In a bust that’s worthy of its name, a company with an upcoming initial coin offering by the name of Enigma has been hacked. The bad guys running off with 1,500 in Ethereum tokens, worth $473,000.

Founded in 2015, Enigma pitches itself as an open data technology company that focuses on analyzing public and private data for enterprises. The ICO raise was meant to raise funds for Catalyst, which it describes as having been conceived following an “Aha! moment” (not to be confused with the band) that should result in everyone buckling up.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates behind the company claim on Medium that their ICO product has something to do with “sophisticated trading strategies.” Catalyst is alleged to be “a platform that empowers anyone to build their own crypto hedge fund and participate in the coming Renaissance of the financial ecosystem,” but apparently protecting their ICO pre-sale wasn’t part of the concept. But back to the hacking story.

According to reports, the bad guys were able to take control of the company’s URL, an administrator account on its Slack channel and for good measure its email distribution list. Once in control, the hackers are alleged to have begun masquerading as being from Engima and managed to con people into handing over their Ethereum tokens under the pretense of an ICO presale. The irony that those who handed over their money to the hackers couldn’t tell the difference between the hackers and the actual people behind the ICO, is not in the least bit lost.

Enigma joins a growing list of companies heading towards, in the middle of, or having completed their initial coin offerings that have been hacked. Previous victims include Veritaseum Inc.  for $8.4 million, Coindash for $7 million and a hat trick of ICOs in mid-July for $31 million.

Photo: watts_photos/Flickr