Pink Taxis, Red Flags: A Deep Dive Into a Sketchy ICO

Sure enough, when CoinDesk visited Pink Taxi Coin's original website - aside from the name change and a shift from a green theme to a pink one - the entire page was seemingly copied and pasted from A2B Taxi's site.

The statement "The payments on A2B Taxi app will be completed using cryptocurrency" had been modified within the Pink Taxi Coin white paper to "The payments on PINK Taxi application will be finished utilizing cryptocurrency."

Another red flag: where Pink Taxi Coin's content was original, it was extremely poorly written.

What was very different between A2B Taxi and Pink Taxi Coin's site and white paper was the lack of a legitimate team, another serious red flag for investors looking at which ICO projects to invest in.

Another way Pink Taxi Coin tried to cultivate an aura of legitimacy is by presenting articles from reputable news outlets as if they were referring to the team behind Pink Taxi Coin itself.

These materials exist because pink taxis - which cater only to women and hire exclusively women drivers - are a legitimate, working business model in many cities around the world.

Pink taxis are a just that, though: a concept, not a company.

Each of the articles listed on Pink Taxi Coin's site is talking about a separate entity: there's a BBC article about a British company called Pink Ladies, an Al Jazeera article about a Pakistani company called Paxi, a Khaleej Times article about an Emirati company called Dubai Taxi Corp., a Hype article about a Malaysian company called Riding Pink, a Wall Street Journal article about an Indian company called Meru Cab, and a CNN article about an Egyptian company called Pink Taxi.

On Pink Taxi Coin's Telegram channel - whose 1,600 subscribers are not allowed to post - the ICO issuer promised investors outsized profits, comparing it to bitcoin directly.

Echoing the SEC here, CoinDesk would like to remind you to take a deep breath and do some research before throwing your life savings into an ICO. In many cases, like Pink Taxi Coin, the red flags aren't hard to spot.