Have you ever been scammed? Well sad to say my first Bitcoin experience ended in a scam. April this year I first discovered Bitcoin, and soon after I got so excited and got my hands on my first Bitcoin BTC 0.04747000 to be exact when it still was 1000USD to 1BTC. The potential was endless what can I do with this? I could invest it on Genesis Mining, Day trade, buy some altcoins and wait for it to grow, or invest it to an ICO or I can just store it in my wallet and not use it, It could have been worth 122 USD today.
I have been scammed!
This is the one I chose, an HYIP or High Yield Investment Programs. It had a name of hashminers.biz here are some screenshots of the website:
They offer this payouts and I fell for it.
They had these in their website a certificate of companies from the UK, and had social media accounts in Facebook and Twitter that seemed to be really active. They also sent newsletter emails everyday about news on the site. It seemed really legit but it ended in a scam.
At first It did payout it returned some payments and I was successful in withdrawing it to my wallet. I have withdrawn everything now from the site. Then here comes the dumb idea I combined the payouts and the withdrawn amount and re invested again and I decided to let it stay for a month. Then fast forward after a month I could not withdraw any more and after a couple of weeks the site is now down bye bye bitcoins. :(
They say bad experiences is the best teacher, so I have this mindset that this experience will teach me well so that I would not repeat this over again. So here I will be adding some tips to know if the site you are gonna invest in is a scam. So that everyone will not be scammed just like me.
Tips to detect if the site or platform you are investing in is a scam and a ponzi scheme
- Research the website search it on google. Search it on bitcointalk mostly there are some threads of the site you are gonna invest in.
https://bitcointalk.org/ - Go to badbitcoin.com and if you see the site you are gonna invest in there most probably that is a scam. http://www.badbitcoin.org/thebadlist/index.htm
- And if you really are not sure go and complete this wonderful scam test from 99bitcoins.com
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-scam-test/
That is all, thank you for reading my post