7 Rules To Avoid Scam While Trying to Invest in Bitcoin
Follow Bitcoin Millionaire: @bitcoinmill18 on twitter.
I was scammed by a ponzi scheme. I didn’t know how to trade Bitcoin the right way and was scared by its volatility and thought;
“I’m not a trader, so i should find a trader or some kind of a fund that will return stable income.”
Back in 2010, one of the founders of my former employer was exploring algorithmic trading in forex. As someone who is in technology business and internet startups for more than 25 years now, i thought this was a yesterdays problem and started searching for it.
One day on tradingview (which is truly an amazing, legit platform) i came across their profile claiming 250% profit in margin trading using artificial intelligence robots. I thought margin trading was something like the margin between buy and sale price, i mean like a regular buy & sell trade. I found that it wasn’t, but it’s not important. The important part was the algorithmic trading.
If you search for “What Percentage Of Trading Is Algorithmic?” on Google you’ll find:
“70–80 percent of trades are happening with algorithms.”
While this is true, i did not know how to start doing it until i came across “QuantumFund.ai”. (Don’t ever trust this site). I thought this could be a scam and searched for it. Viola! there were number of sites mentioning that this site was scam. Ok, but did they really try working with them or were they throwing out of their guts? I didn’t believe them and decided to give it a try with just $100.
Learning the process was bumpy. You need to send Bitcoin equivalent of your USDT contract to their wallet which expires in 2 hours. Then you receive ethereum equivalent of your USD income.
Rule #1
Never send your Bitcoin to anyone other than trusted, high market cap exchanges and wallets. Never, ever.
While this is good for security (i learned this later) it’s also not tracable. I did it and the system automatically created my contract in few minutes. My contract started generating variable amounts of returns everyday at 22:00 with the target goal of 250% I literally went to site every night for 105 says in a row @22:00 and the system was working like a clock.
But there was a catch, you cannot cancel your contract because then the fund would not be able to fulfil it’s promise. It makes sense right? Wrong.
Rule #2
If you cannot access your funds, cancel your deal anytime you want and get your principal back, run.
You also needed to have at least $100 income to be able to withdraw every week. That meant your contract size should be at least $1.600 base on the averages i calculated during my test period, so i’ve sent it :)
Meanwhile, i was sending support questions. 1 out of 10 question was answered. You could tell the response was written by a Russian or Chinese person from the broken English.
Rule #3
If you can’t get proper response from support, beware!
I thought , even if these guys were scammers, they would still have to play the game at least for 8–10 months. I would be out by then, how stupid idea, but somehow it worked until it didn’t :/
While the system was working every day and i was able to widthdraw my income for the week, i thought i should step up the game and increase my contract to $8.400. This was returning a descent amount every week and to be honest, if that was not my own money, it felt real good.
Occasionally i was checking their telegram account, which is sending updates, but of course you can’t contact them. Their facebook page, tradingview, twitter all are empty or removed or with some obviously paid comments. More importantly their so called CEO does not exist on any social media platform, especially Linkedin, come on, you are the CEO.
Rule #4
If you can’t reach them publicly on social media, they don’t exist.
But, weekly income rates started to decrease slightly, while Bitcoin was nearly doubled. I could have 2.5x’ed my money had i not invested in this Ponzi. There was nothing i could do about it, but i thought the averages i calculated might be aggressive so i sent an additional $2.300 and passed $10k limit.
The system upgraded my $500 widthdrawal limit to $5.000. Everything was working fine. I have even received additional bonuses from the referral program.
Rule #5
If the platform offers multi-level marketing scheme, run faster.
This is different than affiliate marketing though. Affiliate marketing is usually a legit award mechanism in exchange for referrals. This, however is a multi-level marketing scheme where you are at the top of a pyramid.
Now, the worst part: My parents were invested in gold and loosing, they wanted to invest some in the ponzi scheme. A day after my brother called me and asked to participate too.
The worst thing about a ponzi scheme is that you cause other people to suffer along with yourself, because of your own stupidity.
This is one of the reasons i remain anonymous, because i’m truly ashamed of my stupidity.
And everything stopped at Christmas. System stopped daily updates for about 2 weeks. I thought it was the christmas holiday. They have sent 2 weeks pending widthdrawal in mid January and that was the last time i received my income after 15 weeks of successful widthdrawal.
Right now, i still can access my account. My balance is updated with new income and i can initiate a widthdraw request, but the daily accrual and transaction history has been removed and of course widthdrawals never arrive.
I was the lucky one here, i got 80% of my principal back at least, but my parents and brother lost all they gave. It really feels terrible.
So, next time you are going to give away your bitcoin, remember this story. I learned the hard way that in crypto world, almost everything other than Bitcoin itself is scam. That’s why i trade Bitcoin and Bitcoin only.
The so called CEO of Quantumfund.ai Jan Jansen (probably not his real name) is a conman, and probably he’s hired as an actor by the real scammers in Russia i believe. There’s also a copy cat of this site under different name @thequbittech and it’s the same exact scam with some different tricks. Never trust these sites and NEVER send your Bitcoin to someone you really know or is trusted.
Rule #6
“If you find similar names with legit businesses, or funny people names like Greg Limon, they are fake.”
When you search quantum fund on Google, you’ll find George Soros, who is a well known investor and he founded Quantum Fund in 1973. What a coincidence that our ponzi scheme name is quantum hedge fund.
Rule #7
Artificial Intelligence Algorithms > Laugh
Artifical Intelligence became a popular buzzword. Every app claims to have it. What you should know about ai is that it can be implemented only by the best engineers of the world, not your regular web developer and these engineers are working at tech giants like Google or Facebook where they can actually build it.
“Bot trading is mostly about automating your leg work and freeing your time, nothing further.”
To sum up, even for someone like me, working in the technology business, it was not 100% obvious given the amount of work and effort spent to create these sites and put systems in place. These sites are translated in tens of languages, their trading api’s are really working and all. I cannot understand how greedy people are, when it comes to scammers. This can only come from a sick brain and can’t be human. You have all the technology and waste it just to get peoples hard earned money. I have nothing else to say, i wish you die alone suffering.
All this happened because i was too afraid to loose trading Bitcoin’s volatility and perhaps too lazy. Easy money sounded so good in an environment where i was unemployed and needed stable income with peace of mind.
Don’t make that mistake and learn how to manage your own money.
Good days ahead.
Follow Bitcoin Millionaire: @bitcoinmill18 on twitter.
