This is a public service announcement to warn the community about Telegram chats posing as "friends" who made a profit at investment companies. As of July 2022, it also serves as a notice to warn people about casino owners soliciting for your co-operation on Telegram.
Update July 2022: If you are reading this, you have probably saw the new title of this thread containing "Beware of 1xBit casino". This is not a joke!
1xBit is a fraudulent gambling website that will steal all of your deposit money, and then use it to pay for ads on other websites and apps so that they can scam more users. Every second page in this board now has a story about how someone played at 1xBit and had their withdrawal stolen. And we are not talking small money either - these are people who have lost $5000, $20,000, and in some cases even $50,000 dollars.
USE 1XBIT AT YOUR OWN RISK!!
This is just my little part to help the community since I have a stickied thread.
No doubt you're reading this because you're either curious, or some stranger from Telegram contacted you about building a casino / token / ICO / whatever. Or maybe they are even trying to be "nice" to you and showing you a way to make money, if only you send your money to this site bla bla...
All of these contacts are scam attempts!They are
not your friends and have not made a profit at any investment company. In fact they haven't even invested anything at investment companies.
Block them at first sight and report them to Telegram if you can (Unfortunately, there is no "Report" button for contacts! A bunch of people need to lobby Telegram to make this feature).
Even if you never post your Telegram handle in public like me, you are still at risk of this scam attempt because they comb groups for potential victims.
Sometimes they will talk to you using other languages such as Arabic as well.
They will attempt to show you "withdrawals" from these companies in an effort to fool you into thinking they are legit (they are fake withdrawals).
They will contact you first, unsolicitedly, by looking up your name in a group chat.
Then they will ask you some off-the-wall question about whatever group: "Hey, I see you are in <X> group - How do you like <X>?" They will attempt to make you believe they are some normal person from some random country with <Y> job. They might even try to call you from Telegram app in an effort to appear legit and a "friend". Again,
they are not your friends! Slowly they will change the topic to trading / investment / passive trading and then they will tell you about some "investment" website that they are using.
They will pretend to care about your "prosperity" with is the most disgusting part about this scam. They might say "all my friends are doing this too" (LOL).
If you try to raise any suspicions to them they will attempt to look like an honest person by saying "Oh, I never scam"; "Oh I promise they won't ask for deposit"; "Oh rest assured you will be making <X> amount of money per day!"
These are all lies.
Slowly they will attempt to gain your trust by making you sign up to the (scam) investment company, then tell you to make a small deposit.
At first it will look like it is actually making money. You might even withdraw successfully the first time (IF IT IS A SMALL AMOUNT).
The second time you make a deposit and try to withdraw (or if you just sent a large amount of money the first time)
they will steal your money using dumb excuses like "Maintainence fee", "cooling lubricant" and other lame scam tactics, in messages sometimes littered with emojis.They might even tell you to deposit more to get your first deposit out and the fake "friend" will say "yes this is what happened to my friend and he did it and it was resolved" -
another lie.There's a saying: the worst type of person is "fake friend". Here we are seeing examples of some in plain sight. Especially how they pretend to to care about your profit (as I already mentioned above).
I am sharing this warning to you all because I have personally lost $2000 (don't worry, it is manageable) from these kind of scammer "friends" a couple weeks ago, but after more people started contacting me about other "investments", I decided to go public about this.
Here is an example of a lame scammer "friend" attempting to dupe me into sending money to his scam company the other day. Scam investment site has been censored for obvious reasons.
As you can see, this potential scammer attempts to feel "sorry" for me but is actually preparing to scam me. He has no clue that other investment people had tried to scam me before, as evidenced from his reactions.
Whatever you do, do not fall for these people. They are all over Telegram. Again, they are not your friends. They are your enemies who want to rob you of your crypto.Stay safe, crypto journeymen. And you should definitely block these scam websites in your ad-blocker, or in your hosts file or anti-virus, so that you can clearly identify them,
Original version of this post is titled: "[EDU] Easy 3 step process to report YouTube videos and scam websites to Google!". It's content can be found below:
Found a Youtube video advertising a crypto scam or a fake giveaway?
Or maybe you found a scam website?
Here's how to report it to Google so they can take it down.
I encourage people to post their future warnings about fake site or fake youtube video warnings on this topic, instead of on a new one.
Forum users should report these videos to Google using this method so that other internet users do not see and fall for these traps!Newbies: here is some reading I made that will educate you about how to know if a site is legit or scam:
Top 5 Bitcoin Scams And How To Avoid Their Trap (external link)
To report YouTube videos:Unfortunately, Youtube videos promoting scams are prevalent and nobody seems to be doing anything about them (except for making warning threads on this and other boards), so I made this guide in hopes that it gets stickied and picked up by guests browsing the forum as a precaution, as well as by journalists of other sites as well.
1. Click the report button under the video's menu, under the three-dots button, and select "Report"2. For reason, select "Spam Or Misleading", then "Scam or Fraud"Make sure you also select the checkbox "This applies to links in the video description"!
3. For additional information, use the exact text below![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FkaZ5kKJ.png&t=665&c=STuPAhWmtSv_eA)
(ignore the red circle, it is from a chrome extension. The maximum number of characters is 300).
Instructs users to deposit bitcoins to use a fake service with promise to receive more bitcoins.
There is additional text you must type if you notice all the comments are by generic names such as "Tom Smith" and have no profile picture and have extremely positive reviews (which are fake or bought comments in case you didn't know).
Additionally, all the video comments are bought/fake and do not reflect the credibility of this video.
When all that is done you will get this success message:
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F7MC2eSZ.png&t=665&c=NPU3luK_kuQz0Q)
For maximum effectiveness, many people should report the video with this format.
To report a website:These are steps you should take if you find any scam websites on Google Search. You can use common keywords such as "bitcoin doubler" and "bitcoin giveaway" to find scam websites.
1. Head over to Google Safe Browsing and bookmark this URL for easy reference.
2. Fill in the scam URL, solve the captcha, and use the text below in the additional details.Instructs users to deposit bitcoins to use a fake service with promise to receive more bitcoins.
3. Submit the report, it should give you this success page.![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FehAZxaX.png&t=665&c=ALSiUepcC1jBjg)