Cue Club Continued

This is a review of our contact with the Cue Club metaverse project, and other materials we’ve found, since the release of our “Cue Club: Another Potential Scam” article just over 3 weeks ago. The content of that article has now been removed from our site and there is a link on it that directs here instead.

In the second half of March a Cardano metaverse project called Cue Club listed itself on Built on Cardano. As we do with all of the projects on our site, we gave its materials a review to see if it met the standards expected by our Cardano community, so that we could remove our warning label from it. It did not meet these standards and we subsequently released an article “Cue Club: Another Potential Scam” detailing the errors on their site and the red flags that we found that drove us to conclude that it was a potential scam.

After publishing the article we had some public contact through Twitter with Cue Club regarding some of these issues, before they provided us with a more detailed and publicly available response to the points in our article; response found here.

We chose not to remove the article up until now because we found another error on their homepage that was really too blatant for someone who does their own due diligence and reviews their materials properly to have left there. That error was the phone number in the footer of their website. It was +44 0123 4567; what we imagine to be a very expensive and exclusive phone number. This error is viewable on the Wayback Machine here. This has now been fixed, hence us now taking down the original article and composing this one.

We also opened up a direct line of communication with Cue Clue to try and get on a call with them to discuss these matters promptly and in-person (we did try calling the +44 0123 4567 number but it didn’t work). In two weeks we have only received 2 responses from them. Their first reply to us, now 2 weeks ago, said that they would love to speak to us. Yet our offers of times are still yet to be responded to. Their last response was over 10 days ago.

We would have expected them to be a bit more proactive about clearing this up and talking to us about the issue. Interestingly, the project’s founder, Florian, tweeted a question that he posted to a Google group regarding suing a news site to remove an article. This tweet was sent less than 15 minutes after our tweet containing our article hit the Twitter-verse. Coincidence?

His tweet may be entirely unrelated to our posting because it was a full 1 hour and 45 minutes before Cue Club responded to our tweet from their official Twitter account. But if we assume that this tweet is as a result of our article we would then be led to ask, why would you jump straight into looking to suing the outlet instead of looking to acknowledge and fix the issues? The previous sentence is encroaching on speculation, but we think it is a point worth speculating on for a second.

What to Make of All This?

There is almost never a project that doesn’t flick up a red flag, and the Cue Club’s immediate response to our post was what you might expect from a legitimate project trying to carve out a space in the Cardano-verse. Is Cue Club a scam or is it not a scam? That is for you to decide for yourself. To make it clear, this author loves playing pool, and when he first saw the Cue Club project listed on Built on Cardano he got very excited. However, research left him skeptical and the size of the errors, and the fact that they were starting a token sale in a mere 10 days, led him to feel obligated to bring such an obvious lack of attention to detail on the website by the project’s creators into the spotlight.

As always, DYOR and stay safe out there Cardano 🦆