If you are on any social media platform, you will have seen the posts about Initiative Q and how it’s giving away free money. The project offers grand rewards for early adopters and touts itself as a social experiment. However, it’s marketed in the same way as a pyramid scheme and that’s frightening people who know a thing or two about the crypto world. With a bit of research, you can quickly separate the sheep from the wolves with Initiative Q, but not everyone has the luxury of time so we did the research for you – here’s what we found.
The Blind Leading the Blind
The only way to sign up and get yourself some free Q’s is to be invited by a friend or click a referral link. Most of these links come with a boilerplate message that briefly sums up the project and makes some rather grandiose claims. The people posting the referral link with this boilerplate message is a prime example of how viral marketing works and how people are captivated by the promise of free money. By throwing in a big brand name – PayPal in this case – people believe the project is legitimate and secure. Saad Wilf – the founder of Initiative Q – is touted as an “ex-PayPal Guy” in the boilerplate message. However, he founded Fraud Sciences which was then acquired by PayPal – not really an “ex-PayPal guy,” but it’s not an entirely false claim.
A Rather Nice Idea
Initiative Q’s purpose is a supposed social experiment that will help revolutionize the payment world. The project goes on to explain that the current payment system is expensive and slow, and Initiative Q can solve these problems – sounds familiar, right? It’s proposing a new payment network that is secure, low cost, and lightning fast, but it doesn’t go into how it will achieve this. For now, the project is simply giving out its tokens to people for free so that there is already a user base to sell to merchants – after all, without people wanting to pay in a set currency, nobody will want to waste time trying to accept it. While this is all a nice idea, without a physical concept, it’s hard to tell whether it’s a good project or not – we want the technical facts.
There is No Such Thing as Free Money
If a stranger in the street walked up to you and said give me your name, email address, and a password and I will give you free money, would you do it? We certainly would be rather suspicious, so why are people doing it on the internet? The number one rule in the crypto world is if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. While there are a few exceptions to this rule, Initiative Q doesn’t even have a white paper explaining how its tech will work, so err on the side of caution.
You might not think there is much people can do with your name, email address, and password, but you would be wrong. It’s the perfect way to build a mailing list for marketing projects, and you already know the user is interested in crypto and payment systems. This means that the database is already very specified and is full of genuine users that can all be verified through social media. Initiative Q could then sell this database to marketing firms around the globe for a very nice sum of money – so be careful. In addition to this, many people use the same email and password combination on many sites, so that could play into the equation too.
Our Take on Initiative Q
Sorry to disappoint you, but our conclusion on this one is inconclusive. There simply isn’t enough information available to make a clear-cut decision, even after hours of digging. The project certainly sounds like it has a promising future – unless it’s a scam. If you’re going to follow a referral link, use an email you don’t mind getting spam mail from – try not to use your main one – and use a randomly generated password specially made for this project. For now, it’s going to avoid being added to our all-time top five crypto scams list, but we are keeping a close eye on Initiative Q that’s for sure.
