5 things you need to know about avoiding cryptocurrency scams | EP 10

Hello. The meteoric rise of cryptocurrencies means many fortunes have been made, but money's been lost too. And not just because cryptocurrencies are so volatile. I'm Jonathan Pierce from the Money Mine team and today we're tackling the five things you need to know to avoid cryptocurrency scams. The number of scams has gone up as fraudsters cash in on the hype over cryptocurrency. In just two years from 2018 to 2020, Singapore investors have lost around 29 million dollars

Thank you for having us.

John. All right. Let's start with you. What are some methods scammers are using to cheat investors?

Yeah, the common scam is is that are imposter to pretend they are either the buyers or seller of cryptocurrency. Many will pretend as a buyer because from there they can get a cryptocurrency from the genuine seller and an outsider can those people? But there's a short seller or some merchandise seller and who then transfer the signals to the genuine crypto sell and get a cryptos. It's very common and common trend that we can see the seller to.

Another would be something like what I was part of, which was talk.

Talk would

give you a percentage every day when you stick your money with them or you stick your crypto

with them as you are

sticking your crypto with them, they will give you bank a very small percentage, like 0.4 percent or something like that every

day and

you just accumulate the crypto, also known

as. And they said

that talk

is worth 0.05

U.S. dollars or

USD. So at

the end of it, we were able to withdraw our coins and we were able to

also very easily

switch it to other currencies. But unknown to us, we

actually are

unable to cash out the crypto because it didn't

exist. I found out that

it didn't exist only later on because I was able to cash out and withdraw my crypto several times over

the year.

And it was this year New Chinese New Year that we were unable to withdraw any of our crypto assets in there or any crypto that has been converted from coins.

On hindsight, would you describe it like a Ponzi scheme?

I wouldn't say is exactly a Ponzi scheme because a Ponzi scheme has to have like several layers. We were our own layers, so to speak. When they told our leaders

to recruit us,

our leaders actually

told us instead of recruiting

friends, we could put ourselves and our own

accounts. We can put

minimum

in each up to

seven levels down. We actually will get back more percentage every day than if we were to put a very big amount in just one account. So they told us how to split our money into tiny little portions and put them in altogether.

I think

49 accounts.

But it was a

little different for me because

I was

a little skeptical in the beginning, so I started off with one account. So from the first

line, I meet

enough to buy another minimum account. And then when I meet enough again, I'll buy another minimum account. I wouldn't see my entire life savings was there, but it was a huge amount.

The opportunity

cost was actually worse than the

amount itself. Yeah, definitely. OK.

Let's bring you back into the conversation. No scams are not a new thing. What is different about crypto scams?

The fundamental of the scam is still pretty much the same, and I try to do a little investor using the great, you know, they don't believe there is no business model behind the object is to either store their customer precious monies in terms of prey

earlier in school. You also spoke about the use of legitimate websites, even bank websites. Maybe. How did they get around this and how can we tell the real ones from the fake ones

they use

what we call phishing P-H

as

AMG? They don't

have the same website, obviously, but they have website addresses that are very

similar. Their logo

will look very similar, but

not quite, and it

would also have all the features and the same description and

details, but it's actually a

phishing site. So to be able to decipher

those type, you have to

be around long enough and

you need to double check reviews

on the app because usually the real sites and real applications will have a lot more reviews. Fake ones usually don't have much reviews, or if there

are reviews, then it

would be saying that. They are fake.

Yeah. Maybe like it is. I think the purpose for this kind of scam surfacing is the scammer or the hacker behind the scenes one the user to enter the TV, a real password. This is not just happening in the crypto industry. I think Banes has faced this tremendous time to show that they are over the website address, almost as similar to banks by imposters, right? So they get your password after that and try to lock in and

as well, not just their

account being

compromised. They actually

have all the

wallets set up, so people

will put in the money into the

wallet.

So a lot of them are like new users who don't know better.

So how can a social media account in terms of looking at reviews and also trying to assess which ones are the real ones?

Facebook or even any other social media, you can do a verification and you get a boutique. And the good thing is that the beauty is the ID, so only trust those bits where there is a move. That's one in which I read the page on identity.

OK, so let's be careful before we have to be careful of sites that are using phishing to get your details. They look very similar to the actual sites, but just something may be a bit off looking for reviews also help checking it out on social media what people are talking about, so that would be another thing to take note of. The next thing, I guess, would be how do you spot the scam? So you knew what you were saying when something sounds too good to be true?

Yeah, but the real challenge of the travel industry is that they are all platform. I know they require really a lot of what we call it the you do your own research. The researchers need a lot validations and tuning capital sizing right only put the money. That loss

talk didn't have any of those red flags. They had a proper governance. They had a proper board of directors, the directors

that were very well

known in the crypto

industry. They had

people who were giving talks

every week, and now they

still say that they are not a scam. It's just that someone ran away with all the money and he was not authorized to treat. I think the best

thing is to tell

newbies not to trust any

platforms, go to

trust, to

exchanges a lot of

exchanges

right now. You are able

to use your seeing pass to sign up. That is a sure sign that it's definitely not a scam site.

In addition to this MySQL, I assume you are still investing in this. What safeguarding measures are you taking now to protect your crypto investments?

I'm treating myself, and I managed to treat and get back whatever I lost in part, which was very fortunate because, as I mentioned, it was a bull

run and they said they were trying

to shut a bull run, which is impossible. So the bull run was very lucky because we've tricky. I meet back the 30k that I lost. So yeah, that was a super lucky thing.

So right now, I'm just more

careful and I wouldn't be investing in other people's platforms because I think my own trading get better returns

to you on the other side. What are some of safeguards that you guys have in place to help

for tokenized one of the fall license arrangement? Ensure we put all of regulations at a Singapore. You're saying that final face to optimal license under a mask governance? This are the measure that we want to give our users confidence.

What do you guys do in terms of surveillance? Maybe tell me about the hot and cold wallets as well.

Oh yeah, sure. Most of the attention we have to wallet structure in place, we have all small threshold in how fair is for operation purposes so that clients can withdraw their funds in real time. Then majority of the crypto we put in the core, which is a so-called custody where all the disconnect from the internet is just a safe environment for me.

I don't really have a cold wallet, but what I do is that I buy. Then I sell and then I withdraw into Singapore dollars straight away. It's not as convenient, but well, I get my money out of the exchanges very frequently.

Well, that's interesting. So in other words, you're in and out a lot faster than you were before. That's a new change.

Yes, I sell as soon as I make money in, I buy again when it drops. So is the buy low sell high.

All right, so let's recap a bit. First of all, we have to look out for suspicious websites that are using phishing. I've also heard about fake initial coin offerings. You have to check our claims on social media, look for reviews. Other warning signs could also be in terms of your own research. Right? That's what you were talking about.

I go to CoinGecko and I go to Germany. They have all the latest crypto news.

I also check out other websites about cryptocurrency

as Cointelegraph as well. I do a lot of reading and a lot of research. So any claims that I'm interested in? Well, I'm actually interested in like three of the coins at the moment. So I read up about all the 30 coins. What are the latest developments?

I try to keep abreast

of all the latest developments and there are many and they are happening almost every day

to you. What is your advice for investors? Where can they get the right information?

I really agree with full schedule and even tokenized. We also have large divisions in our Telegram and Facebook, so I'll try to help our users and community to enhance our knowledge in this space and keep them up to date.

Yeah, for cryptocurrency, knowledge is really power, so I'll have to read more, do more research, do your own due diligence as well.

So that's why I

learned from this scam that I was

involved in. So very glad

it happened early when I didn't have that much money to lose.

I think on that note, that's a good place for us to leave it. So the lessons to learn here research as much as you can. Knowledge is power. If you say use technology to call wallets to store your investments, look out for warning signs. Phishing sites check the claims of the social media to as much looking at reviews and things like that. Beware of Ponzi schemes and others, and especially be wary of offers that are too good

very much. Goodbye.

Bye bye.