(A) Democratization: Let everyone participate as individuals on a freshly equalized playing field that was previously so slanted they couldn't even try.
(B) Democratization: Encourage lots of small disorganized weaker players into the market as unwitting prey for existing interests that have already established themselves with regulatory or competitive edges that they retain/maintain indefinitely.
In this case I'm not focused on whether individuals can act wisely, but rather that such plans often means replacing an insurance policy with an investment account. Those two kinds of financial instruments have extremely different features, benefits, and risks!
So even if believe that's a great idea, be be suspicious of anybody who seems to be trying to hide that aspect of their plan from the public, since it means they're trying to get voters to make an uninformed choice.
However, if you don't let smaller players into the market then they'll be fleeced using some other mechanism (for example, taxed and then handouts given to the wealthy). If access to markets is expensive then small players won't be able to save at all since any method that lets people invest exposes them to risk, and once risk is involved larger players will outmanouver smaller ones.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't but giving people easy access gives people the best shot at achieving prosperity.
I've also heard things that sound like they tend to have sharp eligibility cutoffs or amount calculations. There aren't issues with a 401k if I keep changing employers every few years. And you can't play stupid games with taking lots of overtime for your final year to boost retirement benefits beyond what they "should" be.
This is at least twice as convoluted a process as is necessary to separate people from millions and millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies if the site stays up for a week. People don't bother spinning up stuff like this when the easy stuff works just fine.
The sad thing is that the legitimate ones look just like the illegitimate ones
My first top exchange listing was through a DM
I’ve done partnerships with no name exchanges that turned out fine, also initiated over unsolicited DM
been scammed a few times by people that didnt deliver, and had no intention to
both the legit and illegit ones have no references because their clients are all other token projects whose community needs to feel everything happened organically
scammers take advantage of this desire for secrecy
it’s really just all about niche and specialization
I realize that you probably have no clue how this sounds, so I'm going to translate this sentence into how it sounds to those of us outside the crypto world:
> Both the scammers-of-normal-people and the scammers-of-the-scammers have no references because their clients are all scammers who don't want their marks to know that it's a scam
Please do correct me if I'm somehow misinterpreting the reason why it is so important to these "legit" contacts that secrecy be maintained lest their "community" find out.
Unfortunately, I have no services to provide for the recovery of the resources. After seeing an increase in these kinds of scams in my social circle, I have compiled that book to share my professional knowledge to spread knowledge with everyone.
One of my readers has recently reached out to me about the examples and this has motivated me to start writing these articles for reaching out to more people.
I have no issues to get contacted and I would like to help as much as I can.
That particular scam sounds like the old "binary option" scams out of Israel. Those involved large numbers of people, typically recent immigrants to Israel, working in call centers to con people. The scam binary options brokers were not only rigged, cashing out was next to impossible. Those were finally shut down, after the Times of Israel published a many-part expose, "Predators work at night"[1] Also, one of the big operations tried spamming Wikipedia really hard, which resulted in so much pushback that it attracted significant negative attention to the scams. The people behind those scams were not punished much, and pivoted to crypto, "contracts for difference", and other related scams.
For the simple scams, see r/metaverse-blockchain. This is currently full of pump and dump memecoin scams, promoted as such. Get in and out before the dump is the pitch. Of course, the issuers of the coin are guaranteed a gain, while, collectively, everybody else loses.
There is no "metaverse" component to these coins any more. There used to be claims that the money being raised was going to develop a 3D virtual world. A very few of the "metaverse" coins actually got something going, but most just took the money and ran. Even the ones that got something going didn't do a very good job. The result either looked awful or was so expensive to run server side that they could only run it for special events.
There's several new crap memecoins each week. The promotions look like they come from a template. This looks like a low-effort operation.
Where's the SEC when you need them? (Mostly dealing with higher-dollar scams, actually. They bring the hammer down on one or two crypto scams per month, but there are so many.)
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/tel-aviv-binary-options-firm-a...
Most of the time they do get removed - sometimes successfully before the QRcode is displayed. They even bot the streams so it appears like 30-40k people are watching creating 'social proof'
Suddenly a lot of scammer will contact you in less than 5' with techniques that you cannot imagine are real. For example, telegram handles with the same name as the channel admin but using unicode characters to make tou think it is the same account.
The root issue is the lack of skepticism and verification. At the same time humans have limited energy and verifying everything causes significant fatigue over time, so the problem might as well be intractable.
I believe different browsers have different heuristics about when to switch to that representation - suspicious characters, mixing scripts in the same URL, and so on.
For domain names I use a "corporate" setting in Firefox, disallowing the use of DoH/DoT: to make sure that every single domain name resolution goes through my own local DNS resolver.
And my firewall inspects every packet on port 53 and rejects any packet containing "xn--" (the way they encode Unicode chars in ascii URLs).
For text: my editor is configured to display in bold, fluo, on a dark background any character that is no a visible ASCII char (except newlines and spaces) and "zero width" char are forced to have a width.
But it's a losing battle: too many people don't understand the security implication of using Unicode everywhere.
The most enraging in all this is how stupid these homoglyph/homograph attacks are to pull off: any dumbfuck can pull it off. The bar is insanely low.
Ah yes, homograph/homoglyph attacks. Bruce Schneier warned about that decades ago. He predicted all these homograph/homoglyph attacks.
Work for domain names too seen that there can be internationalized domain names.
although I think it is an interesting idea that scammers intentionally make typos and absurdities, just to weed out discerning people in favor of easier victims, I think there is a larger market for meticulous more legitimate looking scams as well
this one fits somewhere in between
This is an apocryphal anecdote or theory that gets passed around, but I'm not sure how true it actually is, and certainly not universally true. In that, I think scammers are way more likely to just make typos than to setup an elaborate low-level target filter. Regardless, I've also never actually seen scammers admit to this.
[0] https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-w...
Broadly, this is a modern version of what's known as an advance-fee fraud, which has been around for hundreds of years - paying a small amount upfront (hence the 'advance fee') under pretense of receiving a much larger amount later.
But there are plenty of cryptocurrency scams that don't require that. Just some place that looks like an exchange but is actually a money hole.
Honest people get cheated every day.
Well, mom was naive enough to believe it but honest enough to reject it.
It flips the who is scamming and who is the scammer around so that you think you are the one getting an advantage, much like here where you would withdraw some money that clearly is not yours. Much less likely to report.
Also makes the scammers feel less guilty when you also tries to scam another person.
Even though I'm pretty tech-savvy, I'm not sure I could totally avoid falling for this. These scammers don't ask for money directly; they casually mention how they're making big bucks through crypto trading on some app. Naturally, you get curious about the app, but you're still cautious. Then you see it's got a ton of good reviews on the app store, so your trust increases a little.
You install the app, and it looks legit - like it was made by a solid dev team. It offers some limited-time crypto deals where you can't withdraw for a while. The victim invests a little, watches the crypto value climb, and sees their "money" grow on paper. So they put in more. When they finally try to cash out, they realize they can't. They panic and turn to their "romantic partner" for help. That's when the scammers and the fake app squeeze out the last bit of cash, claiming it's for taxes or fees, and they need to put some money. And the victim loses everything.
It's not unreasonable for the victim to think the relationship is real if they've spent months chatting and calling, sharing really personal stuff. Plus, the app seems totally legit, both from the store reviews and how it looks and works. I really hope these scams will disappear soon.
The app mentioned in his video (MetaTrader 5) is still up - and seems actually legit... at least I think?
So is the scam that they send links to fake versions of the app? How'd the reviews look legit then? Or is there some sort of scam they run on the app where they actually have control of your account?
EDIT: nevermind, I found this[1] post that explains it - the app connects to brokers and is not one itself. So they basically just make a fake brokerage and convince you to use it. So John Oliver's explanation was a bit lacking on that part, and misleading/incorrect about MetaTrader 5 itself.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b4070o/...
