‘Don’t see it as a getrichquick scheme’: How to avoid crypto scams and losses
When Mr. Goh joined cryptocurrency trading platform Torque because some of her friends were on it payouts were better than interest rates that banks were offering. There was also a chance that the cryptocurrencies would appreciate in value, she said.
The platform looked stable and appeared to be run by
“reputable people”, added the investor, who declined to give her full name. Trouble
surfaced, however, as Chinese New Year approached this year. After a year of
payouts that arrived like “clockwork”, which for her worked out at 0.014 per
cent a day, they stopped.
Torque, which was incorporated in the British Virgin
Islands, suspended investors’ accounts and went into liquidation. Investors
reported the platform to the police, and its chief executive Bernard One
claimed that an employee’s unauthorized trading activities had led to
significant losses in investors’ accounts, The Straits Times reported. Click here for more information: Cryptocurrency Latest News
While there are investors who have made big gains from
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent years, others have lost sizeable
savings through poor investment decisions or scams. Singapore police received
533 reports of crypto related cheating, fraud or other crimes between 2018 and
last year, of which 393 were made last year. Investors lost around S$29
million.
Besides the unregulated nature of crypto, scammers are using
stories of people who have struck it rich to “play on the greed of investors”,
said Choo Oi Yee, chief commercial officer for private capital platform ADDX. Two
types of scams are the Ponzi scheme, whereby money from new investors serves as
returns for earlier investors, and the “pump and dump”, she cited.
The latter occurs when scammers buy a coin and generate
noise or misleading statements to push its price up, only to dump it after
others start buying. Scammers may also use third party accounts to cover their
tracks, said Hong Qi Yu, the founder and chief executive of digital trading
platform Tokenize Exchange.
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