A few new pieces of information came from people close to OKCoin.

Lying About Investment

Tim Draper did NOT invest in OKCoin, not personally, not through any of the funds he manages.

From OKCoin website: “OKCoin was founded in 2013 and received a US$1m Angel Investment from Ventures Lab and Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Tim Draper.”

That is an out right lie!

The closest link to Tim Draper is an individual investor named Mark Mai, who may have worked with Adam Draper (Tim’s son) at one point. That’s about it. Let’s face it: Mark Mai does not equal Tim Draper.

$10 Million Series A? No way!

From OKCoin.com website: “In December 2013, OKCoin closed a Series A round of funding in which it received US$10m(from Ceyuan and Mandra Capital).”

OKCoin did not get $10 million for series A, as they said on their public website. This seems to be well known in the Chinese community.

In a presentation to US investors a few months back, an $8 million dollar series A was used. How stupid do you think the US investors are? The real number is estimated to be closers to $2 million, at most.

Star Xu went to the US in Oct 2014 trying to raise series B, but was unsuccessful. We can be pretty certain that OKCoin will never be able to raise money from US investors at this point. The company should be close to out of money now.

Conflict of Interest - Company Within a Company

OKCoin’s CEO, Star Xu, owns and operates another company called OK Voice (a voice recognition technology company). None of the institutional investors of OKCoin have any shares in OK Voice. Moreover, the CEO of OK Voice is a guy named Lei Zhen, who doubles as the Head of Customer Service at OKCoin. His salary comes entirely from OKCoin, but he spends most of his time on OK Voice. It looks like most of the cost for OK Voice is born by the investors of OKCoin. Talk about a conflict of interest.

This fact may or may not be known to Ceyuan and Mandra Capital. Mark Mai may know this already.

The Rest, You Probably Already Know

Fake volume, self run bots, front-running and arbitrary claw backs are all a given. Again, it seems everyone in China I talk to knows these already. I seem to be the last one.

The World’s Largest Fake Exchange!

More coming