A trap for investors – two people who came to Tatyana Yordanova to tell their bitter experience fell into such a trap. Fake stock brokers contact them, promising them that they can double and triple their money. The only condition for quick and guaranteed “profit” is to convert a small amount into cryptocurrency, then send the crypto money to the stock brokers' wallet and watch their funds grow.
The promise sounds beautiful, the victims really transfer the electronic money and see on a well-disguised fake platform that the funds they invested are doubling every minute. However, the moment they try to withdraw them, the fake stock brokers start blackmailing them for more and more. However, everything invested turns out to be irretrievably lost. The victims of this scam lose both the possible profit and all the funds they invested. One of them lost 300,000 leva, and the other said goodbye to all his savings in the amount of 27,000 leva, reports Nova TV.
The mechanism of the scam
With his face hidden in front of the camera, the first deceived person stands. We will call him Dimitar. Stock brokers offered him to invest in crypto currency, and they, as specialists in the field, would manage his money and finally take a percentage of the profit. He lost 300,000 leva in three weeks.
„A trading agent offered me to invest in the crypto market. He introduced himself as Ivan, said that his office was in London. The company was really registered there. When you talk to him, in the background you hear 10 different voices speaking the same broken Bulgarian and convincing other clients “Invest, put this, do that”, says Dimitar.
They convince him to invest a small amount of money, but as cryptocurrency. They create an account for him on a platform called CARAT. And after a few days they congratulate him. The platform has made a profit.
Fake video with Grigor Dimitrov's face invites you to trade stocks and cryptocurrency
Every day they start urging him to put in more and more money.
“Come on a little more, let's do this now, let's take the first step and invest this much more money, then something will come of it. They present some beautiful pictures. At first they may not have been pictures, because there was a real movement of money – on my part, on their part. And you get to the point where those 15-16,000 dollars at one point become 30,000. Maybe in a week. The money arrives in the account. And you nibble a little more. Greetings every day for good morning. They manipulated me with words mostly. Kind words, a series of words that you want to hear. And that misleads you. Come on a little more, come on a little more and in the end the little more becomes very little – a lot for them, a little for you. And at one point it turned out that I had missed the end. And the amount became quite large”, says Dimitar.
Dimitar believed that he had accumulated a total of 980,000 dollars. But the moment he tries to withdraw them from the platform, the lies of the supposed stockbrokers begin.
„Some strange element calls and says: „Well, you need to deposit some money here, because we will release it for you.” And this is the scheme – little by little, little by little, little by little. At one point you say: „That's enough”. Let's start withdrawing the money. Well, then we saw the point. „Come on, now pay the transfer fee.” „ „Well, yes, but the money is with you – take it.” It can't be this way, it can't be that way,” recalls Dimitar.
300,000 are the personal funds that he is gradually losing. Now he has a flying leaf – contract with these stockbrokers, but only after the fraud does he realize that his signature there was like a signature in the air. Everyone he communicated with about this investment disappears without a trace. Another victim contacted us - Petar. A man who lost 27,000 leva in a similar way. He believed that his idol in investments - Denis Evgeniev - was really writing to him on Tik Tok. They made a deal for him to be his stockbroker, guaranteeing him a 600% profit per week. They started with $1,000.
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„And he told me „Now watch what happens here in 2-3-4 days". I get up and look - about $3-4,000. The whole session lasted about 2-3 days. And finally, this site wrote me off with $21-24,000. He started congratulating me and told me to contact support, to get my profit," says Petar.
However, this never happens. He is blackmailed for more money, supposedly needed to "unlock" his profit. And while Petar is looking for a way to get his money back with the help of GDBOP, fake profiles of famous Bulgarian investors continue to write to potential victims.
HOW TO RECOGNIZE A SCAM?
Real financial experts advise that when investing, we should watch for a few red flags:
► A famous investor writes first with an idea for getting rich
Expert's advice:
Max Baklayan, investor: You can't expect the promise you get from the other side to happen. A person wants to do a little and get a lot. At the very least, contact this person on another platform to see if he/she is actually the person who contacted you. The psychology is of a person who believes in blind luck, that this miracle will happen to him/her and they will be able to get rich very quickly. What are the chances that someone will call you and give you some money? The cat said to the mouse “just stick your tail out a little and I will give you a lump of cheese. The mouse says, I have to do so little, I will get so much…” Most likely, there is something rotten.
► They want the money not through a bank, but through a crypto transfer
Expert advice:
Denis Evgeniev, creator of a trading academy: If someone initially responds to the scam, the scammers usually ask for a relatively small amount. 500 or 1000 leva. Let's say the victim transfers this amount. This amount is sought through a crypto transfer. The reason it is through crypto is because crypto transfers are largely untraceable and the person behind them cannot be identified. They also cannot be returned. It is not that cryptocurrencies are something illegal, but a licensed, legitimate investment company first gives the option to invest funds through a bank transfer and card and optionally they may have an option to top up via crypto. But when someone offers you an investment of any type, and the only option for transferring funds they give you is crypto, that is also a very strong red flag, because, as we already mentioned, it cannot be traced in most cases and cannot be returned.
► They guarantee profit
Expert advice:
Denis Evgeniev, investor and creator of a trading academy: What I saw was that they guaranteed over 600% in a week. In the world of investments, there are no guaranteed profits, there is nothing that is risk-free. If a person simply has this filter in his head, it is enough to protect him from such types of fraud.
► They work with platforms that are not licensed
Expert advice:
Denis Evgeniev, investor and creator of a trading academy: A fictitious platform that shows a non-existent balance. a fabulous sum of 35 thousand leva. But, unfortunately, this is not real. These are just some numbers that are shown to the victims, which give them some assurance, some certainty that their money is really invested, really growing. There is nothing behind these numbers. Absolutely nothing. Anyone can make a website. Some mediocre programmers can easily make such a fake platform. And to the inexperienced eye, it may look like a completely normal place to invest. They, the money, go to a crypto account, a crypto wallet of the perpetrator of the fraud. And they never reach such a platform.
On this site, the GDBOP page lists some of the platforms that have been categorically found to be fraudulent: https://www.cybercrime.bg/investmentfraud.html