Bitcoin scams appear to be everywhere these days, but nowhere are they more prominent than in Australia, as of late.
Australia Hosts Too Many of These Schemes
That’s right… The land from down under appears to be one of the biggest crypto scam havens on planet Earth. Among the latest scam cases involves a young woman named Kate – an alias, as the person being interviewed wanted to remain anonymous – who invested as much as $4,000 into a bitcoin investment scheme based out of Kiev in the Ukraine.
The scheme involved a new website for a company known as Crypto MB, allegedly hosted by a man who went by the name “William Bradley.” Initially, she was asked to invest as little as $250 into the project, while the rest of what would amount to be several thousand would come later. She states:
I didn’t have $250 in the first place. So, they said, ‘What have you got?’ I said I’ve got $150, so they said, ‘Send it through.’
Nevertheless, she didn’t see this or any of the other funds she ultimately forwarded to the platform again, which is a running theme in the crypto community. It’s even more terrible when in the interview, she admits to borrowing a lot of the money from her own son and lying to him about what it was for. In the end, it was her own child that wound up hurt the most.
Kate is just one of thousands of people who fell victim to this scam, as well as many others like it. They operate out of call centers in foreign regions who try to trap people – those who likely don’t understand how cryptocurrency works – into giving up their hard-earned funds for something that just doesn’t exist.
This case stems from a Ukraine-based company calling itself the Milton Group. It is believed that the company may have swindled people out of nearly $100 million simply from cold calling.
In other events, cryptocurrency scams “work” by utilizing the likenesses or faces of known celebrities. For example, one woman named Rhonda Rutherford – a wedding dress designer in Sydney, Australia – states that she was initially tempted to give BTC a try after she saw an ad hosted by Hugh Jackman – Wolverine, himself – claiming that crypto was the future, and all who didn’t invest would miss out completely.
Don’t Believe Every Famous Person You Hear
She explains:
I’ve been totally swindled with bitcoin. I saw Hugh Jackman on television saying that bitcoin was the way to go. I thought I’d give it a flutter.
The trouble is that it wasn’t really Hugh Jackman giving people the news about bitcoin, and the scammers had simply utilized his face, body and voice in the ad to entice more people to invest in digital assets.
