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Well he has a functional e-commerce website. Quite a few of these ICOs don't even have a working anything.

But still, yikes. This is why you have to be careful around ICOs.

Makes us wonder how many of his previous 'achievements' were similarly exaggerated.
Most, I'd say. He had another venture called "Share My Garage", which was a rental site that he has since stopped promoting. Ashutosh made repeated claims that Share My Garage had been accepted in YC when in fact it had not.
"Sharma is presently a student at San Francisco's "Draper University of Heroes", a for-profit bootcamp for entrepreneurs that is not accredited to award degrees."

You can't make this stuff up...

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Wow.

>Despite claims of enormous turnover and traffic, a search showed around only 400 listings in total, many up to four months old.

"A full 10 percent of listings of goods for sale on the site were found to have been placed by Sharma and his chief operating officer and University of Auckland student Dinyar Irani - the company's only two employees - with the pair trying to sell a soft toy and their NCEA schoolbooks.

Alexa analytics, a service providing information on website traffic, shows unusual results for Sell My Good. The vast majority of visitors - 99.96 per cent percent - are reported to have come from only one country: Japan.

Despite this dominance, the site has fewer than a dozen sales listings from Japan, and Google shows the site is only mentioned once in the country's internet domain.

Honestly, I don't know what to say to this. It's pretty moronic at every level but...it worked I guess?

Bleh, I'll just go meditate now. No use in getting angry.

>"They treated us as a joke. It's really bad, they think 'oh, he's a 19-year-old kid who knows nothing," he said of the market regulator.

I would hope that the market regulator treats everyone as if they know nothing, and forces them to prove things. Not just this guy.

> This week he began accepting investor funds, hoping to raise $220 million

Do we have any proof that Ashutoush has actually raised anything?

Their ICO website, which is currently down, had claimed that they had raised $1 million in the first 6 hours of the eCash token sale.
The saying "Fake it 'till you make it" really comes to mind here.

The kid is hoping he can lie and scheme his way to success.

Sorry bud but that doesn't work with startups, maybe if you were already an executive at a multinational corporation where you have little accountability and any blame can fall onto the company, but if you lie as a startup founder your reputation and that of all your future ventures will be ruined.