In 2018, virtual currencies have been in a bear trend that dragged most of the coin to new lows in more than a year. At the same time, several hacks and scams took place in 2018 and affected the whole market. In a recent blog post, cryptonomos published a set of frauds that hit the industry just last year.

Modern Tech is a firm based in Vietnam that promoted two different Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), Pincoin and IFan the coin promised a very high return on its investment, close to 40% per month. In general, when there is an ICO or company that promises users such a large ROI, it must be red flagged.

The company damaged and defrauded more than 30,000 investors after encouraging them to invest in their Initial Coin Offering. They were able to steal $650 million after disappearing without leaving any information behind them.

OneCoin is another scam that has affected several users back in 2017. The founder of the project is Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian businesswoman. Nevertheless, the company is registered in the United Arab Emirates, which has welcomed several crypto and blockchain companies from all over the world.

The project presented itself as a crypto and blockchain company that was developing a decentralized platform. However, it was neither decentralized nor open source. This raised several concerns in the community. After users realized that the project was just a scam, the firm faced several problems.

Back in May 2017, the government of Kazakhstan imposed strict regulations on this company and labeled it as a Ponzi scheme. Later in July 2017, the government of India arrested 23 people involved in this scam. Additionally, China was able to recover $30 million dollars.

In 2018, Mark Scott, one of the key scammers was indicted back in August 2018 after being arrested by federal officers.

BitConnect is perhaps the most popular scam in the last years. The company offered high daily returns to investors that fell victims of this fraudulent project. Users could lend Bitcoin and receive interest for these funds. After it, users received BCC coins in which they received the interests.

Users were able to exchange Bitcoin for BitConnect Coins and wait for their returns in the future. Although the company was a Ponzi scheme, it was able to reach the top 20 at the end of 2017.

On January 2018, BitConnect shut down and BCC dropped more than 90% when they announced this issue. According to the company they had to shut down their operations because of negative comments from the media.

At the moment, the investigations related to BitConnect are still on its way.

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