Bitcoin Forum

Since cryptocurrency users continue to increase, many people are exposed to it. At the same time, there is also an increase in scams in the market, which usually always fall victim to the newbies in the crypto space. And this is happening because nothing is happening in the regulation here in cryptocurrency. So crypto is one of the high-risk assets in the market. So the opportunity here is way higher than we expect. "If there is an opportunity there is always a risk"

Now let's talk about the crypto scam that rocked cryptocurrency. So the only one I covered was the biggest crypto scam, the one with the biggest stolen amount. Because we all know that there are many scams in the crypto world.

---

PLEXCOIN

It was launched in August 2017 and raised 8.5M$ through ICO. They say it will be used for maintaining the Plexcoin, Infrastructure, and for the future development of products and services. They also have promises to their investors of 1354% Return(ROI) within 29 days on investment, And it is stated in their whitepaper.
They also claimed that they have a global team of financial and managerial experts based in Singapore.

It is a Ponzi scheme, so its founders are all residents of Canada, Lacroix, Paradis-Royer, and Ouellet were charged in 2020 with Security Fraud, Wire Fraud, and Money laundering.

---

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/three-individuals-behind-alleged-plexcoin-ico-scam-charged-with-fraud

---

CENTRA TECH

It's a Miami-based company whose purpose is to offer crypto-based financial products such as debit cards, Visa and Mastercard. They claimed that they have a license for 38 estates in money transfer. And there are also celebrities involved in it like Floydmayweather and DjKhaled to promote centra tech ico the centra token, and it was able to raise 25M$ in July 2017. And its founders are Sohrab Sharma and partners Robert Farkas, and Raymond Trapani.

But in the same year of 2017, A project investor filed a Lawsuit, alleging the centra tech had violated security loss when it was able to raise 25m$ from the centra token ico. And in April 2018, the SEC charged them with multi-million dollar Unregistered Securities. It also includes the charged celebrities who were involved like DJ KHALED and MAYWEATHER but they also ended up in a settlement with the U.S security and exchange commission but they neither admitted nor denied their involvement here. And Sohrab Sharma has sentenced to 8 years an illegally conduct ICO and the others involved or partners only got a low sentence.

---

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/03/05/centra-tech-co-founder-gets-8-years-for-crypto-fraud/

---

PINCOIN

This, in turn, is one of the Vietnamese cryptocurrency projects that also took advantage of the times of ico mania. It only took away 660M$ from their investors.

How did they do it?
They created an attractive website, convincing whitepaper, social networks, mobile apps, and well-executed documentation. And a company promises a constant return for its investors with a profit rate of 48% per month. And besides that, investors will receive an 8% commission for every new member who enters the network.

---

The early investors made money from it at first, then the team started to pay rewards with other tokens, the Ifan token because the token they issued aside from Pin coin is the second one. But that token has no value because it was never traded in any exchange, after that the team disappeared and flew to another country. Almost 32k investors bit into this project, that's why they got 660M$ from ico earnings.

---

Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/vietnam-pincoin-ifan-icos-exposed-as-scams-that-allegedly-stole-660-million

---

BITCONNECT

It is a classic Ponzi scheme, the company started in 2016 and promised a consistently high return. And they say this is possible with blockchain technology, many have invested in this project, and others are defending that it is legit because it started in 2016. And it became one of the best-performing currencies in the coinmarketcap in 2017. There was even an imitator here then, when it was at its peak its market cap even reached 2.6B$, its business model guaranteed return to investors up to 40% per month which is added to the based initial deposit or cash deposited faster.

The company also developed a trading bot and volatility software that would earn your bitcoin into an investment into a fortune. This is what is posted on their website.

If you invest 1000$ in bitconnect, it will net 50M$ within 3 years, assuming that their daily interest of 1% is true and will compound daily. This is where it gets suspicious because there is no guaranteed return in crypto. And experts say that even Buterin said on Twitter that "if 1%/day is what they offer then that's a Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoinnect's attack here is an aggressive marketing strategy. They have a large army of multi-level affiliate marketers to recruit new investors. Think from January 2017 the value of bitconnect was only 0.17$ and it reached 460$ at the end of December 2017. But it didn't take long because the scam was discovered, and they received a cease and decease order from Texas from North Carolina regulators. And the company shut down in January 2018. The reason for the fall in the value of their token is that in September 2021 the top North American promoter of bitconnect, Glen Arcaro, was sentenced to 38 months in prison for defrauding US investors a total of 2B$ who is now probably free,... The founder of bitconnect is Satish Kumbhani but he is nowhere to be found. And it is not in India it is in another country but it is not known where, so its location remains unknown.

---

[1.] Bitconnect shutdown (https://www.businessinsider.com/bitconnect-to-shut-down-2018-1)
[2.] Bitconnect Fraud (https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-unable-to-locate-bitconnect-founder-convicted-in-2-4b-fraud-case)

---

ONECOIN

The largest cryptocurrency scam history, it took 4B$ of money from investors. But in other articles that I have read, it is playing with 4B$-15B$ of stolen money from their investors. And they had 3M members around 175 countries. It started in 2014 and its Founder is Dr. Ruja Ignatova or better known as the crypto queen. She claimed that onecoin is a bitcoin killer that can be used for payment. However, there was no onecoin blockchain model in the payment system. It is not even considered a blockchain.

In addition, the company sells educational materials such as courses, and cryptocurrency, this is their main business. There is also Trading and Investing here, and this is part of their multi-level marketing scheme. That the buyers will receive rewards for bringing in participants. course token buyers will also receive a rewards token that can be used to mine onecoin.

Its founder goes to different countries to conduct seminars to attract more investors, Dr. Ruja Ignatova who is a Bulgari national is now included in the most wanted top 10 in the FBI. Because in the year 2017 she left Onecoin, it disappeared like a bubble, and left the company without a word. And until now no one knows where it is. However, even though he left onecoin at that time, its operation continued with the help of his associates, later his brother Konstantin took over as a manager and face of the company.

But in 2016 many countries investigated this and called it a pyramid scheme. In 2018, the onecoin company was raided in Bulgaria, however, it was not until 2017 that Dr. Ruja and 2019 his brother Konstantin were arrested.

Onecoin had never been traded in the market or used to purchase anything. People are wondering how this woman was able to scam millions of people. Those who became members of this onecoin seem to have become a cult. They don't believe what the outside world says and this is what Dr. planted in their brains. Ruja Ignatova. But many people think that maybe it's just hiding or maybe it's getting plastic surgery. And also based on my research, Dr. has done many more scams. Ruja onecoin is still new. I didn't include the other scams. It's up to you to add.

Thanks for reading and taking the time.

---

[1.] What is Onecoin? (https://www.businesstoday.in/crypto/story/what-is-the-onecoin-scam-promoted-by-cryptoqueen-ruja-ignatova-340127-2022-07-03)
[2.] Founder most wanted list to FBI (https://coingeek.com/fbi-adds-onecoin-ruja-ignatova-to-top-10-most-wanted-list/Onecoin)
[3.] Co-founder of onecoin was arrested (https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/accused-onecoin-scam-orchestrator-arrested-in-los-angeles)

What is funny is that all the scams listed about were not even real cryptocurrencies but rather ponzi/pyramid schemes masquerading as the "next big coin" or the "next bitcoin"
Onecoin in particular had this kind of advertising, where they used Bitcoin's historic growth to convince their victims to join the Ponzi scheme. And then there was Bitcoinnect, if I recall well, it was even listed on coinmarketcap  ;D

I believe you forgot the real biggest scam history in cryptocurrency which is the Mt.Gox considering that the hacking event is an inside job since the CEO is jailed for falsifying there records. The estimated amount loss on this event was around 650K to 800K Bitcoins which is a trillion or billion dollar value using the current rate of Bitcoin.

Lots of undocumented exit scam too happened that greater value on the NFT industry during its hype.

I would add some to the list:

PlusToken (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlusToken) $2+ Billion. This was a chinese scam in 2018 where scammers pretended to be South Korean exchange and this actually affected markets a lot as scammers got to dump their stolen cryptos to the markets. No wonder that China banned icos. Most of these scammers got arrested 2 years later in 2020.

Envion (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2348435) $90 million. Mining farm in stored in containers. Product was ready to be manufactured, or so they said. At least they didn't get away from it. I am uncertain how much money investors got their money back trough trial.

The Swiss Alps Mining ICO (https://shitcoinoffering.com/dead-snow-the-swiss-alps-mining-scam-ico/), can't remember how much they scammed, but  ivested and it has similar container idea to envion and surprisingly it was a slow rug scam as well. I suppose no one wanted to sue them and ceo runs free with his lambo.

And obviously there are countless of icos scamming just some "millions" and under.

I will never forget centra tech and onecoin, at that time those two coins were very noisy, especially onecoin, their fanatics were arguing with me who were acquaintances of acquaintances who also shared with me the beauty. of onecoin and telling me that if I don't invest they will leave me. But when I asked them what blockchain platform and exchange it can be traded on, they couldn't answer me well.

That's why I said to my acquaintance, they are only doing hype, sytle networking is where the approach of the members there comes from, and their style is also networker, they go through the power of words and mindset.

Bitconnect and Onecoin proved that a Ponzi scheme can be a part of Cryptocurrency and when there's money that's where investors go, they forgot the meaning of Ponzi scheme all they see the exponential growth of its investors, as they say, do what the Romans do and newbie in Cryptocurrency becomes attracted because of the shilling and the hype it created in the industry, they hire influencers, writers, marketers to make these Ponzi schemes legal to the eyes of investors.

You can add pitcoin to this list. It is also one of dirtiest scam that was able to generate large amount of sales and gotten it's app installed on millions of devices. Later it found out that the app was secretly mining on the peoples smartphone. Thought it had very less power of mining from single device but collectively millions of devices were powering up their mining greed and gotten big amount of money in their wallets. With the time they also started selling the personal data of their users. This was nothing but surprisingly KYC docs of uses. I think I have seen a post on the forum itself with actual photograph of the KYC docs that were leaked from the Pitocin server. They were not hacks but intentional sell outs for money. That is one dirty business they played out there. Definitely it was wake up call for me to stay away from alts and try to be with bitcoin all the time.

At this moment the biggest scam in the Cryptocurrency by market cap is Ethereum. It's far ahead of its competitors.  8)

Ethereum is really a good project so how come you are seeing it as a scam in history. The highest project in altcoins which are suitable with all the dapps are currently booming. I dont know why some called it as scam as this will not be justify as there are many people relying on the effectivity of eth. Yes it did transfer from PoW to PoS but its really an amazing L1 among its competitor.

What is definitely missing is PlusToken, which had a big impact on the crypto industry in its time. The amount of damage was in the neighborhood of $3 billion, which by 2019 standards was a significant amount for the crypto industry. Fraudsters have 1% of all bitcoins at their disposal and are ways to crash the market in a very serious way.

I consider all Ponzi schemes as a big ball of scam, every one of them so if you like me that wants complete security then you would avoid them totally turning deaf to all their BS preaching.

Also I am skeptical about most new projects not that they are all scams but many go to buy shillers, run death trap giveaways, over their budget promises, so always research on them before joining in.

Not one of the biggest scams but EthereumDark was a fairly successful scam:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2106405.0

I was one of the lucky ones that made $10K AUD from a $300 investment.

Most investors lost money though

And the even bigger funnier thing is a lot of people saw them as just that but still put money into it.  Greed is a funny thing it will make people do crazy things.  The old if it sounds too good to be true than it is just doesn't matter in crypto.  And even crazier is we probably haven't even seen the biggest scam yet.  Plenty more to come but people won't learn from history.

I remember this Onecoin, I got into a heated argument with one of the recruiters of this scam company.  He flared up when I stated that Onecoin is a Ponzi scheme company.  He wanted me to prove it and I stated the red flags about the company. The person got more agitated when I stated the red flags one by one.  His only defense is that the company is paying and he earned a huge amount of money from it already.  I just told him, to enjoy the money while it last, he will be enjoying his stay in jail if he doesn't stop recruiting people to his Ponzi company.  Then after some months, Onecoin was labeled a Ponzi scam company, the person is lucky that not one of the people he invited filed a complaint against him. 



The Ponzi scheme is destined to be a scam, so yeah we can say that the Ponzi scheme is a scammy scheme to rob people of their money.  I think a project that rely solely on NFT and token staking is one big Ponzi scheme.  Because there are no funds to support the market 1:1.

I think we can add another coin. Savedroid aka Scamdroid: And its gone! The website is offline for several hours that day in 2018. On the website only a picture of South Park with the text "And it's gone". So it could be worse? This was an PR-Gag and for me one of the most stupidest things in crypto scams. Then they send holiday greetings via Twitter... how cheeky. Over $40,000,000 was raised in the ICO and the worst thing about it is that they are still active today. Not so much money has been scammed as the others, but how they have done it, so worse. German Thread:[VORSICHT möglicher SCAM] Frankfurter Fintech Startup Savedroid startet ICO (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2611692)

From those scams that you have listed i only heard of Bitconnect and onecoin before. There even was a pretty well made documentary about the woman behind onecoin last week in german television i have not watched it yet but i definitely want to. What i heard though was that onecoin really was a scam from the first minute. The token never existed, the blockchain never existed. Onecoin was just created in order to rip people off.
The bitconnect thing happened when i already were a little bit interested in the crypto space myself and i still remember watching that weird Bitconnect meeting with the moderator guy who quickly became a meme. I still don't understand though how people could really think that bitconnect was a legit project. Paying such high interest is just not sustainable. Even newcomers should know that.

There are hundreds or thousand more but when there are scam coins exposed or crash it never creates a huge impact on the market, what makes the biggest impact in the market is when exchanges scam their users, because the scam many coins and amounts to hundred millions of dollars or even billions, the latest is FTX, this one will have a lasting impact and still create havoc in the market, it will take many years before many traders forget this biggest fiasco.

FTX and Terra might become the biggest fraud all time even SBF already labeled as the greatest villain in the crypto. That proves that if those projects were nothing compared with billions of money that already wiped from the market caused by it's being stolen by scammers like SBF. Those scam projects were happening during 2017. I guess the most difficult thing to know that if that was a scam project or not. I remember when money raised by scammer of centra being used to buy roll royces.
There have been many scam icos in the market even though it's still continue till now but scam projects were doing soft rug pull to the its investors by slowly dumping their tokens to the market.

The scam projects are so hard to be identified for sure.

Bitconnect perhaps is one that really pushed a lot of people off the cryptospace for good. Everytime the word 'scam' comes out, this is the first thing that comes to mind. It also proved how gullible people can be when it comes to money. Most of their common sense comes off pretty loose and their initial reaction is to be bewildered by the possible profits they may have.

Terra comes into the list too, although of course we still don't know the severity of the damages it caused because no full report has been released for that YET.

I wouldn't be so fast to judge on these. Just because something is not profitable doesn't mean it's a scam. Most of the projects and actually the whole trading game is a zero sum game so therefore the whole industry should be a scam if we are going by your 1:1 rule.

Staking as a term has been misunderstood and most of the "staking" happening has nothing to do with securing the blockchain. It's mostly just for people getting more money. Which is just dumb.

There are a lot of scams that happened in the past which are considered the biggest scam in history in crypto.

These aren't directly to the scam projects but in general, they would be considered the biggest scam too.

• Bitcoin doublers
• Social media celebrity hacked and scammed many followers

Easy money and greedy people was usually a victim of those scams.

Out of all the scam projects you mentioned, I was most impressed with bitconnect, it was a very successful ponzi project in 2017 and its price has increased to over $400 per token. But in the end, what comes must come because it is just a Ponzi scheme.
It was the demise of Bitconnect that was the leading cause of the 2018 bear season, a catastrophic bear season no different from this year.



The bitcoin price in 2014 was not as high as it is now, so it cannot be said that Mt.gox was the biggest scam in crypto history. For comparison, I still rate the crash of FTX as the biggest market crash ever, wiping out $120 billion in market capitalization by the time it collapsed.

I remember that Bitconnect incident. But below these huge scam projects are small projects which turned out to be a scam, not to mention their quantity ofcourse. With these incidents, it is quite unfortunate that many people are still falling for the same scheme. Problem only is that, projects won't announce if they are legitimate or not right? Silly! Investors may only do some background research which could be faked. Likewise with fake community for that certain projects. But that's just how this industry works I think. Anonymity is everything. The least an investor could do is to 'bet' into a project and hope that it won't turn out to be his or her lost.

When no one could estimate the actual amount involved in every scam of altcoin space, I guess we could never get any clear list on these. I mean since the beginning of ICO kind of crowd funding in altcoin industry, we have been watching lots of projects scamming investors for various reasons. I agree there were projects which got failed for unexpected reasons but there were 90% of projects which were here only to scam and in that case we cannot estimate the actual money involved.

Here the point is not about being huge or small; we need to stay safer in crypto investments and due to this reason I have decided not to risk money in any new projects which on the other side led to miss good opportunities, still I am happy with my bitcoin investments.

We should even be more concerned about cryptocurrency project with potential to be scams. How about all the potential scam projects that are currently looking and acting legitimate with very good disguise. I think it will be nice as well for us to have a list of projects that people here have individually identified as potential scams in cryptocurrency, so people who do not know have an idea of how to identify potential scam projects can stay clear. Have you identified any?

If we are trying to be as honest a possible the number of scams we have seen over the years in this market is so large that we will not need a thread or two but a whole site dedicated to them, most people are aware of the those which were huge but there are many other scams that only took a few million dollars which did not even made the news, and yet the developers behind those coins earned a huge sum of money by deceiving the people that trusted on them.

I can still imagine when I remember BITCONNECT which is always adored by its members and hopes to get rich instantly through BITCONNECT. but in fact, this ponzi scheme project deceived many people, the founder disappeared without a trace to this day. and Carlos Matos as The Man , The Legend bitconneeeeeeeeeect! is a mascot that will never be forgotten LOL
https://i.imgur.com/unuAHp0.gif

Scams can be avoided most especially for the newbies if they won't engage on the real thing but first they need to take time to learn. They won't lose this way but it will only increase their potential of earning huge. I guess many of them are just too impatient, that is why these advices are hardly being followed. It's not true when you say that nothing is happening in regulation.

How will you explain those platforms that now requires a KYC? Regulations are actually becoming heavier now in this space to possibly prevent scams, frauds or cyber crimes in general. Cryptos are high risk not because of the scams but because of their highly volatile state/nature.

I remember an investment scheme which they  used bitcoin mining and bot trading as their front. They accepted huge amount of money on subscribing to their plan. They also used did fake advertisement using various known personalities worldwide and even personalities on a local setup, these advertisements are mainly fake testimonials.

Is it possible to classify as a crypto scam those projects that were originally created for the purpose of enriching their creators? Even if they do not cheat anyone and do not run away with the money raised through investors and other open machinations, but still, they have a plan to put their product on exchanges and then sell their coins to hamsters at high prices. There are a lot of such projects, and if you classify such projects as scam, then it turns out that almost all altcoin market is one big scam that you have to stay away from.

In the forum, don't create FUD about Ethereum without sources and information. There are times when you see a team struggle with a project, tried to be as transparent as possible, available every time to inform the community around their project, yet some people continue to call it a scam. It has appeared that Ethereum has become too centralized and many people want to know more about the currency with 18% value in the space.

Talking about the crypto scam projects, I read in one of the threads that DECOIN is among those that rekt their users. According to this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5415171.0)  that scam project had stopped responding to emails, does not allow their users to withdraw and the site is under error 503 which entails that the site/server is possibly taken down.

I pay attention to crypto exchange hacks and bankruptcy cases (https://oneart.digital/en/blog/top-exchange-hacks-bankruptcy-cases). The biggest are FTX (probably the main drama of this year), Crypto.com, BitMart, and others.

I think I should be thankful that I have not bumped into these coins while looking for something to invest with in the altcoin section.
It sucks to see they just won't stop even until now, and the worst thing is there are still investors being sucked at this big pile of shitty business.
All we could do now is protect ourselves.
This forum really helps a lot to avoid such things and also to dissect one project once it's shared here.

    These are the times when ico projects are really at their peak, and when the 4th quarter of 2017 comes, the emergence of scammers has also become rampant. Then when 2018 entered, almost the majority of the projects that come out of this industry are just running away from their investors and even the participants who participated in the bounties are no longer paid.

So this Onecoin, it's cruel, to be honest, it's the only one known to have victimized millions of people around the world to steal their investors' money. And I just found out that until now no one knows where its Founder is, no one knows if he's alive and changed to another person or dead.

This is when scammers knows that crypto is profitable and this is the time where crowdfunding project or as we know ICO projects started to have a trend. I remembered that most of the ICO projects that time are succeeding if we based it on hitting their hard cap and other only hit soft cap. Those projects also gain attractive token values even if their native tokens just entered the exchanges. I'm pretty sure that there are some ICO project owners who have taken the chance of getting into DeFi projects trend where most of the project are being funded just like the ICO trend. And yeah most of those project collapse and now gone. The question is, What kind of trend will the next scammer use to accumulate the money from their victims?

While the forum can indeed help us to avoid scams, as experimented members of the forum can warn newbies about the dangers to invest in shitcoins, at the same time this effect is limited as now those newbies prefer to use social media websites to communicate with each other and exchange information about the coins in which they are interested, and scammers take advantage of this knowing they can incite those newbies to invest in their coins and then steal all their money.