Crypto scams are a plague. They range from finfluencer scams through to bot laden spam. Indeed, my own videos on YouTube have been innundated with bots.

The crypto bots are infuriating for everyone. For content creators, they make it difficult to see genuine comments. Filtering out words does not work well: what if a real person is calling out the bots? The crypto spammers also annoy viewers.

One that has caught my attention is Marshmello Finance MARSH3. Marshmello Finance has plagued social media comments sections for some time now. They promote a token called MARSH3. And it is clearly ridiculous. It is also a cash study for how to identify a crypto trash fire. Let’s look at all the clear problems.

Spam

The first major red flag is that they spam YouTube comments. The bots spam inane assertions, such as “Marshmello Finance MARSH3 is gonna explode anytime soon 🔥” or “Why do you say there is no way? Have you seen Marshmello Finance MARSH3 This thing is gonna skyrocket 🚀🚀”. This strongly suggests that Marshmello Finance is not to be taken seriously.

Unrealistic promises

The second red flag is that the token – MARSH3 – promises insane annual yields. For example, the website claims “An investment of 1000$ MARSH3 gives approx 2,040,926.05$ MARSH3 in just 12 months!🔥”. This is clearly nonsense. They also promise a “sustainable price boost of 30% annually and a 20% APY”.

How do these yields come about? Who knows? The best the white paper offers is that they burn MARSH3 token, thereby reducing the number outstanding and supposedly increasing the price per token. At an extremely superficial level, this is akin to a stock buyback where reducing the number of shares increases the price per share.

MARSH3’s buyback analogy is flawed. Stocks have real value. Thus, reducing the number of shares outstanding increases each owners’ claim on the firm’s cash flows. But, MARSH3 has no clear use case. The cash flows seem hyper speculative. At best they might accrue from transactions taxes.

In short: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Holders and transactions

BscScan reports that there are 73 holder addresses. It is not clear whether these are 73 unique people. There are 106 transfers. This is not confidence inspiring.

Some of the transaction patterns also look odd. There is a weird mix of transfers and buy transactions. While it is possible that Marshmello Finance might classify an initial purchase as a transfer, it is not clear why those transferees might subsequently transfer tokens to other wallets (as opposed to simply sell them).

Odd social media activities

The Marshmello twitter account has some 18k followers, but extremely low engagement. The YouTube account has two videos, both of which are dedicated to instructing people how to buy MARSH3. The lack of solid social media presence looks concerning. It makes MARSH3 look like a fly-by-night operation. Indeed, one wonders whether – and how many of – the followers are also bots.

Overall thoughts

The overall impression is that one should treat MARSH3 with extreme caution. It does not look promising. And, anyone who invests in MARSH3 faces a serious risk of losing their entire investment.

MARSH3 is a paradigm example of a poop coin. It has all the hallmarks of a coin that has serious risk of going to $0. The only silver lining is that MARSH3's awfulness is obvious and it provides a case study of what to avoid.

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