The scariest character on Halloween is crypto SCAM
It’s funny to say, but I’ve been investing almost since I bought pizza with bitcoins. Each time I thought that I was such an experienced investor that nothing could break me, but SCAM is merciless and catches up with everyone. The Whitebit stock exchange action for everyone’s favorite holiday Halloween reminded me that understanding fear is the key to defeating it. My post about the most high-profile scams that many investors suffered from, including me.
OneCoin. The losses amounted to about 25 billion dollars, it was a financial pyramid where there was no real blockchain.
In 2014, Bulgarian Ruja Ignatova launched OneCoin – a new cryptocurrency, a “competitor to bitcoin”. The scam was exposed 2 years later, and she was never caught, although Le Monde (screenshot above) reported in 2024 that she invested in luxury real estate in Dubai.
BitConnect (2016-2018). They promised huge returns on investment in a cryptocurrency lending program. After raising about $4 billion, the platform collapsed.
Bitclub Network (2014-2019). The organizers convinced investors to invest up to $722 million in mining equipment that no one saw.
**FTX. **This cryptocurrency exchange collapsed in 2022, causing customer losses of over $8 billion.
FTX SCAM was caused by a series of breaches and insufficient liquidity on the platform. This experience prompted me to seriously study all the CEX cryptocurrency exchanges to choose the safest one. At the moment, I use WhiteBIT and Bitfinex.
PlexCoin (2017). The project promised over 1300% profit per month, which raised suspicions and intervention from regulators.
Mt. Gox. One of the first and largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Mt. Gox went bankrupt after hackers stole about 850,000 bitcoins. In 2024, Reuters reported that affected Mt. Gox customers would be compensated based on the BTC price of $483. Thus, the exchange will reimburse customers $68.5 million instead of $8.7 billion.
There would be fewer victims of fraud if we followed these seemingly obvious rules:
✓ Study the whitepaper before investing in an asset.
✓ Ignore messages from unknown persons, especially if they are related to investments.
✓ Be suspicious of links or attachments from unfamiliar senders.
✓ You received a notification about unusual activity – freeze all transactions immediately.
✓ Beware of promises of big earnings.
✓ Beware of “celebrities” who promote cryptocurrencies.
✓ Don’t transfer money to people you only know online.
✓ Stay calm if you receive a message that your account is supposedly frozen. This could be a scammer’s letter.
✓ Be suspicious of “free” money or crypto giveaways.
✓ Keep your crypto in cold wallets.
Scammers are constantly improving their methods to deceive even the most cautious and prepared people. Almost all of the scams I listed used social engineering and exploited human emotions such as fear, trust, and empathy, which made them effective in the cryptocurrency industry, where people are driven by the desire to get rich quick and easy
