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There are people who want to bypass the law and make money without paying taxes to the country's budget. Fraudsters of this type try to earn as much money as possible for themselves without paying taxes.
Shady schemes invented by fraudsters have been operating on various platforms and internet resources for a long time. One of the profitable moments has become investing and cryptocurrency.
How to Recognize Shady Investment Schemes
Fraudsters come up with various investment schemes - the essence is to deceive investors and make as much money as possible. Although this requires fraudsters to invest a lot of effort and their own money.
One such way is to announce a grand project with a lot of advertising and at a large scale. In this case, they organize:
- extensive presentations;
- trial access to blockchain games;
- approaching famous bloggers for advertising, buying it;
- organizing promotions and raffles.
To promote such a project, fraudsters invest a lot of money - this creates the appearance of a successful project with promising development upon investment. Often, after the completion of such advertising campaigns, the fraudsters recoup the funds spent on promotion and end up with the investors' money in their hands. After this, the project unexpectedly closes. In this situation, the organizers disappear, and the deceived people are left without finances.
Fraud Schemes in Investments
Another scheme of fraudsters is the aggressive purchase of cryptocurrency by a certain group of people to create artificial excitement and allegedly increase the popularity and demand for the cryptocurrency.
This type of fraud is organized quickly and in a short time to show the popularity of crypto money, which will allow faster finding of investors who can be sold this currency at several times the usual price. Falling for such a bait, the buyer makes a useless investment. Fraudsters earn on naive investors by selling useless currency and, as always, disappear.
To protect against such fraud, you should:
- conduct operations on special and verified services where the transaction is monitored, which will allow determining whether it is a fraudulent scheme or not;
- pay attention to the history of cryptocurrency transactions, if it is determined that many transactions were performed within a day, this indicates that it is artificially created excitement and has signs of fraud.
Fake Investment Offers
To attract investors, fraudsters often use copies of sites, i.e., create viral mailings with links. Distributing them using:
- advertisements,
- sms messages,
- emails,
- pop-up windows on search sites.
The goal of such mailings is to attract the attention of a future investor, drawing them to a clone site where fraudsters can easily organize the theft of personal data during authorization.
In this way, they gain access to the account, PIN codes, passwords, which allows them to later steal finances.
It is recommended in the case of such an attack from phishing sites:
- do not click on pop-up links and ads;
- install spam filtering protection programs;
- keep personal data secret;
- do not share bank card numbers, account details, passwords with anyone;
- be sure to enable two-factor authentication on financial sites.
Signs of a Fraudulent Investment Scheme
Fraudsters also like to use a deception scheme that works with cryptocurrency. They use the method of changing cryptocurrency at the very last moment of sale.
The scheme is that during trading a high bid is made, this allows attracting more sellers who are dreaming of profit. When the seller is already in agreement and the deal reaches the final stage, only the purchase needs to be confirmed, the fraudster instantly changes one cryptocurrency for another, thus shattering the seller's hopes.
How to Distinguish Investing from Fraud
To avoid cyber-fraudsters and protect yourself in case of such an attack, you should:
- carefully check assets when buying or selling them;
- not make dubious deals;
- work with digital assets only on reliable payment systems that have been verified many times;
- use a reliable password and organize two-factor authentication protection.
It is mandatory to check the seller, their transaction history, which will help understand what they do, how long they have been in the market, and whether there is an opportunity to protect your crypto money.
Checking Investment Offers for Honesty
To understand that an investment offer has fraudulent signs, it is enough to know them:
- aggressive intrusive advertising promotion;
- signs of network marketing;
- promises of high profits with minimal risk and stable payouts;
- psychological pressure on the victim;
- the presence of insider information, allegedly secret strategies;
- lack of documents for conducting investment operations;
- withdrawing money becomes problematic.