202 1 Virtual Currency (Empty Currency) Fraud Inventory

202 1 is an important year for cryptocurrency mainstream. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other popular cryptocurrencies have ushered in a brilliant year after the memestock craze of 1. These cryptocurrencies have soared to a new high, attracting the attention of a large number of people who may not be familiar with the industry before.

However, cryptocurrency is unpredictable, it is still an incredible volatile market, and there are almost no laws and regulations to protect virtual currency investors. However, in the past year, so many cryptocurrency novices jumped into this "half heaven, half hell" market to try their luck, and they and some scammers formed the most unique and shameless scam in the 202 1 virtual currency market.

Squid game squid coin

Turn this year's biggest and hottest TV series "Squid Game" into cryptocurrency, what will you get?

The answer is that you will be the protagonist of SquidGame, one of the most "social death" scams of the year.

Squid coin is the exclusive token of the game platform, with the same name as squid game. The platform imitates six rounds of competitions in TV series, and the prize money won by the final winner (the highest prize money in the drama is $38.5 million, and there is no upper limit for this virtual currency project) will be distributed in the form of squid coins. However, players must pay the preset price of squid coins to participate in each game, and some rounds also require users to buy customized NFT (heterogeneous tokens, similar to the game skin or props in this game) sold on the platform.

It is such a project that sounds like a sickle cutting leeks, but it has achieved great success. It is reported that squid coins were snapped up in less than 1 second during the pre-sale of 10/0 on October 20th. 1 When the squid coin was officially put on sale on October 29th, within 24 hours,1cent was fired to $2.22, which soared by 2,400%. In the following weeks, the price of squid coin reached an astonishing 28,666.

But like most Ponzi schemes, the virtual currency project of squid game will not be installed soon after it reaches a certain stage. At the peak of currency speculation, some investors complained that they could not sell their squid coins on Pancakeswap, which is the only virtual currency platform that can trade this currency. This should be a wake-up call for everyone, but everyone was still carried away by the soaring squid coins, and chose to believe the explanation of LinkedIn, the founder of squid coins, that is, the project deployed an innovative "anti-dumping technology" to temporarily restrict people from selling squid coins when demand declined.

However, it turns out that this is another "carpet canvassing" scam. On 1 65438+1October1EST, the squid currency suddenly collapsed, falling from 286 1 USD to 0.0007 USD in five minutes, a decrease of 99.9976%. At this time, LinkedIn, the founder of squid coin, has cashed in the equivalent currency and transferred the funds.

Save children's coins

In 20021year, KOL on American social media promoted cryptocurrency, which is a major feature of this year.

For example, Musk, who has recently sold a lot of Tesla shares and intends to resign as an "online celebrity", has promoted dogecoin on social media many times, and the scam mentioned today is also caused by KOL's promotion and platform for cryptocurrency on social media platforms.

At the beginning of June, 20265438+0, Kay, Teeqo, Jarvis, Nikan and YouTuber RiceGum, four members of FaZeClan, an e-sports organization in Los Angeles, began to promote a cryptocurrency called "SaveTheKids". The project claims to raise funds for children's charities, which should have been the win-win result of the project and KOL, but it is also a "carpet" scam.

This happens when developers create a cryptocurrency with the intention of escaping with investors' funds. Shortly after the official launch of the SaveTheKids token, due to the large-scale selling of the initial investors who held most of the tokens, the cryptocurrency fell, and once the SaveTheKids was listed, it became worthless.

It may not be a scam from here, but it has been noticed that FaZe's Kay especially likes to promote cryptocurrencies, and these cryptocurrencies all end in this way, such as Coffeezilla, SomeOrdinaryGamers and Barely Sociable, and FaZe's Kay is all promoting.

Finally, in early July, FaZeClan, an e-sports organization in Los Angeles, announced the results of the self-examination. Four members were suspected of encryption fraud, 1 members were dismissed, and the other three members were directly suspended.

MILF token

It is dereliction of duty not to punish Adin Ross for selling Moro Islamic Liberation Front coins.

Ross is a popular Twitch media person with millions of fans on this platform, but he himself is a complete liar.

It is Ross's usual trick to inadvertently expose how much money he has earned on any project on social media. Ross used to promote online casinos in this way, which is why he was criticized in the past year. In May this year, Ross also followed the trend of the times and entered the cryptocurrency world, and began to promote a virtual currency called MILF coins.

As usual, Ross exposed hundreds of thousands of dollars he earned through Moro Islamic Liberation Front coins on social media to show his tedious process of buying cryptocurrency. However, only three weeks later, when it comes to this investment opportunity, Ross's information transmission has undergone tremendous changes.

"By the way, the MILF Token I made some time ago is shit! I have told you not to buy that thing. " Ross said with a smile in a live broadcast. "

As of press time, compared with Ross's promotion, Moro currency has depreciated by about 98%.

Meme coin

Last year, you couldn't have seen the tweet about the new Meme Coin project without the reply from the fake elon musk Twitter account.

This year, the fake press release raised this scam to a new height.

202 1 on two different occasions, the false press releases of global retail enterprises deceived the media, making them publish false news that companies will begin to accept cryptocurrencies. In September, a false press release announced that Wal-Mart would start accepting Litecoin. Just a few months later, a false press release claimed that Clough would accept bitcoin cash as a payment method.

However, neither of the news is true. The counterfeiters behind these fake documents can successfully publish the fake news through big news publishing companies, where they can spread to mainstream news organizations and report. As cryptocurrency advocates continue to seek verification and legitimacy for their young industries, scams claiming to provide such verification and legitimacy will continue to grow.

These behaviors drew criticism from Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street), a former stockbroker. In an interview with The Sun, he warned investors not to invest their money in cryptocurrencies such as Doecoin and Shiba Inu, because Shiba Inu and Doecoin are worthless jokes.

Juwang (a decentralized trading platform)

In the virtual currency scam of 202 1, the century robbery of Poly.com must be named.

This summer, a hacker discovered a loophole in the decentralized financial platform Poly Network, which enabled them to transfer more than $600 million in virtual currency to their accounts.

However, it is hard not to feel guilty that such a large sum of money has disappeared. In the following weeks, hackers extended a helping hand to Poly Network and claimed that they had always intended to return the money. Juwang is also very cooperative, even calling hackers "Mr. White Hat" (that is, hackers), trying to find security holes in the platform through them so as to fix them before evil actors appear.

Finally, fortunately, the hacker fulfilled his promise and transferred most of the cryptocurrency funds back to the platform, so that Poly Network and its platform users did not suffer more losses.

What benefits do hackers get from it? First of all, they escaped any possible adverse effects because they committed the biggest cryptocurrency robbery in history. Secondly, Poly Network offered a reward of $500,000 to the hacker who returned the funds, earning both fame and fortune.

Africrypt (Virtual Currency Investment Platform)

According to overseas media reports, in the middle of this year, Ameer Cajee and Raees Cajee, the founders of South Africa's cryptocurrency investment platform Africrypt, have confirmed that they have lost contact, and 69,000 BTCs (currently worth about 2.3 billion US dollars) have also disappeared. This incident may become the biggest cryptocurrency scam in history.

It is reported that Africrypt is a cryptocurrency investment platform founded in 20 19 by two South African brothers, Raees Cajee(2 1 year old) and Ameer Cajee( 17 year old), and its target audience is high-net-worth individuals and celebrities.

Like any other scam, Africrypt also promises to provide investors with incredibly high returns, and even claims to provide 65,438+00% daily returns. The company is so good at targeting victims that most investors regard it as the secret key to wealth and freedom. It is this target market that gave Africrypt the opportunity to contact other wealthy investors in the past. The average investment of its customers reached 6.5438+0.05 million dollars, and some even reached 6.5438+0.4 million dollars.

In fact, in April of 20021year, Africrypt was already planning to escape. Cajee brothers claimed that their investment company was hacked and all their customers' accounts were leaked, and begged them not to take legal action because it would affect their recovery of cryptocurrency. Seven days before the escape, Africrypt employees could not access the background of the system, and then everyone became anxious. Afterwards, it was proved that everyone's worries were not superfluous. The Cajee brothers finally disappeared into public view with 69,000 BTCs.

Lawyers representing investors claim that as many as 69,000 BTCs were stolen by Cajee brothers. If this is true, Africrypt will be the biggest cryptocurrency fraud case to date. However, Brandon Top ham, the relevant person in charge of the South African Financial Sector Conduct Supervision Bureau, said that legally speaking, encrypted assets are not financial products, so the agency is currently prohibited from conducting formal investigations.

Stolen NFT

Compared with other scams mentioned in this article, the story of Jeff Nicholas is dwarfed, but it is still worth mentioning.

Nicholas is the owner of three NFTs (apes, cats, dogs and computer-generated artworks). He bought these unforgeable tokens to prove the ownership of the items related to them.

Nicholas said that under the guise of providing technical support, the swindler took NFT apes, cats and dogs from Nicholas's wallet within the next hour. According to Nicholas, the total loss of this fraud is about 150 ETH, which is about 480,000 US dollars.

When NFT was stolen for the first time, Nicholas tried to spread the news and informed others not to buy his stolen NF, and the platform OpenSea also locked Nicholas's assets at the first time, but the swindler had sold it to the highest bidder first. Although Nicholas still has a chance to get it back in theory, he must buy it back through real money.

Later, although the blockchain showed that he no longer owned them, Nicholas claimed that these indisputable records on the blockchain were irrelevant, and he was the real owner. Nicholas finally denied the foundation of any such value advocated by NFT, that is, trust.

There will be more new scams in the currency circle in the future. Everyone should pay attention to prevention and protect their assets. (End)