Ongoing Minting and Dumping: RusGas Allegedly Scamming Token Holders

On Nov. 28th, 2018, MonitorChain detected that RusGas is minting billions of tokens, diluting the value of investor's tokens and driving the price down to near-nothing.

RusGas is a project using blockchain to "Transform the gas industry." According to ICO Bench, the company raised $2.2 million during its ICO. On Nov. 28th, MonitorChain detected the first incident of suspicious token minting.

Initially, RusGas ICOed with a 10 billion token supply, as stated in the company's whitepaper.

So far token minting has accelerated, and within the last eight days a total of 850 billion additional RGS tokens were created-86 times the original supply.

The massive influx of supply drove the price down to the lowest possible trading price on the exchange, with each token trading for one one-billionth of a Bitcoin.

To further investigate the incident, Hornby had one of his analysts take a closer look at the underlying smart contract backing the token, claiming "We couldn't find any vulnerabilities, but one thing that we did find is that there was a function to disable the minting new tokens, and they never disabled it."

"RGS is changing and getting better! We announce reboot!" and asked holders to "Transfer all available RGS tokens to the cryptocurrency exchange CREX24.com," promising that a "Network swap will happen automatically."

"[RusGas] has had the ability to stop this at any time if it was done by a 3rd party, and have not done so, even after their December 1st announcement of a token swap.

In response to the warning, Crex24 said that they "Trust that the token teams know best," and in Hornby's professional opinion, "That makes them complicit."

The minting is still ongoing, with an additional 500 billion tokens minted within the last eight hours.