitment, and finance. The site does not appear to offer any highly specific information and instead seems to be mostly buzzwords and other highly vague generalities.

Further, the writing on the website seems to be very poor and contains a large number of typographical errors. For instance, there are numerous grammar errors, some spelling errors, and many words in the middle of sentences that are capitalized for no reason.

For example, the first line of the description of the project reads exactly as follows:

“E-coin is a Compulsive and wide-ranging Blockchain Project, scheduled to acquire a way for making future’s financial Transactions better for the HR/Manufacture/recruitment/finance etc industries in a similar way to how BTC has made an evolution.”

To make things even more hilarious, one of the main bullet points on the website list "non-volatile tokens" that will "protect users from cryptocurrency market price volatility. It will give the assurance of stable price." Clearly, they failed in this.

While it is unclear if this is true or not, the main site claims that the crowd sale earned the group 2,000 bitcoin, 10,000 Litecoin, about 7,000 Ethereum, and 48 million Dogecoin. This could, of course, be completely false but at this time we have no way to verify. The site claims that the price of E-coin was pegged to the bitcoin, at one bitcoin equaling 1000 E-Coin. This would mean today, 1 E-Coin is worth about $8.50 based solely on the ICO valuation.

What about the business plan? The official website includes this as part of what it calls "E-Coin level 1":

"The first step of our project is to create the financial backbone of E-coin by publishing ICO for the public market by giving E-coin tokens: E-coins are linked to average businesses Transactions fees and are backed by a businesses.

Transactions are necessary for all businesses and the yields from It is the real force for the backup of E-coin. It is the most tradeable resource in the real economy."

Were you able to follow along with that? We certainly weren't.

In summary, what is E-coin? To put it simply we can't make heads or tails of it. It genuinely just seems like a bunch of poorly written buzzwords and extremely vague generalities about business and blockchain.

Is E-Coin a scam?

While it's pretty clear that the E-Coin website is highly unprofessional (or at least, the only existing version from back in January is), it's not absolutely clear whether or not this is a scam. It is entirely possible that this project was a trap of sorts to catch those who don't have strong English-language skills to notice the very childish and poor writing style. If you replaced all of the text with placeholder text and asked someone to just judge the design only, they may very well say it looks trustworthy.

It is also possible that this is an honest project that was just pretty poorly managed and misguided.

In searching for information about the team that is listed as running E-Coin, a search on LinkedIn yielded no results. Both the supposed blockchain consultant, manager, and strategy advisor don't seem to exist.

While people with the same name exist, none of them seem to have any connection to blockchain tech, or even the technology industry at all. This is highly suspicious, no doubt, but not conclusive as not everyone uses LinkedIn.

Final thoughts

If you are currently invested in E-coin, it's probably best that you consider stepping out of your investment now while prices are still somewhat elevated. This project has existed for nearly one year now and so far doesn't seem to have really accomplished much of anything.

Now that the website has gone down, and it's clear that the supposed team behind the project don't seem to exist, this all points to a bright red flashing exit sign for anyone who is paying attention.