Ok, this is a pretty embarrassing and also amusing story of how i got scammed. I say that, but there is still this little niggle that keeps making me wonder if maybe, just maybe I'm somehow totally wrong, and my holdings in the totally unknown and new token called TIC has just made me about 20x!
I have never been scammed before, and maybe to some extent i set myself up by preempting a conversation about bitcoin with my new Japanese friend from Tinder. THis was my first attempt at using Tinder, i thought id finally check it out and see what all the fuss is about.
That was about three months ago now. It all seemed quite natural really, if a bit strange as she is Japanese apparently in Portugal doing business with textiles. I doubt this is really her, but please meet my scammer girlfriend Alice! If you recognise her let me know!
After some WEEKS of very boring and superficial good morning wishes from her, and an almost total lack of conversation in any depth at all, i did begin to wonder why i was even bothering! Normally i wouldn't share pics of people, but you have this see! Lol.
My good friend Josh was pretty sceptical about her from the start, but i kept telling him that she never tried anything on at all. IT all seemed very innocent.
SO one day, i ask Alice (thats her european name) "have you ever heard of Bitcoin?
That is where i made my big mistake! Since i brought up the whole topic of cryptocurrency it made me less sceptical for what followed! This conversation started as you see in the image above. I was telling her about Hive and she claimed that she had made a lot from bitcoin.
The chat ended there, and for many days if not a week the conversation turned back to sharing about food and what we had done that day.
Then suddenly she messages me something interesting! She starts telling me about this new coin called TIC. She says her uncle is some big shot investor in Tokyo and he says its going to moon!
In fact it already had gone up a lot, and i was really not interested either. So i just sort of ignored it. The next day though she persisted. She had a great story really, it was quite compelling.
I still wasnt interested, and she continued to keep making me want to buy it over the coming days and weeks.
Finally one day i thought, why not , lets just get a bit of this TIC.
She told me to go to www.oxbiex.com and i could buy it there.
Sadly, i did no due diligence. Even the most basic checks would have shown me that this was not right! The only way to contact them is via an email address okbiex@88.com. Not looking good!
Anyways, its all so obvious now.. and i just thought id only throw $200 at it and transferred some USDT in after a fairly unusual authenticaion process. It all seemed a bit weird really, but i just put that down to it being chinese or something.
So it seemed to work and the USDT appeared in my wallet. I immediately bought TIC with it, whilst looking at the charts. Quite strange how it seemed to be constantly parabolic since the day it launched without so much as a blip. Not a good time to buy right, but she was SO sure it was going to 10x, so i just went for it.
THen i did something i often do. i was impulsive. I thought to myself, you know what.. lets just throw $2,000 at it and see what happens.
oops.
So i did
and I bought $1,000 in TIC, and kept $1,000 as USDT so i could buy on the dip. Arn't i clever!? lol.
Whilst i was looking around i noticed i couldn't sell TIC! I tried but it was all greyed out. After some search around the website i discovered that they have a 90 day lockdown period, and also they give you ETH from their mining as a return.
I didn't like that at all, suddenly i was locked in for 90 days.. so i decided to try to withdraw the $1,000 that i had thankfully not bought TIC with.
The option to withdraw was there and when i clicked it i was presented with a pretty crazy upload process.
I then proceeded to upload ALL my personal information to the website! Wonderful! Let me tell you im pretty nervous today wondering what they are going to do with that information! What a genius scam! (it is a scam right?!).. Fortunately i photoshopped out my credit card numbers!
I submitted it and it went into processing mode. Then just a few minutes later the withdrawal failed. The USDT went into a frozen mode.. which was a long hour to wait . and then it came back to the wallet.
It was at this time the penny dropped. I checked everything and quickly realised that this was almost certainly a total scam! Bloody brilliant one too. Most people wont even start worrying until after the 90 day lockout, and then who knows how much personal information they will all upload as it fails timed and time again.
Until today ive not tried again! NO WAY. So far i have not noticed anything unusual, but i am holding my breath a bit. Perhaps i should report this or something!
Anyways.. i just gave up right there. I have sent a few emails to the OXBIEX address and surprisingly i did get some responses. They were clearly written by someone who spoke almost no english, and they told me to try again.. but could never tell me why my uploads had failed their checks.
I also told alice i knew it was a scam but she seemed offended. After that she stopped messaging me, until a few weeks later. BLoody strange if you ask me.. She was just asking how i was, and continuing to make chit chat .. She kept it up for days and i just could not imagine why she would keep trying to keep up the pretence when ive already been scammed and clearly called her out on it.
Now since a couple of weeks she has ignored me as i asked her to video chat! I wanted to see what she would say.
So TIC has continued to bull run, and i bought it at around $0.20 cents. Todays the price of TIC stands at an apparent whopping $5.06. My wallet is worth a stunning $21,673 USD! That is probably the best investment ive ever made!... NOT!!!
ANyways, look... this is pretty much where the story ends. Im not interested in even trying to send these people my personal information anymore. I give it up, i let go! but...
On a more serious note,.. this is bad.. and i really feel like i should do something, say something, report this somewhere. I have googled it and can find no one saying this is a scam. The only thing i found was an empty reddit question, asking just that.
What i am also wondering is maybe someone in the Hive sphere can help in one of two ways. First i need to be 100% sure that this is a scam before i can suggest the second way.. What I would like to do is have someone launch a DOS attack and take them down. I did even discover a total clone of this site, all exactly the same except for the URL.
I think this would be very ethical and may save god knows how many people from losing a lot of money.
If any of you have any suggestions or ideas of how to handle this, please do let me know! Im open to all suggestions.. including the more formal route of reporting the business to whoever one reports these things to. Obviously if you have or know anyone else who has been scammed like this please let me know!
Thanks everyone, i realise this was a bit more information than was needed to understand this story, but it was a funny story so i thought i share it all..
Cheers! ..