Fake Crypto Exchanges and Crypto Wallets
“If you browse your social media handles, you will come across sites that advertise cheap Bitcoin (BTC),” says Martin Leinweber, digital asset product strategist at MarketVector Indexes. They may advertise cryptocurrencies at 5% below market value and promise huge savings when you buy through the site—but sometimes, these platforms are fake crypto products.
These fake crypto products often quote outrageous returns on investment, and users are typically required to pay a high initial fee and then frequently asked to invest more and more.
And when you try to withdraw your funds, you’ll likely find they’ve vanished.
“A fake crypto wallet is a malware scam,” Leinweber says. “Scammers use it to infect a computer and eventually steal the user’s private key or password.”
To avoid such scams, stick with reputable exchanges and wallets with long user history.
“If a wallet’s website tries to resemble a reputable brand, you should consider it a scam and move on,” Leinweber says.
So where does the fraud come into it? The perpetrators behind many of the binary options websites, primarily criminals located overseas, are only interested in one thing taking your money. Fraudulent binary options website operators go to great lengths to recruit investors. They advertise their platforms often on social networking sites, various trading websites, message boards, and spam e-mail with big promises of easy money, low risk, and superior customer service. Potential investors are also cold-called from boiler room operations, where high-pressure salespeople use banks of phones to make as many calls as possible to offer “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities.
Refusal to credit customer accounts or reimburse funds to customers
These complaints typically involve customers who have deposited money into their binary options trading account and who are then encouraged by “brokers” over the telephone to deposit additional funds into the customer account. When customers later attempt to withdraw their original deposit or the return they have been promised, the trading platforms allegedly cancel customers withdrawal requests, refuse to credit their accounts, or ignore their telephone calls and emails.
Identity theft
These complaints allege that certain Internet-based binary options trading platforms may be collecting customer information (including copies of customers’ credit cards, passports, and driver’s licenses) for unspecified uses. Do not provide personal data.
Manipulation of software to generate losing trades
These complaints allege that the Internet-based binary options trading platforms manipulate the trading software to distort binary options prices and payouts. For example, when a customer’s trade is “winning,” the countdown to expiration is extended arbitrarily until the trade becomes a loss.