Bitcoin Forum

Hi. I'm new to this bitcoin investment and have, probably made a mistake already. After watching an episode of Dragons Den, I invested £250 in bitcoin with a coy called vip-crypto. It all went well until I asked them to stop bugging me for further investment. The small investment grew to around £6000. Becoming a little suspicious, I asked for a small withdrawal in order that if they wanted me to trust them, then I needed a little proof. They finally agreed to a withdrawal of £250 (the initial deposit) leaving around £5750 in the account. Deciding to use this money for a family holiday, I asked them to release it to my bank. This is when the fun started as they then asked for around £2000, which they described as capital gains tax, to be paid upfront in order to release the funds. After checking with HMRC, I informed them that, due to certain allowances, it cannot be capital gains and it must be some other tax. This is when they informed me that it was, indeed, a tax and that it had to be paid upfront to prevent any money laundering. So, the crux of the matter is that I have £5750 sat in a fund that I cannot have until I pay the so called tax upfront. Definitely smells of a scam to me.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Any advice would be very welcome.
Cheers. Tony Reay

Tell them to take it out of the payment due to you.

It doesn’t sound good at all ...

I’ve seen cases similar to yours on a couple of sites (see for example https://scamoption.com/question/vip-crypto-broker-for-trading-with-bitcoinproapp or https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.vip-crypto.com ), but in all the cases the people seem to not take further risks and decide not to go forward with the alleged tax requirement. On the second site, the case goes to say that they paid the tax fee but even so they stated that the compliance was incorrect and that was it.

I would suggest to invest time looking through the referenced cases and searching for as many cases as you can, to see if you can see any positive results after paying the so called tax fee. After a few minutes searching, I found none, so I would be extremely wary of going any further in terms of providing additional funds.

Just forget about the £5750 profits, you already got back your initial investment of £250 right? Consider yourself lucky as scammers will not likely give you any of your money back. Don't pay those f***ing scammers and just move on and let this be a good lesson to learn.