Unmasking VooVoo (VOO): The NFT Marketplace Scam That Left Investors High and Dry

Non-fungible tokens were one of the biggest innovations of the most recent crypto bull market. Billions of dollars were made in the NFT industry. Of course, where money like that appears there will always be people attempting to make money out of it using illicit means. 

The VooVoo project on the Solana project is a good example of that. The founding team claimed to be working on developing an NFT marketplace that would allow verified content creators to launch their own NFTs. 

This never ended up happening. While VooVoo did launch an NFT marketplace, it never amounted to anything and the project completely failed as the founders ran off with investor money. 

This article will cover everything you need to know about VooVoo and how to avoid scams like VooVoo in the future. 

What Was VooVoo?

As mentioned in the introduction, VooVoo was an NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain. The marketplace did actually launch, likely to prevent fraud charges from being raised against the founding team, but no one used it and the money raised was far more than it took to develop the marketplace. 

There were a lot of warning flags that VooVoo was a scam right from the launch of the project. The next section will cover some of the warning signs that we noticed with VooVoo. 

The Problems with VooVoo

VooVoo had a lot of problems with it. The team did a decent job at glossing over some of the problems, but seasoned investors could filter through the buzzwords and obfuscation to see a lot of underlying problems. This section will cover some of the problems with this project. 

Anonymous Founders

The first problem with VooVoo is that it has anonymous founders. Anonymous founders are not always a dealbreaker, but something like an NFT marketplace should have public founders. 

It’s a financial marketplace – it does not make sense for it to not have a public founder. The exception, of course, is if the marketplace is nothing more than some smart contract code. 

Sadly, that’s not the case at this point in the cryptocurrency industry. 

As for VooVoo, the project had anonymous founders. The whitepaper stated “VOOVOO is backed by a team highly experienced within business development, e-commerce, marketing and importantly have advanced knowledge of blockchain.” (Source: VooVoo Whitepaper). 

They even include a list of “team members” that is laughably bad. 

“A businessman who has been heavily involved in a number of large and exclusive crypto projects” is what it says about the CEO. 

What projects has the CEO been involved in?

Also, why would such an experienced team choose to remain anonymous?

A project that plans on becoming as large as VooVoo would surely look good on a resume. 

The VooVoo whitepaper did not answer any of those questions. And those are some very important questions to leave unanswered.

On a related note, VooVoo did not have an umbrella company or even a foundation. 

How can an NFT marketplace be taken seriously when it does not have an umbrella company or foundation?

It’s a complete joke of a project at that point. It’s something that a teenager could make in their bedroom. 

The Marketplace Used a Native Token

The other problem we have with VooVoo is that the marketplace proposed using a native token. This is almost always done so that the scammers have something they can sell in order to bilk investors. 

However, it’s a non-starter from a business perspective. An NFT marketplace forcing customers to use a native token in order to use the marketplace is not a wise business decision.

Why?

No one is going to purchase the token. It adds a completely avoidable step to buying an NFT, which just adds more friction to the whole process. Potential customers will just go to a different marketplace that can take the blockchain’s native token (ETH or SOL) rather than purchasing a utility token to then purchase an NFT. 

VooVoo Promised a P2E Game

VooVoo billed itself as an NFT marketplace, but they had bigger plans than that. 

The team wanted to launch play to earn games on top of becoming a premier NFT marketplace. 

Again, that’s completely ridiculous and a sure sign that a project is a scam. How talented does a team have to be to launch an NFT marketplace from nothing and then launch a play to earn game? 

The team would have to be extremely skilled. It’s already hard enough to launch a successful cryptocurrency project and this team wants to launch two successful cryptocurrency projects? 

That’s extremely unlikely. 

It is a common thing that scammers say, though. They like to make a lot of promises because it makes the project look more appealing to rookie investors. Seasoned investors know that the best projects have a very narrow focus in the beginning and do not even begin to think about expanding until they have completely dominated their industry (ie. Amazon started selling books before selling everything). 

Was VooVoo (VOO) a Scam?

Yes, VooVoo was a scam. One quick read of the whitepaper is enough to know that this project would never deliver anything that they promised. 

The (anonymous) CEO’s byline reads “a businessman  heavily involved in a number of large and exclusive crypto projects.”

That one sentence alone should tell you all you need to know about the project. The CEO can’t list a single project he was associated with? 

Other things like promising a little too much and a very underwhelming business plan made it obvious that this project would amount to nothing.

Is VOO a Good Investment?

No, VOO is not a good investment. The project was a scam and it does not even have any trading volume. 

Anyone that says VOO is a good investment is trying to scam you. 

Final Thoughts

That covers it for everything you need to know about VooVoo (VOO). The project was a scam and investors lost a lot of money with it. 

Avoid projects in the NFT industry that have anonymous founders and don’t actually solve a problem. Just those two tips alone will save you from a lot of scams.