Online Scams

 The seduction begins on social media with an ad that pops up on your feed that catches your attention. It could be a video or still image. Here are some examples: Of course, not every ad that you see is a scam. However, the ads that are scams will almost always promise an incredibly high return on investment. The psychology of greed starts here and will almost certainly inspire you to wonder and be curious about how such a  high rate of return is possible. To learn more you will be invited to chat with the ad's sponsor on WhatsApp or Telegram. I will refer to this initial contact as the "Guide". Your Guide will almost always be displayed in the messaging profile  as female. This person will help through the sign up process and come across as a friendly, helpful contact. Once you get signed up, your Guide will invite you to join a large messaging app group made up of other investors signed up in the platform. Note, a variation of this process is that your WhatsApp number ...

 It's important to understand how these crypto scams work as there is a common strategy all of them employ to achieve their goal of scamming you. This playbook is most commonly known as a pig butchering scam. Pig butchering is a metaphor for how the scammers operate their fraudulent scheme. Wikipedia has an excellent article that goes into the history and detail of what pig butchering is and how it has spread throughout the world since around 2020. The common thread in all of these pig butchering scams is that they all essentially follow a well-choreographed road map: Each pig butchering scam involves several actors playing different roles in order to fulfill the ultimate goal of robbing you. Once you understand the dynamics of how this all works, it will become easy to spot which opportunities out there on the internet are likely to be PB scams.   

Get rich quick opportunities have always attracted investors looking for easy ways to make a quick buck.  In traditional "Exaggeration Scams", companies or individuals market a service or product that they claim can make hundreds or thousands of dollars with little effort. At the very least, investors discover the results are never close to what was advertised. At worst, they lose all their money through the incompetence or deceit of the provider.  The establishment of digital assets like Bitcoin as an accepted form of payment has created a market and infrastructure that allows criminal elements to flourish without fear of being caught. The anonymity and immutability of crypto transactions provides both the cover and assurance to grifters that they cannot get caught or be forced to return funds transferred over to them by unwitting investors. For investors not satisfied with traditional buy and sell strategies with crypto, scammers are now advertising AI trading bots as a way...