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Introduction to Trading Bot Scams and Staking 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 to earn huge profits from trading futures such as options. These bots supposedly forecast future prices and place highly profitable trades based on those forecasts.


While there is nothing illegal in using AI trading bots and there are some bots that can generate decent returns, the results are nowhere near the results being advertised online. For example, you might have seen an ad on your FB feed or IG feed that looks something like this:


Like any other get rich quick scam, the profits advertised are unrealistic. However, the difference here  is that most, if not all of the trading bots advertised on social media are actually 100% fake. I will explain more later on.

A less common type of scam used to cheat investors are blockchain transaction validation scams. All crypto transactions are recorded on blockchains, decentralized public ledgers that provide reliable transaction history that cannot be changed. Exchanges use independent validators to check that each transaction is valid before it is recorded on the blockchain. Owners of crypto can participate in validating transactions by "staking" or lending their coin to platform validations and earn rewards for each validation completed. There are essentially two ways to validate. You can do so by tying up your funds with a platform, or in the case of "liquid staking", stake your coin without your funds ever leaving your wallet.


There are many legitimate "Proof of Stake" opportunities for investors that earn decent returns. However, again like the AI trading bot scams, the ones being advertised on social media offer returns  that are unrealistic and the platforms themselves are fake.


There are many other types of scams that I may cover in this blog and the list is long, but for now, these two types of scams seem to be the ones most popular on social media and ones which I have personal experience with.


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