I've used virwox several times when I was just getting into bitcoin. There were absolutely no problems.

Since they deal with high risk payment methods, it really shouldn't be a surprise that they are looking for suspicious accounts, so that they don't lose money as a business when someone claims that their credit card was hacked and files a chargeback against Virwox. This is probably what has happened here, they believe that your paypal/credit card that you paid with may be fraudulent or has a high risk of chargebacks, and they have decided to refund your payment instead of going ahead with the withdrawal.

You said that you used different IPs and create new accounts each time - why? Is there a particular reason of doing so? Do you use a different paypal/credit card to pay each time or do you use them same one? If you use the same one, they could have potentially mistakenly flagged it.

While I would agree that virwox has terrible rates, I think that the majority of the time if your payment accounts are legit, they will process your withdrawal without hiccups. Obviously, there are exceptions. Crap happens once in a while, and it's understandable. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't use them if you have paypal/skrill/CC funds and want a fast exchange without verification.
Just because it's aged doesn't mean it can't be fraudulent, neither does it mean you can't charge back. That's where virwox is coming from, imo. There are tons of people selling aged paypal accounts with hacked docs. I'm not saying that you are doing this, but it's just giving you Virwox's perspective when it comes to risk mitigation.

This has to get the worst photoshopped team award of 2018 

Anyways, this is ridiculous. I tried to search them up on google, and there was pretty much no info about the project anywhere apart from one very poorly made youtube review video. It wasn't a surprise that their business model and statements were pretty much plagiarized, because honestly when I took a glance over their site, nothing seemed to make sense. It was just so generic and so vague, and that's one of the signs that an ICO is made purely to lure money in without a working model.

The team is obviously fake, and none of the links to the CEO, COO etc.'s social media worked. Their "about us in the media" had links to completely irrelevant articles as well.

I think that this is probably an ICO which hasn't officially launched yet, but it's already exposed as a scam. Where did you find their site being promoted, may I ask?

Why choose to trust a hosted bitcoin wallet like Coinbase, when you are able to have complete control over your funds trustlessly with wallets with which you hold your private keys exclusively with? You don't even need to sync the entire blockchain with most of them.

My suggestion would definitely be Electrum, as it is one of the most widely used wallets, you hold your own private keys, it's open source, it's been around for a long time, and it's very user friendly on the UI side.

There would be no point using a hosted wallet in any scenario unless you're exchanging BTC for fiat, in my opinion, because you don't hold your bitcoins anymore when you deposit funds into a hosted wallet. Rather, you hold an IOU that the wallet service writes you. Then, there would be absolutely no point using bitcoin anymore.

I don't think that's the case.

Even though we may have seen a small bullish run right now that took bitcoin from $6k to $7k+, I don't think that it's enough for us to call this the start of a new bull market. There is still mainly bearish sentiments across the market, and virtually no bullish momentum.

Even if $6k holds as support, it's unlikely to go fully bullish all of a sudden. There will still be mostly sideways movement for the rest of the year without much upward growth, in my opinion. Furthermore, the $10k resistance was a lot stronger than a lot of people expected and there is no indication that it's any weaker at this stage. Taking into account how long the 2014 bear market lasted, I think that it's definitely too early to call it a bull market right now. However, buying BTC below $8-9k with DCA should be a good strategy nonetheless.

I do think that gold is most likely undervalued right now.

There has been basically a half a decade gold bear market that has gone on, and i think that the end for this precious metals bear market is going to happen sooner or later. However, I don't really see gold reaching $2400 any time soon.

If you want a decentralized, independent store of value and hedge against inflation, you've already got bitcoin which is much more convenient and promising in my opinion. Gold is still going to be trusted by many due to its history. I don't think that it's really that good of an investment though, and it's probably better described as a safe haven.

It honestly depends on what the regulation is all about.

If it restricts access to bitcoin altogether, then no, it's definitely bad for cryptocurrencies. Measures such as draconian KYC laws mean that average Joes have to go through an extensive procedure and provide source of funds before they can actually buy bitcoin with their credit cards or whatnot, a huge hassle, and definitely discourages use of cryptos in general.

On the other hand, there can be positive regulations as well. For example, initiatives that regulate exchanges and ensure that they're running fractional reserves can be a positive regulation. It's all about the regulation - you can't put all regulations under the same umbrella and say whether it's good or bad.

So you're saying that fake images taken off the internet isn't sufficient proof that this site is a scam?

Last time I checked - if you use fake images and fabricate your entire team and advisory team, then there is no chance that you're actually legitimate, and should automatically mean that your project is a scam. Identity theft is not okay, especially if you're using it to lure investors into depositing money.

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Great job, OP. You're really make these scammers work. I see that they've even removed the pictures from the site - further proving their guilt (@Janisnader, everything was archived, dw). I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the team was completely false as well, but by this point it doesn't even need to be proven.

Looking at the site, it's very poorly made and the bets are so obviously faked. Even well established crypto casinos don't generate this type of volume on a regular basis and yet people are betting $1k-2k regularly there.

The chat seems to be filled with shills as well.

It's definitely brutal loss for you since I see on chat that your balance before your account got frozen was over 3 BTC. Any site that asks you to deposit more to withdraw your balance should be automatically labelled as a scam - legitimate sites never do that. Always do research as Randall said. Even asking on the forum before you bet there could have saved you thousands.

Think of bitcoin like sort of a digital, better version of gold.

Does gold have any "collateral" per se behind it that gives it intrinsic value? No. However, it's still considered to be a great store of value and hedge against fiat inflation. This is because the supply of gold is decentralized, it can't be manipulated by entities or organisations, and there is a demand for gold as a store of value.

That's how bitcoin derives its value from, in my opinion, and it's the same as gold. Bitcoin isn't representative money - it doesn't have a backing per se, but its supply is limited and hard coded, unlike fiat, making it a good store of value in the long run.

I don't think that it's fair for electricity companies to be able to charge anyone more for the same product, regardless of what the business or person is using the electricity for. Bitcoin miners included, they're not getting any better quality electricity than anyone else.

But hey, what can you do. It's the government's decision, and if they're not generating enough electricity to deliver to every day citizens without having to raise prices, then they will eventually place a tax on electricity for mining.

As squatter said, miners, especially big mining businesses, can definitely just relocate to countries where mining is less expensive - a hassle, but still can be done.

Once again, great finds on the pics. Really assisting the newbies with spotting scams, good job.

If the team is fake then the entire project is fake. You shouldn't have any confidence in a project that is willingly and intentionally performing identity theft, it's not trustworthy behavior and should straight away label them as scammers.


More likely they bought those followers, or the account along with the followers.

Always be cautious when you see extremely large amount of followers on social media or extremely large amounts of members in a telegram group, and the project itself isn't that well known. Most likely, they are paying for these followers because they can't get them organically. 108k members in their telegram group is absurd for a completely fabricated project.

I think that the main reason why this seems much more plausible than the other predictions is that there is no time frame involved, no time limits.

It's only going to be a matter of time before bitcoin hits $50k, in my opinion, due to the limited supply, and growing adoption. Plus, fiat currency inflation will also mean that bitcoins as a store of value will naturally appreciate over time against fiat currencies.

It's not some kind of wild prediction at all. In fact, I'd say that $50k is perfectly reasonable within a decade or so given the fact that user and merchant adoption has picked up so much over the past few years, and is only going to climb more in the future, and that bitcoin is really becoming mainstream and recognized by institutional investors. But I definitely wouldn't pin down a specific time frame, that's absurd.

There is absolutely nothing legitimate going on with his sales thread. It's self moderated, it's locked to prevent comments, and there is obvious astroturfing going on with all of his shills vouching for him (pretty obvious given the repetitiveness of it all).

He's a known scammer that has ripped off countless others. Most of the people don't have a bitcointalk account, and contact him directly on Telegram for a purchase.

The reason why he locks and self moderates his thread is to limit the accusations from stopping his sales. Common scammer tactics.

Always remember to deal with a escrow, and never buy from anyone off-site if they a) have a negative reputation on the forum b) have an autobuy link/uses telegram/whatsapp instead of forum communication and c) if their thread is self moderated and locked. YoutubeTV checks all of these boxes. You're right, OP. Don't be stupid. These scammers feed off stupidity.

Great finds.

There is no doubt at all that this is a scam, since legitimate projects simply would not fabricate their entire team. This one is actually pretty easy to spot, because there was no LinkedIn profile anywhere on the site for these people, and if you do just the tiniest bit of your due diligence and search them up, you'll never find any info about anyone except that they work at Canocoin. Typical scam site behaviour right there.

Also notice that their concept has literally been manufactured hundreds of times, repeatedly. Nothing original, at all.

I wonder if they are going to come out now with some sort of outrageous excuse now, or just shut down their site altogether after they get exposed (we've seen plenty of this happening before).

Based off the track record of WEX alone, dating back to its BTC-e days, I definitely wouldn't deposit a large sum of money into WEX right now, let alone hold it on their site for long periods of time. Their support is unresponsive, and there are obviously legality issues. Funds are not safe on any exchange if you hold it for long, especially WEX, as things are bound to happen.

Now they've got this maintenance coming up that was previously unscheduled and will last for a week - for absolutely no known reason.

This is not trustworthy behavior by any means. The rates on their site is already completely screwed up and dysfunctional due to all of the issues that they're having. Get out of this exchange asap, it's dysfunctional, it's not going to get any better, it's got legal issues, it could have liquidity issue. Don't keep money on there.

I'm guessing that this was the transaction that you paid the "admin" with: https://www.blockchain.com/en/btc/tx/7b93279b5a78c9fe5b4db64c5da9baa26d049c0a1ade39d047eabbb97da6ed9e? Why did you wait 2 months before coming out and creating a scam accusation? You should have done this way earlier.

A possibility as suggested by Joel_Jantsen is that the person you contacted is an impersonator of the actual channel. It would be extremely illogical for even a scammer to not post your content on a telegram channel, since that is completely free on their end anyways.

If you can be sure that the person you contacted was the admin, then where did you find out about this person? Does this person have a bitcointalk account? If not, then there is really nothing you can do. He's taken your money, and there is pretty much no info of him anywhere. Don't ever deal with random people without escrow.

The whole telegram group seems to have an artificial amount of followers. It's probably got very little organic members.

Not necessarily.

Regulation will help cryptocurrency businesses gain legitimacy, for sure. However, I don't think that forcing KYC onto users will help a lot regarding its legitimacy. It's attacking the users that are using the service, not trying to keep the integrity of the business or the coin itself in check.

It's going to restrict access to a lot of things. Crypto is supposed to be an anonymous currency, and when you have KYC/AML, especially over the top measures that we're seeing already (like asking where funds are sourced), it makes it extremely difficult to use the service and drive people away from it altogether.

I think that we're going to go down the path of forced KYC nonetheless on all regulated centralized bitcoin services, which may see decentralized versions pop up in response.

It's not every country that is doing this. Some countries are being procative on the issue and actually trying to regulate some of the services surrounding it and encouraging use of decentralized currencies on the blockchain. Of course, these are definitely rare.

I think that the main reason is that crypto takes direct control out of central banks/governments. And some countries don't want that to happen, obviously.

Other countries have strict capital controls, whether for good or bad, that basically restrict foreign currency exchanges and capital outflow from the country, bitcoin included. These countries obviously have vested interest to keep bitcoin out. The bans are definitely not very practical as bitcoin is decentralized anyways, though.

This is some pretty interesting stats, but even with the lowish adoption rates for bitcoin as a currency, it's still quite positive to see that people are at least aware of bitcoin more and more now, and some are holding it as an investment.

I'd expect that right now, when we're in the early adopter phase, we see bitcoin more as an investment or speculative tool rather than anything else as demonstrated by the statistics. However, in the future, as adoption rises, bitcoin's use as a currency will increase as well no doubt. The main issue here is the lack of merchant adoption at the moment, and this will improve as time goes on.

Nice to see that a central bank has showed interest in bitcoin (even though they might not actually be supporting it), and looks like Canada probably has one of the highest adoption rates right now across the world.

WEX's prices are artificially inflated, and I don't think that there is any good looking there considering that they are quite a shady exchange with many problems including withdrawals that are present right now. No point speculating with their price as a reference point.


This probably isn't going to happen, you can hope all you want, but the probabilites are pretty low.

The prices are probably going to either continue dipping or continue to move sideways with no momentum upwards at this stage. There just isn't any momentum as I said, nor any bullish sentiment within the market. Plus, bear markets have historically lasted much longer than just a few months.