Blockchain Council: Not Worth It

Introduction

Some time last year, I was seeing a lot of people talking about blockchain certification and others claiming to be certified experts. Being someone who's seen the start of it all since 2008, almost all these certifications smelled like scam.

I looked around and saw Blockchain Council being touted. I paid them to see what they're actually offering.

TL;DR Summary

The site is run by a single person who's showing off as an entrepreneur, but has no real product to show. The study material is very basic, filled with typos and mistakes, and the final exam has almost no relationship to the material and many of the questions weren't even part of the material; a trick to have you take the exam multiple times (and pay more).

Additionally, the site owner shoves his own product into the material to promote it, but doesn't include other competing products. That's quite unprofessional.

Even though the certificate says "Certified Blockchain Expert", the end result is that you're not an expert in any form. You'd only learn basics, that are available for free on the internet already.

Registration and Education Sites

The main site used to register is www.blockchain-council.org but after registration, you're redirected to another one www.toshacademy.com -- What is Tosh? Or better yet, Who is Tosh?

Self-Promotion and Ownership

Looking around for what and who owns the site, I found this: www.toshendra.com

Looking around for who Toshendra Sharma is, I found this article on Forbes India promoting him, even though there was no product to show for at the time, so what was the promotion and hyping the person for?!

Link: http://www.forbesindia.com/article/30-under-30/30-under-30-toshendra-sharma-a-messiah-for-cyber-security/42329/1

Link: https://www.forbes.com/profile/toshendra-kumar-sharma/

So what are his companies to deserve a mention on Forbes? The companies are defunct and dead. 2 sites are dead and no product was actually delivered and finished.

Link: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wegilant#section-overview

Typos

The typos are scattered across many slides, that it looks obvious the whole thing was cooked on a haste and not taken seriously nor professionally.

"Sierra Leone was among the first country" should've been "Sierra Leon was among the first countries"

"to conduct the same" -- the phrase "the same" is often used by people from from India. Not that there's anything wrong with Indians, but shows that the content was made by one individual, and he's likely to be Indian.

Notice the bullet points. The first one ends with a full-stop, but the others are left without one. No consistency.

"minor node" should've been "miner node."

"%tage" should've been written as "percentage" -- the fact it was written that way shows the level of unprofessional work.

"RecordsKeeper" is the product the creator of the site is trying to promote throughout the material.

In the blockchain architecture, one layer is shown as "insensitive layer" where it should be "incentive layer" -- I wasn't whether to laugh or cry when I was going over the material.

Worthless Certificate

I totally do not recommend wasting money on this nor fueling this terrible "business." -- I wouldn't label it as scam, but it's certainly not an "expert" body to judge people, and definitely not teach them.

Flexible Ethics: What is Inspiration

So K took the initiative to inquire from a blog on Al-Zanki's Social Media Boss's statement which they boasted on their site. The guys from the Social Media gang replied some days later and I'm surprised that they replied in the first place! But rest assured, both their reply & Al-Zanki's reply have been nothing but a boat-load of egotistical idiocy.

So at first, The Social Media Boss gang said that copying Mashable's Code of Ethics' page is called Inspiration!!!! They were inspired by Mashable's "structure" (whatever that means), so they copied their Code of Ethics page. Not only that, Khalid comments later that it has been removed, and he slaps in a smiley!

Wow! I didn't know that plagiarism can be fixed by deleting the content, pretend that it never happened AND add a smiley to it! Plagiarists rejoice!

The amount of epic fail isn't enough to describe my feelings, not only towards this fraud who calls himself a social media expert, but also my feelings towards those who pay him to spew his "inspired" thoughts and copied book. Sorry, I meant "his authentic book."

The Flexible Code of Ethics

My buddy K pointed me to 2 links the other day. Here, see these two screenshots for yourself and tell me what do you see.

   

Yes, this is Khalid Al-Zanki at his usual act of plagiarism and theft. In case you're not familiar with his previous (bad) work of art, here you are.

This time, he's talking about ethics, and not only he copied Mashable's entire page, no! That's too typical of him; this time, he's also preaching in seminars about ethics! After he copied Mashable's entire page, with NOT A SINGLE MODIFICATION!

I hope for a day when people learn to use search engines and run background checks about the people they're bringing for seminars or training sessions.

* Figure out the links yourself. I won't link to his pages to not rank him higher on search engines.

Bad Business Practices: Dealing With Haters

If you're a business owner, how do you deal with haters? Like any problem, you have to understand why you have the problem before you grab your tools & start fixing it.

It doesn't take a genius to see why people hate Oracle, but this post is not about Oracle. I'd like to use Khalid Al-Zanki as an example here because of some of his tweets that have been surfacing ever since Bashar and I wrote about his bad business practices.

Before going through some pictures, I'd like to note that we've never mentioned his personal life. We've only highlighted his fraudulent approaches to marketing his services and himself.

As you can see, in these pictures and ones from previous posts, that his approach to all our exposures was to warn people to not listen to us, write a general post about what his method is without saying that he uses it, and rather than looking at things from a professional point of view, he quickly saw them as personal.

How did Khalid deal with haters? Not as a professional for sure:
- He didn't bother replying to us directly.
- Always deleted our questions on his posts.
- Switched his Twitter account to Private, disallowing his followers to read about what's going on.
- Rather than admitting his mistakes, he hides for a while then pushes for more.
- He scolded people publicly when he didn't like a reaction or something someone did (like tagging him in an event in Facebook)

So from the last image, in addition to his funny typo, we can guess what he's gonna be up to & count on us coming after his cunning and dirty approaches at doing business, over & over until he learns about something called ETHICS.

Khalid Al-Zanki: Oliver Was Surprised, Too!

A supportive member of the general public took the initiative in contacting Oliver Olsen, the author of the book that Khalid claims he wrote.

Well, Mr. Oliver replied and I was just as surprised by his reply as he was by Khalid's copying!

So as you can see, it seems to be OK between online marketers to share their content (free or for a fee) as long as the receiving end does some magical paraphrasing so as to not look like a buffoon when someone decides to paste some of the book's content in a search engine.

As usual, Khalid is yet to reply to our posts and he's probably cursing us from behind his private Twitter & Facebook accounts, calling us names like: market business morons or liars, as he also does some of his magical brain washing to his beloved followers & fans.

If you have nothing to hide then why don't you let them see the truth? Why don't you reply to our posts in public? Why post some general post about Private Label and Royalty Free definitions without stating WHY you posted it?

Follow up posts: http://mbhtech.blogspot.com/search/label/khalid%20al-zanki

Khalid Al-Zanki: Out Of The Closet!

After much silence, Khalid has finally decided to ALMOST reply to our posts. Indirectly, too!

His post is cunning! He doesn't say what is covered: Is it the ebook? Is it the website? Is it the posts?
Either way, it clearly means that he's admitting using someone else's content, even if he paid for it.
(and for a change, he actually listed the sources of his quotations this time!)

I have heard of private label services where someone manufacturers a product for me to use under my own name, but what if that manufacturer made the same book/content and sold it to hundreds or thousands?
What if all what was changed is the book's cover? The content's title?

Also, as Bashar's post and mine show, he had copied and paraphrased content from various places. Did he pay to each & every website he copied from before posting? Or do all these websites copy from the same ebook?!

In my opinion, it's great that all he did was change some pictures & styling in the ebook, because it proved that he does not have the capacity to write his own content.
A copied About page, Terms of Service disclaimer, blog posts, and God knows what else! All of that to show that he has knowledge and knows what he's talking about.

Does he? Maybe.

I don't know about you, but I would not do any kind of business with a person who can't write his own content yet sells his services through it!

Khalid, you're welcome to reply back in comments or email and I promise you that I will not modify nor delete any of your comments, unlike how you deleted mine.


Update: I commented on Khalid's blog to thank him for confirming that the content wasn't his & asked him to comment back on my blog. He deleted my comments!!! AGAIN!

Notice the time: 8:07 PM. If you go to his post now you won't find the comments.


Also, it has come to my attention that he has posted his explanation post to make it clear to (and I quote): "most of Arabs in 3rd world are still confused with.."

I would like to see you keeping our comments on your blog to allow your followers, fans and visitors to see the other point of view of the story, rather than brainwashing them with your copy/paste talk.

Follow up posts: http://mbhtech.blogspot.com/search/label/khalid%20al-zanki

Khalid Al-Zanki: Plagiarism, Fraud & Thievery

The scam artist Khalid Al-Zanki has been quiet on Twitter for the past 2 days since he was exposed. In fact, he switched his twitter account to private mode!

That's something odd for someone who's been boasting online for a very long time! But I'll continue with this post with more evidence of Khalid's theft and plagiarism.

In my previous post, I showed one of his posts and where he stole the content from. I had left him a comment on that same post but he deleted it and replied in a private email.

So he took the content from a book, and published it under his own name and claims that the publisher allows that. And that's funny, because if the publisher does allow that kind of thing (which I'm not sure of), it means both of them are scammers!


Now to another post of his titled: The Social Strategy.
This post wasn't completely copy/pasted but it was paraphrased from a website sponsored by the Australian Government: OnlineGrowthProgram.com.au

To another post of your favorite scammer: Why A Business Plan Is Important
This is a nice paste by Khalid. He did a great job as usual; the material this time is from: http://www.anesite.com/profitboostingstrategies.html

After all of this, I didn't really bother looking further. It's quite obvious that he's a professional paster and people, organizations and companies have paid him thousands for this great paste work, which they could have gotten for free from the web.

Follow up posts: http://mbhtech.blogspot.com/search/label/khalid%20al-zanki

Khalid Al-Zanki: The Big Successful Fraud

Khalid Al-Zanki is an entrepreneur who thrives at utilizing online and social technologies to maximize a business's profits. He also does that while writing blog posts, quotes, and a book that he had stole from other people!

My good buddy Bashar wrote a post exposing Khalid Al-Zanki and his thievery. All with screenshots. Please do check Bashar's post as it has more details than you'll find here.

I have also took the initiative and did some quick search of my own, to discover even more rip offs and plagiarism by the amazing entrepreneur!

Before posting my findings, I have to explain why I'm joining this expose: It's OK for you to become an entrepreneur and grow a business, but it's not by stealing other people's intellectual property, thoughts and efforts and then claim them to be yours.
What I sincerely hate about Khalid is that he pushed his face unto TV shows, newspapers, online ads and worse held speeches for college students and major corporations.

1) Khalid's blog post: Market Strategies: http://www.alzanki.com/blog/internet-business/business-plan/market-strategies/
It dates to August 20th, 2010, while the source he ripped it off from dates to July 16th, 2008!
You can check the date of HTML pages by putting this line in the address bar after the page loads:
javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

His other blog posts are mostly plagiarized. If not whole, each chunk from a place.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't do business with a thief. And to those whom he fooled already, I hope from the bottom of my heart that you sue him, especially the Australian College of Kuwait (ACK) since he was brought over for workshops to your dear students.

Follow up posts: http://mbhtech.blogspot.com/search/label/khalid%20al-zanki