Who is behind ICO bench?

Investigative Opinion

ICO bench tries very hard to hide it’s company details and the identity of it’s founders. So far it has been successful with this, however some thing are obvious and cannot be hidden. I conducted an investigation, and based on logic patterns came to conclusion of possible the people behind infamous ICO bench.

Let’s start with the facts. What we know about ICO bench?

1. The site was registered on GoDaddy with privacy protection on 04.07.2017, from St. Petersburg Russia.
2. According to Linkedin ICO bench is located in St. Petersburg, Russia.
3. There are some people working for ICO bench according to Linkedin, however they are all pawns, none of them has senior role.

What can we expect from ICO bench founder(s)?

Since ICO bench is one of the biggest ICO listing sites in the world it is quite obvious that it’s not run by amateurs:

1. The founders are skilled and successful business people, with great knowledge and experience in ICOs, crypto currencies and online business in general.
2. They have funds and connections to launch and operate such business.

It is therefore quite obvious that all the people who are displayed to be working at ICO bench on Linkedin are only low level workers, since they lack the skills mentioned above, and the actual founders remain anonymous.

What else would be very logical to see?

It’s quite unlikely that the people at that level and skills would remain completely anonymous. They would much rather just distance themselves from ICO bench, and continue with other business projects they have.

1. They most likely work in ICO, blockchain and crypto industry themselves, since it’s surely their specialty.
2. The founders would take benefit from ICO bench, so they would definitely be Experts on ICO bench and also appear quite high on the “People of Blockchain” list.
3. They would speak only positive things about ICO bench and promote it when ever it’s possible.
4. They would live in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Now that we have the profile of ICO Bench founders, let’s see who fits it the best.

After research of all ICO people, only 2 of them came out to fit the profile perfectly: Nikolay Shkilev and Vladimir Nikitin.See their Linkedin IDs: “icoadvisor” an “icoadv”, quite nice, and notice the similarity as well.

What do we now about them?

1. Both Nikolay and Vladimir are based in St. Petersburg, Russia, just like ICO bench.
2. They both know each other, promote each other, work with each other and have quite good relationship.
3. Both of them are popular ICO Advisors with huge portfolio of roughly 50 advised ICOs per each.
4. They are both Experts at ICO bench. Vladimir is currently on 3rd place on the list and Nikolay is on 4th place.
5. In the list of “People of Blockchain” Vladimir is currently on 4th place on and Nikolay is on 5th place.
6. Vladimir Nikitin is an admin in ICO bench Telegram group.

Nikolay, why do you trust ICO bench so much? Is it because you control it?

What else they have done?

1. Both of them have blocked me on Linkedin after I started to write about ICO bench.

2. 
   

   Nikolay Shkilev has stated in his Linkedin profile: “ I don’t work with ICO projects that aren’t registered on ICObench and founders of which hadn’t gone through KYC verification”.It surely seems that Nikolay is giving lot of faith to ICO bench, too much in my opinion, unless of course it’s his own platform.

3. Nikolay has stated on Linkedin that he has been ICO bench Expert since February 2017. Wow, that’s 5 months before ICO bench was launched. So Nikolay considered himself as and Expert while he was still developing ICO bench?
4. Vladimir on the other hand has been ICO bench Expert only since January 2018.

Nikolay Shkilev became ICO bench Expert 5 months before ICO bench was launched.

The verdict

Based on the fact presented above it’s very plausible that both Nikolay Shkilev and Vladimir Nikitin are behind ICO bench or at least heavily involved with it, however there are slightly more facts in Nikolay’s favor. Perhaps Nikolay is having a more important role or maybe he even started ICO bench on his own and Vladimir joined him later.

So why ICO bench hides it’s founders details?

One may think that founders of ICO bench would want all the credit for themselves, for creating such a large ICO platform. However based on past negative news about ICO bench the impact would be quite the opposite. ICO bench has already lost it’s reputation due to numerous of abuse cases. We all understand that ICO bench chooses to act like this. Perhaps the founders of ICO bench planned all the way from the start to just exploit ICO industry and make as much money as possible. Then it would make sense why they chose to go anonymous: to protect their own reputation.

Disclaimer

All of the claims indicated above are only speculations and we may never find out who is really behind ICO bench. However if you have any information about ICO bench or it’s founders please leave a comment under this article.I maybe be wrong, so I welcome both Nikolay and Vladimir to respond to this article and perhaps share some information about corrupted ICO bench and their involvement with it.