Bitcoin Forum

The Biggest Scam Coins In Crypto History
https://tradersofcrypto.com/guides/crypto-scams/
"Since February 2020, approximately 1,000 cryptocurrencies have been pronounced dead, deceased and no more, with the total death count now standing at about 2400 coins. This equates to an increase of about 71%!"

That was already a large number, and I believe it will continue to increase because many projects have been created on monthly basis and most of those projects will also experience the same fate, but my concern is for those people that invest in those so-called dead projects are they okay now? Anyway, Im just asking because it is a real situation and might continue to happen in the market because as we see many newly created projects have also shown weaknesses and might be added to that list, just my opinion!

There are so many unsupervised fake projects out there that at this point, we could make a betting game out of which project will be the next scam project. Personally, for me, I think that Bitconnect is the most disgusting scam that has happened to date. Not only because it was a scam but it because it was something that greatly damaged Bitcoin's reputation. Had that scam not happened, we might already be at 100k.

We really need to find out a better way to weed out scams rather than hope for government regulations which do nothing but restrict real projects.

quite a lot of value for money earned from the results of the cheat. I'm sure over time the fraud will continue and there will be more and more victims because the target audience is definitely new people who are fomo and hype about crypto without researching what coins they will buy.
where shit coin will fomo at the beginning of the introduction to a fictitious community

No. The better question would be, "how can we educate the majority of people to learn and identify which project are scam and which project are not?" and "how can people learn to manage their risk especially in terms of investment?"

As long as there is money involved, shady projects will persist, and the only practical answer I can think of is education. Government can only warn people and it's up to individuals if they will follow or not.

yup! before starting and doing anything must prioritize education.
if it starts from learning, we are less likely to end up on scam coins. even someone who is an expert also needs it.

but basically people will be very difficult even do not want to learn, they do not have the patience.

               This really isn't surprising. People scam people even when the ways are limited and hard that it puts them at considerable risks. Which is why scams only increase in time here in this industry. Specifically as more people find out about its existence. What's worse is that the ways of scamming even became easier with the creation of the binance chain. I mean, even the normal people who know little about coding can even create shitcoins. Heck, even NFTs are being used for money laundering as well and to scam as many people as possible. But eventually, it is good that this came to surface earlier and will make this industry mature even faster. Some time in the future, scamming people with the use of crypto won't be that easy anymore.

With so many scam tokens you can imagine how much investor funds have been lost. And the average token/coin scam happened in 2016-2017, and those were the worst years in crypto history for scam projects and scams with various modes. But that doesn't mean that nowadays fraudulent projects don't exist anymore, if we are not careful and careful we can get stuck with new altcoins that appear every day.

Yeah, this is one of the many reasons why governments are really strict with cryptocurrencies, especially in some countries.
Another thing is this is the most downside on a decentralized space, anyone can do such anonymously and without getting caught.

So for me, I believe that basic education for those "investors" are must, people must have basic knowledge how to identify fishy/scam projects that are related with cryptocurrencies.

And they are not stopping but keep coming more. While these scammers still see that there's a demand that they can easily fool, they won't stop making new scam projects.
Despite with many warnings and red flags that have been given by concerned people through the web and different platforms, still, they are able to victimized and scam investors which mostly are newbies.

With hundreds of ELON, SAFE, SHIBA or DOG-themed meme tokens launching every day (just take a look at the token [ANN] section) that number will surely continue to grow. Shitcoins continues to be launched regardless of whether it'll be a success or not since the project team could simply abandon it and create another one the next day. This is what happens when there is no regulation, no accountability.

I don't see the number dwindling, lack of regulation, and open-sourced developers preparing to create a pump and dump coins because it's an easy way to make money for developers and old investors, leaving new investors losing for lack of knowledge on how this pump and to dump coins works, there are legit projects that can keep up because of lack of support and developers although they have a good motive, they just cannot keep up because the majority of investors prefer easy money than a long term investment.

Learning is the key to success, experience teaches us to add insight, especially for people who are new to the crypto world, of course there will be lots of obstacles and challenges that we will face, because we can't tell which coins are real and which are fake coins, a term in a proverb that scales are not necessarily fish, the point is to learn and continue to learn so that we can distinguish which coins are real and which are fake coins, such as the Pincon coin, a crypto token originating from Vietnam, which has succeeded in deceiving several investors.

How about the other profitable coins which have given so good returns ? If some of the coins were made for scamming people, we cannot blame the overall crypto market and crypto coins to be scam.
You can call few coins as scams but if we can avoid investment in these coins, the rest of our investment may give us much good returns. Crypto markets have given highest returns as compare to any other market.

The lure of the market and the false promises of profits make many stupid people believe blindly. And there are also male infidels who use greed to make money, bonus scams don't happen to those who understand the risks posed by the market.

In fact I think every year it will continue to increase even if cryptocurrency grows better and better crime will also get easier access to facilities, the only thing we can do is avoid it and learn not to fall into it.

Honestly, I would guess that mtgox is one of these. I know that they are not considered an obvious scam and they keep saying that it was hacked and maybe some of it is true. However I am 100% certain that they got away with some money as well. It is said that over 400k bitcoins were lost during that period, and that is over 15 billion dollars, at its peak and with the highest estimation we are talking about as much as 50 billion dollars (if we take the biggest reported number + and bitcoin ATH price to calculate).

So, they may not be considered an open scam but they are by far the biggest hurt in the crypto world, without that, we could have been higher way quicker, the 60k+ ATH would have been in 2017 instead of 20k, and 20k would have been back in 2014-2015 periods and today we would be already 100k+ even maybe as much as 200k.

That's the reality that we have to face, we know the investment world is a risky place if without prior knowledge and own research, the losses will be get. I've been scammed by scam projects twice this year. this makes me frustrated with projects that carry ICO projects

Didn't realize onecoin was a larger scam than bitconnect. Maybe because a lot of onecoin scam did happen offline. What's been seen in a large number of scams is sooner or later people are being brought to justice, even though the investors might not get the money back, the operators even don't lead a good life. A few insiders of Onecoin were even killed.

The number of dead coins is still in counting, many more will come and be recorded dead. This is really disappointing and imagines that the number can be doubled easily if many people will try to take advantage of the market by creating other scam projects. In fact, almost every day we saw new (unreliable) projects and this will surely add to the current dead coins in the market.
I think that was too much and enough or else, this gonna be the reason why crypto will fail in the future and no one will ever believe this alternative.

Quite a number of projects are copycat project, without a real vision. These kind of projects will definitely fail, because they don't have a clear plan.
These figures will continue to rise, because there are still very plenty of them that are going to die also. So, I am not surprised.

That's true and now that the hype's are getting stronger for a new trend. This will be their reason to create a useless coin to scam people. It is really disappointing on our side even though we do not invest on it because we are still going to be affected if this act does not stop. We can say that there are  too much coins already in the market and it must be stop now but those greedy coin creator's does not care to us at all.

This is one of the disadvantage of crypto (for us) because it its mostly unregulated while this can be an advantage to them because they are free to do what they want without getting caught out easily but no, the whole crypto system wont fall just because of them.

I remember Bitconnect before but not the onecoin, that was a huge scam ever and I feel sorry to the investors. I don’t know why until now, many are fall as a victim on a fake project where they easily spot the fake one to the legit one. We should already know how to deal with the new projects, I see most of the fake project now are about meme tokens and nfts, so just a tip better to do your own research first before investing and don’t ever fall for a false hype.

Lots of investors' money have been wasted and went to scammers' hands. I guess it's the best time to educate the majority or even educate ourselves to know whether a project is a scam or not. To be honest, it's hard to notice scam projects easily nowadays but being observant and skeptical would help. Scam projects will always exist in different forms yet we should be smart enough to notice and get rid of them.

I remember how to hype the Squid Game movie was on Netflix and suddenly, there was a Squid Game project.
I was sure enough that at that time, there is something wrong and it may turn a scam or dead project into another hype following project.
And yes, that's it.
At that time, the Squid game is very hype, many beginners are following the hype and getting into that scam project, so sad to know it.

Actually, we can find numerous crypto project scams that are emerging almost every day. They utilize the hype of something, the ways of easiness a token is created, how many new investors are too easy to be attracted by a fake project because of the high-profit consideration.

There’s a lack of guidelines here, many are still falling on the hype and the only way to avoid it is to restrict users from creating their own tokens easily, there should be a restrictions. Well, scammers and hackers are very genius because they can still find a way, so education is the key. If many people knows how to spot fake project and do their work, many can avoid these scam projects and save their self from falling into this trap.

I was surprised with the small count as there is huge number of projects that vanished with billions of dollars collected from investors and then noticed since February of 2020 just 1000 cryptocurrencies are pronounced dead and how many billions lost in the process. Even with such a high failure rate people stick take risk in investing in these projects looking for a quick profit.

I am not surprised at all and if anything I think the number is too low, that number are only the coins that we know have died, there are those that are about to die and those that were dead from the beginning, and that number also only includes the last 2 years, if we were to include all the coins that have disappeared since bitcoin was created then the number will grow many times over, so I hope this opens the eyes of newbies that believe that they can earn money with those coins and they realize the chances of that happening are awfully low.