Chhavideep Singh
Source: Inspirationfeed
Cryptocurrency is the new jewel in the market of finance that everyone would like to mine or buy because its market value is soaring through the roof. However, only with proper knowledge of what cryptocurrency is and how it is transacted should you invest or buy them because the market stability of digital currency is hanging by a thread. Sometimes the value rises to the moon while sometimes it falls and other times, people get scammed and lose all their money.
Yes, fraudulent activities around cryptocurrency and digital transactions have become more common than what we would like to hear. As its market popularity has increased significantly since this past one year with major credit to the COVID-19 pandemic, frauds and scams have also parallelly increased.
Recently, some members of the WallStreetBets (WSB) forum were reported to be scammed for USD 2 million as they signed up for a cryptocurrency exchange deal that turned out to be a big fraud.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the said WSB forum members were asked to get involved in the deal and cash in on a new cryptocurrency token, “WSB Finance”. The catch with this scam involved a white lie of it being a “pre-mini sale” which means the WSB Finance cryptocurrency was being offered before its official launch and that’s where the forum members got scammed.
Bloomberg reports that these members of the WSB forum were involved with an account, “WallStreetBets- Crypto Pumps” that asked them to send over Ether or Binance Coin to its cryptocurrency wallet. Furthermore, the members would get in touch with the fraud company’s ‘token bot’ through the Telegram app in order to receive their WSB Finance coins in exchange for their Binance Coins.
The scam happened to be this way that the token bot displayed an error and the members never got their money back in exchange. As mentioned in a report by Interesting Engineering, the members received another message from “WSB- Crypto Pumps” saying that their payment did not go through due to a technical issue and in order to keep their first investment safe, they would have to resend the same amount. According to reports, the scammers disappeared along with all the money.
The unknown scammer is reported to have received over 3,451 Binance coins that equal to approximately USD 2 million. As mentioned by a user on Reddit, the Telegram group made was actually a support group for people who accidentally fell into the trap of these scammers.