Digital currency pyramid scheme - onecoin

[zooterkin]

I haven't seen anything about this on the forum, nor in the news, but I've been listening to the ongoing BBC podcast, The Missing Cryptoqueen.

Onecoin was marketed as an alternative to BitCoin, and used existing MLM networks to promote it. Then, when questions started to be asked, Dr Ruja Ignatova and other key figures disappeared without trace.

The podcast (which still has episodes to come) goes into how the story broke, and then does investigative journalism to find out who bought OneCoin (certain religious groups seem particularly vulnerable), who was involved, what they did in the past, and where Dr Ignatova might be now.

 

[catsmate]

A scam, rather like other "crypto-currencies" but a bit more blatant than most. Up there with "Shinil Gold Coin" was a sink for the funds of the deluded.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Thanks for the link, I've always had a morbid curiosity for scams and cults, even though you know that they are going to have bad endings and leave behind ruin for the rubes.

Everything old is new again. Crypto presents an opportunity for scammers to trot out the classics schemes with a fancy new package.

Reminds me of the Bitconnect scam, which was a blatant ponzi scheme. Since it involved crypto, it was sexy enough to convince people to ignore the obvious warning sign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitconnect


Bitconnect is interesting because you can see the scam operating in real time, archived by Reddit posts in the bitconnect subreddit. The tone goes from credulous rubes bragging about how they are going to be rich to posts listing the Suicide Hotline number after the scam collapsed and the founders ran off with the cash.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitconnect/new/

The only thing new about these schemes is that crypto makes it very easy for overseas scammers to up and disappear with the money once the scam is played out, and it is much harder for law enforcement to claw back the cash. Other than that, these scam investments are little different than their ancestors from the early days of the unregulated stock exchanges.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

credulous rubes bragging about how they are going to be rich...

...and getting what they deserve.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Thanks again for the recommend, I'm nearly caught up with all the released episodes.

I know victim blaming is a bit gauche, but jesus. Of all the scams out there, this one seems among the most obvious.

The onecoin was sold on a closed market. Based on the reporting, liquidating your onecoin into real cash was very difficult. Even for those that aren't savvy with crypto, that should be a giant red flag.

People logging into the internet and seeing reports that they're rich, all on paper, never seeing a single Euro of real money. And with that, they pump their life savings in.

Dig a little deeper and the situation is even more dire. The "crypto" coin is not even a crypto coin. There's no blockchain, it's not open source, there's no distributed ledger. It's just a database on some central, private server that is managing the scam-bucks and printing off reports of huge returns.

These guys make the Bitconnect victims look like geniuses. At least some of them actually made money if they managed to cash out before the collapse of the Ponzi scheme.