Scammers have allegedly stolen $2 million from investors through the promotion of a dubious initial coin offering that used fake LinkedIn accounts for promotion.

The company, called Giza, was promoting an “innovative hardware wallet,” a physical cryptocurrency storage device that would allow users to send and receive payments from each wallet via a browser extension. In a buzzword-laden pitch, the company said that “care and accuracy in design show our respect towards the potential consumer” and the hardware wallet was engineered with “materials such as ‘Gorilla glass’ and water-repellent silumin body material play a central role.”

The fact that the company was using terms related to smartphones rather than hardware wallets should have been a wakeup call but apparently not enough of one. CNBC reported that Giza was able to suck in about 1,000 people to invest 2,100 Ethereum, worth $2.4 million at the time of the fundraising, before the ICO itself disappeared.

The methodology used by the scammers is said to have included fake LinkedIn profiles and copied pictures from another user’s Instagram to create false personas. Leading the project was someone going by the name of Marco Fike, possibly a play on the terms macro and fake. According to his still active LinkedIn profile, he claimed to have worked at JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Microsoft Corp.

Problems with the ICO emerged in February when a Russian firm called Third Pin which had been tasked by Giza to manufacture the hardware, said it had halted working with the company because of nonpayment.

“Everything was fine, until that company that was meant to develop their device came out on the internet and said that Giza has cut ties, and it seems to be a scam and they might not be developing anything,” an investor told CNBC. “Then things started looking fishy.”

Later the same month, users noted that Ethereum that had been paid toward the ICO started to be removed from wallets linked to Giza. Ethereum transactions sit on a public blockchain, so all transactions can be monitored.

Giza joins a growing list of scam companies and people successfully defrauding investors who are looking for the next big thing in cryptocurrencies. A company called LoopX that was raising money via an ICO to fund an investment platform disappeared with $4.5 million in Ethereum in February. Other so-called “exit scams” include Confido, Prodeum and possibly BitConnect.

Image: Giza