2019-1-18 23:03 |
A Group of Bitcoin con artists in Taipei, Taiwan, have recently been charged by the police for creating a crypto scam that took millions of dollars from investors. Both foreign and local investors were fooled according to The Next’s Web’s Hard Fork, which has also reported on this story.
The scam began on October 2016 and, since then, the police believes that “Lin”, a 47-year-old man from Taiwan, has been scamming investors and violating the laws of the country with his fake Bitcoin scam and has attracted at least $51 million USD in investments from over a thousand people.
While most of the people who were scammed are from Taiwan, some of them were from China and other near countries. The Ponzi scheme operated by Lin promised yearly returns of over 355%. At first, the returns were considerably lower than expected and then later they stopped completely.
The source did not indicate whether the money was actually returned to the investors at the moment but Lin was already arrested and he will be charged by scamming these people.
Crypto Scams Are Pretty Popular NowScams were always popular before cryptos were mainstream, but now it looks like the news about this kind of crime simply does not stop at all. For instance, The Next Web’s Hard Fork has also talked about two other crimes in the article in which it talked about Lin and these are just two examples of something that is happening all over the world.
Back in November 2018, the police from Tokyo has arrested a total of 8 people that used a similar Bitcoin Ponzi scheme and actually took more than $68 million USD from over 6,000 investors. At the same time, the Phillippines arrested people for defrauding over $33 million USD.
Why do these scams happen? Because they are very easy to pull off, despite all the risk of being caught later. People are just generally not very well informed and some are gullible enough to believe all miraculous claims about Bitcoin. The hype of 2017 was very big and criminals are still using Bitcoin as a buzzword.
Unfortunately, the only way to solve this situation is by actually becoming more well informed and never investing in any shady scam as while misinformation continues, so will the scams.
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