The Bee Token

The Bee Token was a software development company and creator of the Bee Token (BEE); a digital currency built on top of the Ethereum blockchain that was used to power the Bee Protocols and Beenest platform. The Bee Token was founded in 2017 by Jonathan Chou and Tony Tran and headquartered in San Francisco, California. In July 2020, The Bee Token merged with Coinformant.

The Bee Protocols (P-A-R) were open source tools for the creation of decentralized applications (dApps) for the management of secure cryptocurrency payments, arbitration, and reputation building based on verifiable identities.

Beenest was a blockchain-based, decentralized, and peer-to-peer platform for hosting and renting living spaces.

From January 31, 2018 to February 13, 2018 The Bee Token held their Initial Coin Offering (ICO) selling ~15,000,000 in value of BEE Tokens.

During the ICO of The Bee Token there were a group of scammers using email addresses meant to look like official email address of The Bee Token, such as 'presale_registration@thebeetoken.com', to contact potential buyers of The Bee Token ICO. It is estimated that approximately $928,000 was collected by the scammers from potential Bee Token investors. Potential investors were sent an Ethereum address or a QR code to send their investment resources to. It is not known how the scammers obtained the email list of potential Bee Token ICO investors.

The scam was officially recognized by Bee Token and they released a statement urging investors to only send money to email addresses listed on the company's website, and that the company would never use QR codes, give 100% bonuses, partner with Microsoft, or accept more than 0.3 ETH; all of which was presented to investors as part of the email phishing scam.