Five former Safemoon maxis reveal their stories [serious]

As time drags on in Safemoon land with a dearth of useful products, information and explanations of various suspicious and outright fraudulent blockchain activities, I have occasionally received messages of apology from former members of the Safemoon cult who have seen the light. Sometimes I ask them what made them change their minds and personally I find their stories fascinating, so I'm sharing them here for you.

1. The former Discord moderator

Me? Nothing much, just a holder who got in late March from a friend who made 5 figures off a small investment early on. I'm new to crypto in general but have learnt a lot through the trial by fire that is Safemoon. Believed a lot of the bullshit before one day you realise there's too many red flags to keep protecting it.

Followed the hype and made a lot of friends in the discord, so was suggested to apply and help moderate earlier in 2022. When you're in the OPs channel and you read the way John communicates with mods and staff belittling them and writing off valid criticism as FUD, you realise how immature and incapable of running a "company" he is. My concerns grew seeing the Bitmart LP hack happen and there being no explanation except misappropriating the LP.

The forming of Safemoon as a company just to avoid the SEC knocking on the doors (not that it matters there's probably nobody in the offices now). Seeing Mr Adult / Fox gaslighting everyone and inflating his ego while the twitter account and marketing continue to be misleading to holders.

The more I look the more I see signs of Safemoon just dragging out product releases to look like they are a legitimate business and I hope it catches up to him.

2. The former Reddit Maxi

For me, safemoon was my first crypto. I was working at a school board at that time and was completely burnout and hating my life, it gave me hope that I could exit the job and become financially free, and bought into the misinformation and blatant false project potential. I understand and sympathize with people that are still maxis as they are trying to protect their declining investment, regardless of the signs. As more people left the "company" and continual articles and videos were released about the fraud and money stolen from the LP I started to wake up. The fact that John never came out and made a statement raised my suspicions and then i finally dug deeper, it was obvious the whole time. I feel like an idiot haha, all good though lesson learned.

3. The former Content Creator

Safemoon had a massive community to market and push any product, they had millions although I wasn't sure where they got them, and the releasing of blockchain and exchange with a huge community to bring attention and users to it, could have caused it to be widely used if it wasn't a terrible product and thus cause a price run. The opportunities with operation phoenix and dark moon (his mom) were actually just as big as we had thought. But over time with delays, lies, team leaving, finding out almost everyone took from the cookie jar, the team and John Karony demonstrated they were taking care of themselves first then winging the products for Safemoon.

Then comes Coffeezilla's information and accusations along with lawsuits that make John look worse than any previous member of the team, info we didn't have until recently. All of which appears to me like the easiest crypto win in the world was wasted by a centralization in what is supposed to be a decentralized space. Most people probably couldn't handle being exposed to that kind of money and fame, but John Karony might have been the worst person to possibly run Safemoon. With an honest intelligent person Safemoon could have been a huge name but the opportunity was wasted and recovery seems near impossible

4. The former Twitter Space host

For me, the "walk away moment" was two fold:

When Grove listed, it had become obvious to me that they were all just copies of the same playbook. When they allowed Falasi to dump on the army and provided no legit explanation, I finally realized that it was all a scam to profit off swap partner listing fees. That is THE model. So, when Don announced that he was going to launch BBTF, I remember tweeting, "Just what we need, another project to pull money from Safemoon."

The second thing was hearing how internal people had discussions with John regarding making the people whole who lost money in the V1 honeypot. The way he described him as wanting nothing to do with making those people whole. It made me sick. I could tell he wasn't lying. Today, the army acts like the most recent reimbursement makes up for the massive losses those people incurred over the past year. That is so disingenuous and exactly why I don't feel bad for going after the project. I only care that new investors don't get screwed.

5. The former Reddit Mod

I initially thought SafeMoon was a smart move and it was literally EVERYWHERE when I jumped in (week 1). Quickly made an absolute fortune and believed it could be even bigger for one reason: John Karony and the team were quite happy to self-dox -AND- appear in those weekly videos. To me, that meant either they were stupid or they have massive fucking balls to become public figures whilst running a long scam.

When did I realise it was a scam? Partly after reading your fine work and also because I was a Mod and quickly started to see that a lot of what the team were promising was basically ... bollocks. The 'BETA Testers' announcement for the Wallet was a clear red flag as there were no Beta testers. Ever.

Most of the stories I read are just from normal people who believed in financial freedom, quitting the jobs they hated etc. Those are very powerful motivators, and the strong you believe in a dream the more you subconsciously fight against people who are just there to tell you the facts. There is still a large base, around 5,000 or so, of people that are totally committed to Safemoon, this is out of over 700,000 holders.

I thought these stories are interesting though.