It has been a rough year for cryptocurrencies with the value of many legitimate cryptocurrencies down more than 60% and this doesn’t include the estimated 3.5 billion dollars lost by cryptocurrency investors to a wide variety of cryptocurrency scams. In recent years I have written about many of these scams. If you want to see them, go to the “search for scams” tab at the top of the first page of Scamicide.com, type in “cryptocurrency” and you will find information about a huge number of these scams.
The recent bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the criminal charges brought against its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried have been particularly devastating to many people who invested in FTX which had been endorsed and touted by a number of celebrities including Tom Brady and Larry David in a Super Bowl ad from last year.
Desperate people who have lost large amounts of money through FTX and other cryptocurrency scams are being contacted by scammers posing as recovery companies or government agencies telling you that they can get your money back for a fee. The truth is that no legitimate company can get your money back and any fee you paid just increases your losses and while government agencies such as the FTC and the SEC have in the past taken action against cryptocurrency scammers and have actually returned money in some instances, they won’t be contacting you about getting a refund for you and asking for a fee. When refunds do occur, I will provide the information needed to make your no-fee claim here on Scamicide.
TIPS
Remember my motto, “trust me, you can’t trust anyone.” Whenever you are communicated with by email, phone, text message, through social media or even through an old fashioned snail mail letter, you can never be sure of with whom you are actually communicating. Therefore you should never provide personal information or make a payment in response to such communications unless you have absolutely confirmed that the communication is legitimate. As for being contacted to pay a fee to get your money back from the scammers, it is always a scam. A telltale sign that it is a scam is that often these scammers ask for your payment by a gift card, which is always a scam because no legitimate company asks for payment for services by gift cards, but scammers do because it is easy to use those gift cards anonymously.
As for cryptocurrency investing, it is important to remember that you should never invest in something that you do not completely understand. This was a mistake that many of Bernie Madoff’s victims made. Cryptocurrency scams quite often involve complicated language and investment terms that are purposefully unclear in an effort to confuse potential investors from understanding the real facts. You also may want to check out the SEC’s investor education website at www.investor.gov. Scammers can be very convincing and it may sound like there is a great opportunity for someone to make some money, but you must be careful that the person making money is not the scam artist taking yours. You should never invest with anyone whom you have not thoroughly investigated to make sure he or she is legitimate.
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