(Note: I was very hesitating to share my friend's story as i didn't want to violate his privacy , but after talking with him he agreed because he thought he can be a reason to prevent this from happening again to another person.)
A couple of months ago, i got a call from my friend ( we will call him Adam), he was choking on his words so i had a very tough time to try and understand what happened, and knowing adam, he wasnt that kind of people who we call a " cry baby" so i was sure something bad happened. And oh god i was very damn right: Adam was a victim to a scam and he just lost 3000 $ in cryptocurrencies!
Needless to say that he isn't that super rich guy so 3000$ is a decent amount to him. I spend hours trying to console him ,it made my heart ache to watch my closest friend act like a kid who just lost his candy. However, there was some obvious questions in my mind : how were you scammed ? but most importantly WHY was he scammed at the first place which is the reason why i decided to write this article.
After hearing the whole story, the reason why Adam was scammed became very obvious to me; simply he broke the first rule of what i call" the three golden rules to not being scammed"
Rule N°1 : If it's too good to be true, then it is
What did Adam do was to "invest" half of his cryptocurrencies assets in a website which offers a 20% yield per month. obviously that "offer" seduced him and led him to invest a nice money in that website. Adam was paid for the first month, but much to his surprise few days later and he couldn't login to his "investing" account because his account was blocked! my friend was so sure he didn't break their rules so he sent an email to their so called client support but of course no answer! and only at that moment Adam realised that he is just another victim to this kind of scams which called ponzi.
In short, a ponzi scheme is an investing scam which allegedly promising high returns with only a little risk. It is very similar to a pyramid scheme which is based on using new investors' funds to pay the earlier backers and that's how most of cryptos scams works. It is a very known way to scam people yet it always work. In fact, scammers made a profit of $4.3 BILLION in 2019!!! so to scammers, it's just like the proverb says "old but gold".
That was rule n°1 then, let's talk about the second rule.
Rule N°2: Do your own researches before investing in any project
and when i say do your researches, i don't just mean to search if that website, company or whatever is paying or not like what adam did. Instead, i mean to research EVERYTHING about whatever project you want to invest your precious money in.
you have to make sure you are dealing with is a real live person ( or company) with a verified online identity because many scammers doesn't have any real identifiable informations (for exemple if you are dealing with a company you have to search their location in real life and don't forget the legal authorization ). The second thing to do is to learn how does that project work and how it makes profits to avoid Ponzis. Next, you have to contact the support and ask about anything unclear about their project, and even if it's all clear you have to contact them to know if they do have a costumers support at the first place or they are just using a fake phone number and a fake email address. Oh, and don't even think about investing a cent before you got an answer back (from a human of course not a bot).
Now, you might be wondering why do i make this look so complicated? well.. here is a little hint.. adding to the fact that being scammed isn't a nice feeling at all , we are talking about your money being at a very huge risk, So that's deserve the effort you will put in searching .
To prove how researching facts is important before investing, simply take a look at the biggest scam on the history of crypto's : Onecoin, the cryptocurrency which is going to be the king of cryptos and even beat Bitcoin as the "founder" Ruja Ignatova tried to convince the world. She made a huge effort trying to promote her project in a very successful way. Ruja was very famous and she was even invited to big cities like London to introduce her new project, so basically everything was looking good. to be a part of this project, you have to "invest" amounts that goes from 100 euros to as much as 118 000 euros! and like any project nowadays it had an affiliate program which will supposedly bring you more incomes. People (especially poor) didn't think twice about it and of course did no research about it and just trusted the pretty face who was promising them richess and the happy life they dreamt about and kept "investing" every cent they had . But one day all of those pink dreams became a living hell. can you guess it? correct! On octobre 2017, Ruja disappeared after making profits of about $4 billion and scamming almost 3 million victim!! it turns out all their documents are not real. and that crypto wasn't even on blockchain!!
At this point, Adam said: " alright, but what if i made my researches and found nothing suspecious?" well the answer to that is easy: check back rule number one and then don't forget about the third rule which is...
Rule N°3: Always take your online security seriously because it can affect your cryptos
This is the most dangerous scam, because it's simply about some malwares which can harm your computer and have your accounts passwords and your personal data if you store them on your device so avoid at any cost storing cryptos wallets password or your private keys on a device , write it down and put it in a safe place
. Also there is another kind of milwares which switches addresses used to transfer cryptocoins with ones the malware controls, so in other words when you will send someone some cryptos, this malware will change the adress to another one!
Finally there is a simple trick yet alot of people especially beginners got scammed because of it: when a site or a person or anything similar asks for your private key , seed phrase or anything which makes them able to access your wallet; don't even think about answering that and just forget it for your own safety.
In the end, i hope you will find those rules helpful and i really hope that it can make even a very small difference. If you find this article helpful then please consider giving it a like and maybe a small tip :) .
Thank you for reading and sorry for the long post.
stay safe all!
