Beware of Crypto Scams: If It’s Too Good to Be True, Don’t Fall for It
A few months ago, I was approached by someone through text asking me if I wanted to make some extra cash while working on my 9 to 5. My current economic situation is not bad, but I don’t say no when people tell me of new ways of making money. I said yes and she said that I was going to be contacted by someone through WhatsApp to provide more details about the gig.
A few hours later a new person contacted me through WhatsApp, mentioning that she got my contact information from the other person that contacted me through text. We introduced ourselves and we started to talk about the job. She mentioned that it was very simple, just clicking a few buttons, and I could do this in just a few minutes while I worked on my regular job. I asked her how I was going to get paid, and she replied, “bank deposit”.
After she explained how the job worked, she asked me if I had time to get the training on how to use the platform, and I replied that I was busy that day but I could do it tomorrow, and she said that she was going to contact me in the morning. I really could have done the training that same day, but I wanted to give it some thought to see if I wanted to proceed or not.
During dinner with my family, they were talking about what they wanted to do during the weekend, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about the easy job that this person explained to me during the day. I was thinking that it would be an easy way to make some extra cash to pay for new shoes that my little one needed or for dinner dates that I haven’t had in a while with my wife because we didn’t have time, or we were short on money. That same night I decided to do the training and see where this could go. I didn’t know that I was going to lose a lot of money in the next few days.
She contacted me the next day, early in the morning. She started to explain how the platform worked. The platform was very basic, with a lot of bugs and things that for me (I’m a Software Engineer) didn’t make sense how they could launch a platform with so many issues. For example, when you put the cursor of your mouse on top of a button, the cursor doesn’t realize that it is a button but more like a text even though I could click on it and be redirected to the next page. Also, the main login screen didn’t have a very good well-designed login page and the sign-up page was very basic. On that same page, she asked me to put a referral code that she gave me before starting the training.
After creating my account, we started to go through the platform. She explained to me what each button did and what I had to do to maximize the daily earnings. The job seemed to be very easy, you had to submit reviews of mobile apps that were already pre-created for you to use. To submit reviews, you would need to have a balance on the account of $50 because each review you submit would cost you money. After you submit the review, they will give you the cost of the review plus the commission.
From each submission, you would earn a very low percentage that in the end would add up to a decent amount. Before I started submitting reviews on my account, she created a training account using a user that she created beforehand, and that she shared the password with me. In the training account, I did 40 submissions that in the end added up to $300 in commissions, and the reason for that is because the account was in a different tier, and it had a pre-balance of $2,000 before I started. Depending on the balance of the account, the platform would give you more expensive reviews so you would get a higher commission. All that was fine while she was explaining it, but the scam would happen with the combo reviews and that is where they would get all your money.
“All that was fine while she was explaining it, but the scam would happen with the combo reviews and that is where they would get all your money.”
The combo reviews are reviews that cost more money than what you had in the balance of your account, making the balance of your account negative. When the balance of your account was negative, you were not able to continue until you put more money into the platform. When that happened, she asked me to contact customer support to ask for a “wallet address” that she would use to put more money for me to continue. I followed the instructions and contacted customer support, they welcomed me to the platform and provided me with the “wallet address” in the ERC20 network. I gave the information to her to deposit more money into the account and she proceeded to do that and after a while, she came back with a screenshot of the transfer. She told me to forward that to customer support for them to verify and put the money in the account. After 10 minutes they came back with the confirmation that the money was in my account and that I would proceed with the rest of the reviews.
10 minutes later I was done with the reviews on the training account. She asked me to log out from the training log into my account and check the balance. When checking I found out that I had made in less than 45 minutes $60. She congratulated me for the work and after that, she proceeded to tell me how to withdraw the money from the platform. When I asked her how to do it, she told me to get a crypto wallet in a specific platform for me to withdraw the money. I mentioned to her that that was not what she told me in the beginning and she explained that using a cryptocurrency wallet was going to be faster and easier to withdraw the money, and that made sense to me, so I then proceeded to open the wallet in the specific platform that she told me to, and when I did this I had to provide a lot of screenshots of each step that she told me to do. This should have been another red flag for me, but I was happy with the money, so I did everything that she asked me to do.
After I submitted the withdrawal to the platform, I made sure to get the money before I continued doing the reviews the following days. Another important thing to mention is that for you to withdraw the money, you had to complete your 40 of the day. I continued to do these next following days, and on those days, I had to put more money in the account because I would get at least 1 combo review each day.
I noticed the money was growing, with a better return than any staking and buying low / selling high strategy that I’ve seen before, so I decided to continue. Every day I would withdraw the money from the platform to make sure that I had the money on my side, and I was able to do it because I was following every single rule that she explained to me. At the beginning of each day, I would put the entire money (previous balance = commissions + balance used to submit normal and combo reviews) back into the platform. For this, I had to do the same thing that I did in the training account, ask for an “address wallet”, send the money, provide the screenshot, and wait for them to validate.
It was the fourth day of doing the entire process and I had more than $2,000 in the account when I started the day. I started to submit the reviews and I was submitting the 9th review when I got a combo review for the 10th. Checking the balance, I saw it was -$3,000. I got very nervous, because even if I knew that I had the money, it was quite a lot, and I knew that I had to finish the reviews to withdraw all the money from the platform. I followed the process and I put the money in the account, and after doing that I had a balance of $5,000 in the account. I continued submitting the reviews and now the commissions were $100 each. I was very happy to see more money coming my way, but I was also worried about getting another combo review because I was not going to be able to match the negative balance on the account. Sooner rather than later, on review 27th, I got another combo review and now the balance was -$7,000. I was now angry and frustrated. I knew that I had the money to keep going but I didn’t want to keep depositing money because all my savings were going into this without knowing if I would be able to get it back. I decided to contact my “friend” who introduced me to the platform. She replied after a while, and she mentioned that she would assure me that I was going to get my money back. I took some time to decide and finally, I put the money in the platform. At that point, I was $12,000 in, and I still had 13 reviews to submit.
It was review 38th when I got another combo review. Now the balance was -$15,000. I didn’t have any money left, so I contacted customer support. They said that the rules were very clear, and I would need to put money to clear the balance so I could continue to finish the reviews. I proceeded to contact again my “friend”, who told me the same thing, “clear the balance, you are so close”. I didn’t have any money left, I was all in.
I was dying inside, but I had to tell my wife that the money was gone. She freaked out and she asked me to tell her everything, from the top like they say in the movies. After telling her the entire story, she told me not to put more money into the platform and block and report the phone numbers in WhatsApp. Days passed and being a Software Developer and knowing how to use the Google developer console, I decided to see if I could get more information by reading the code of the website. I was able to get an API endpoint that they used to populate the information and images on the website. I then followed the URL paths of the images, and I was able to see that the images were stored in an Alibaba server. I tried contacting them to provide them with the information so they could shut down and maybe prosecute the owners of the account, but they decided to try to sell me their products instead of hearing my story and helping me.
I went into Reddit a few days after I became a victim of this scam, and I found the sub CryptoScams and the first post that I saw talked about the Pig Butchering Scam. Reading the thread I identified myself completely with the OP (original poster) and I saw that this was more common than I knew. They also mentioned that this type of scam would be performed frequently in Asia (Chinese people to be more specific) and that people would lose between $2,000 to $50,000 every single day. To be honest, this made me feel a little bit better but at the same time, I was very angry and frustrated to know that a lot of people were losing their savings to these people.
Key Takeaways to Avoid Crypto Scams:
- Promises of Crypto Payments: If they promise to pay you in crypto, it’s likely a scam.
- Request for Screenshots: If they ask for screenshots of each step, it’s suspicious.
- Upfront Payments: If they ask for money before you start the job, it’s a scam.
- Sketchy Websites: If the website looks unprofessional, avoid it.
- Don’t let them take your money. Stay informed and protect your investments!
Don’t let them take your money and I hope this doesn’t happen to you!
About the author : admin
