Michelle Mone’s ICO Ends in Disarray as Equi Capital Fiasco Turns Ugly

Equi Capital’s ICO has ended in acrimony, with bounty hunters claiming to have been offered a pittance of what they were promised. The project is led by Baroness Michelle Mone, who describes herself as “one of the United Kingdom’s most celebrated entrepreneurs”. The fallout sheds light on the plight of low income workers who toil on behalf of cryptocurrency arrivistes such as Equi Capital’s celebrity co-founder.

Lady Mone, Equi Capital, and the ICO That Never Was

Lady Mone of Mayfair OBE, as she likes to be known, is a familiar face in the UK, popping up at black-tie events and charging up to $30,000 for public speaking. (OBE stands for Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an award she was given by then-Prime Minister David Cameron). Michelle Mone is a controversial figure best known for founding the Ultimo lingerie firm before rising to become a “global entrepreneur” whose “impressive portfolio has led to Lady Mone being firmly cemented as one of the world’s most in-demand public speakers”. Wikipedia states that “Mone ranks among the UK’s most successful businesswomen and her designs can still be found in department stores worldwide,” before finishing with “[citation needed]”.

Shortly after launching her Equi Capital ICO this year, Lady Mone proclaimed to be “one of the biggest experts in Cryptocurrency & Blockchain”, despite having first tweeted about cryptocurrency only five months earlier. Aided by her her peerage granting lifetime membership of the House of Lords (the UK’s upper parliament), billionaire boyfriend, and retinue of highly paid lawyers and publicists, Lady Mone was confident that Equi Capital would be a success. From the start, however, it was unclear who the prime beneficiary of the project was meant to be: the tech startups Equi Capital would be investing in, token-holders, women, or Michelle Mone and her Equi colleagues, as the message was constantly shifting.

One group that Equi Capital wasn’t designed for was low income workers in countries such as Russia, India, and Indonesia, but over 1,000 of these agreed to promote the ICO nevertheless in exchange for tokens. Shortly thereafter, however, things began to go awry, both for the bounty hunters and for Equi Capital.

The facts of the case run as follows:

Mutiny on the Bounty

As alternative UK media outlet Wings reported this week, “Bounty hunters are effectively unpaid marketers, often from developing countries, who help to raise awareness online, particularly among the cryptocurrency community. In return for their efforts, they are remunerated in the form of tokens. Some of the workers posted adverts on social media platforms and others created YouTube videos, while yet more translated Equi marketing materials.”

Equi Capital’s 1,000+ bounty hunters, having been offered 2% of the funds raised, would have been entitled to $140,000 of the $7 million that was ultimately raised. Instead, they were offered just $5,500 in total, which was eventually rounded up to $10,000. (This equates to approximately $10 per head, or $2 for every month spent promoting the aborted project.) Bounty hunters were quick to make their feelings known on social media:

“Our Founder is a Baroness and She Doesn’t Lie”

On Telegram, meanwhile, things were turning ugly. Any sign of dissent in the Equi Telegram channel resulted in chats being deleted and protesters banned. The account admin also deleted a separate Telegram group for bounty participants, and then entered a spin-off channel set up by disgruntled bounty hunters to berate them. “Our founder is a Baroness,” wrote the Equi Capital admin “and I can assure you she doesn’t lie”. And: “Our lawyers will show you who is legally wrong here. It’s [sic] certainly isn’t our high profile entrepreneurs”.

On the Bitcointalk forum, bounty hunters created a thread to fight for what they believed was rightfully theirs. Others found solace

Meanwhile, Baroness Mone and her team jetted off to Silicon Valley to prepare a relaunch of Equi Capital, this time operating under the name of Equi Global. The whole experience has stuck in the craw of bounty hunters, who claim to have been used as free labor and then dispensed with when it was no longer expedient to utilize their services.

Power, Prestige and the Press

News.Bitcoin.com reached out to Equi Capital three days ago ago seeking comment for this story but failed to receive a response. We then contacted the PR agency that represents Lady Mone, Egg Media. The company, which specializes in crisis management, was founded in 2012 by Ian Edmondson, “an award winning journalist with nearly twenty years experience in working for national newspapers including the News of the World”.

Despite repeated requests for a statement from Equi Capital or its co-founder, Lady Mone, Egg Media refused, asserting that any attempts to document this story would be “highly defamatory, libellous and actionable”. Mr Edmondson’s unfamiliarity with media law can be traced back to his imprisonment for phone hacking while at News of the World, a crime which he oversaw on 344 occasions. “On 7 November 2014,” notes Wikipedia, “Mr Justice Saunders jailed Edmondson for eight months, saying that he only had himself to blame”.

Easy Come, Easy Go

UK media outlet Wings concludes: “Doug Barrowman described Equi Capital as a way to “give everyone an opportunity to play in my world”. Those who still await any recompense for their time and effort may wish they hadn’t played at all.” In a previous interview, the Equi founder opined, “So many of these ICOs have no purpose…You basically buy a token, or a coin if it’s a brand new currency, which actually has no real value at the moment in the real world.”

From a legal perspective, Equi Capital is likely to be on firm ground in dismissing its bounty hunters with a fraction of their dues. From a moral one, however, there would appear to be a prima facie case. “We’re not in it for money,” Baroness Mone told the Sunday Times back in March. “We’re doing this because we’re passionate about the cryptocurrency community.” Upon relaunching as Equi Global, the Baroness may be forced to proceed without the support of the cryptocurrency community and its army of bounty hunters.