Topic: [CLOSED] ★ VESCUDERO's Risk-free Weekly Term deposits at 1.5% ★ (Read 35057 times)

Now it's time to close this thread.

As I previously announced, in the next months I will focus my attention on conventional trading, providing liquidity to the bitcoin market. I will be buying bitcoins at a discount rate and selling them for a small fee.

I encourage you to follow this trading activites in this new thread in the currency exchange section.

I'm sick of all of these guys talking about a scam that didn't take place and about a hipothetycal case when somebody would do a new scam in future based on his well gained reputation thanks to this succeeded bussiness.

I need to tell you something, this is over. This thread is not needed anymore.

I'm unwatching this thread.

Nope.
This guy had it right:


I actually didn't have any coin with Victor at all as I was suspicious that it would turn out to be a scam, or that he had hidden ponzi exposure as Patrick did and would wind up insolvent in the same way.

However, the guy has paid back every investor in full. If he shortly launches another larger deposit scheme let's judge that one then. For now though, there's no reason to believe that he's going to do so.
If you're going to go around targeting scammers, check out the bullshit RustyRyan's trying to pull 

Wow, you're right. That's much more reasonable. It must be totally above board with that kind of rate.


Um gee, ya think?

If I recall correctly, Shadow383 was one of the most vocal people against pirate.

Since there are so many people that are certain of vescudero's nefarious intentions, I think we need a new bet. How should the wording be to make sure you don't skip because of technicalities? Scammer label till mid 2013? A new scheme and then default till mid 2013? Longer?

You forgot a few things: first of all, the interests were not compounding, so this is not 1.5% weekly => 117% yearly, but 1.5% weekly => 78% early. Moreover, it ran for what, 10 weeks? So it means 20% max if it had been at 2% all along (which is not the case). This would mean a maximum investment of 748 BTC if Victor had to pay everything out of his pocket and everyone had kept their investment for the maximum time at a rate of 2%, or 655 BTC at a average rate of 1.75%. That's not really a big deal, and in reality the interests were probably lower than that (the detailed computation can be performed from the published data).

When he started doing this, it was easy to loan money at 3% a week, and get it back. Assuming Victor did this, I guess he started to build a reserve with the extra interests he got. When the other people rate went down, Victor promised interest rates also went from 2% to 1.5%. He probably had difficulties when others started to fail. He may even have had to compensate some defaults by buying more bitcoins himself. He wanted, as he announced it, to establish himself as someone that could be trusted. So far, he took upon himself to give everybody their money back with the promised interests, even if he probably endured a loss by doing so.

Moreover, you also forget that Victor gave his personal information, verified by several people, along with pictures, including at public events, we know where it works, I think Micon had it checked by a friend of his from his employer internal directory, so yes, this increases the confidence.

If Victor was to start a venture in the bitcoin world, I now think more people would trust him than before, because he stood by his word, with not a single deviation from the beginning, although a good part of the bitcoin world broke loose at the same time. I certainly would trust him more than before. Maybe I'm gullible, but what kind of guarantee would satisfy you?

Everyone is a *potential* scammer. Heck, I may even have dealt with people on #bitcoin-otc and used my real and public identity to do that to instill confidence, but nobody (not even me) can predict what the future will be made of! Even the most trusted person can become crazy. What you need if you want to ensure you will not be scammed is regulations (k out of n signatures for example), because you can never know what a person will do next, even if you think you can guess so.

May I remind you that pirateat40 also had stellar reputation over multiple months before his theft. He also had fairly big depositors. He also had supporters, people just like you, ardently arguing that pirateat40 always paid, and that, therefore, there is no way he was going to turn out to be a fraudster.

The rest is history.

My guess is, based on your broken logic, you would have supported pirateat40 as well at the time, am I right? Think about that very deeply. And try to understand why your logic is broken.

Bottom line, there is no free money. 1.5% weekly == 117% yearly. There is almost no way Vescudero is legit, especially when his operations match almost all the Ponzi red flags established by the US SEC, which I keep quoting again and again: http://www.sec.gov/answers/ponzi.htm

I was right about pirateat40. I will be right about Vescudero again. Gullible investors will continue to lose their coins 

+1
Assuming the list in the OP is correct, it seems viktor paid out 400-450 BTC in interest. Thats substantial, but not a huge amount to invest in your credibility if you plan on doing another Pirate.

The OP might give a clue here: "Why do I offer such a high interest for my 100% guaranteed deposit? I am interested in slowly building my reputation here as a bitcoin trader". Weird reason if you ask me.

My prediction: within a month viktor will start another round, with lower interest rates, perhaps even without guarantee. And he will have no problems collecting far far more than 450 BTC.

You are right that fixed interest schemes should automatically be suspected. But Victor's program was well within the acceptable range.

The problem is, the community went a bit too euphoric and suffered for it. This is the same pattern with the 2011 crash. Micon's mania is also analogous to the same problem. He's now onto defaming "supposed" newbies, some of which have been members of this forum a year longer than vescudero.

I don't think victor needs to use a bunch of shill accounts. There are clearly more than enough morons on this forum to deposit into any scam that shows up.

He could be going for a bigger scam
He could have run a successful ponzi pass thru by depositing and getting out in time
He could just be taking everyones money and betting it on satoshi dice and got lucky

The fact that he paid out does not make this a good investment.

What are you, a fucking idiot? Maybe if you had listened to this guy you wouldn't have lost so much money in ponzi schemes.

Deposit plus interest paid. Will do business again

There's a full list of users with deposits on page 1 - there are a lot of fairly big users in there.
Can't you just settle for the fact that you were wrong about this one for once?

Your the kid no one wants around but you need to hang with because his parents called your parents aren't you?

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Think all of these are real users with real investment?

That is an interesting thought and an interesting gamble. He could well have been doing that. Equally he could have bought the trust of the community for the low price of $9k in order to abscond with a much larger sum later on. I am not calling him a scammer by any means, it's clear to see that he hasn't scammed anyone with this scheme.  I am just saying that running a very high interest deposit scheme like this is suspicious as hell, and the fact that he paid everyone back at the end doesn't make it suddenly beyond suspicion.

I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation that he spent 898.320 BTC on interest. That's actually on overestimate as I assumed a uniform 2% throughout (did not account for the change to 1.5%), among other things.

If you take that as being about USD $9,000 (again, rough calculation), to put things in more familiar terms, you can ask: is that really a big deal?

For most people, it's a big deal. But if you are a wealthy person who has money to put into bitcoin, maybe not.

He did claim to put money into loans and other projects. So that could offset some of the cost, perhaps.

In that vein, if vescudero expected a fall in bitcoin price, he could have been pursuing the following strategy:
Step 1: Borrow lots of bitcoin
Step 2: Sell it for fiat
Step 3: Bitcoin price crashes
Step 4: But back bitcoin to pay back depositors
Step 5: Profit

If the strategy works, you make big money. If the strategy fails, you only lose a fraction of what you stood to gain, i.e. (in this case) around $9,000.

Just some random, hopefully interesting thoughts.

If people want to continue accusing vescudero of scamming, it would be interesting to look at the list of depositors and see how many no established reputation, small post counts, and/or login patterns that support being socks. (I suspect you will find this data to *not* substantiate scamming accusations, but I don't know for certain. For the record, he currently has a well-deserved positive rating from me on bitcoin-otc.)

He's definitely doing something

Either some of the transactions are fake, or this guy lost a lot of money for the purposes of building up trust.

I'm sure there are some legitimate reasons for someone to drop a lot of money to build up trust quickly. Maybe his reputation is going to help him do some fantastic, honest, business deals in future.

If you ask me though, there's something fundamentally suspicious about a man who runs a high yield investment program at a loss to himself for the purposes of building trust quickly. It screams "confidence scam"

Of course most people here lack the critical faculties to recognize this.

He calls everyone out as a scam, so he's bound to get some right.

Micon - you got one wrong.  Deal with it, move on.  You've got some right too.  No-one bats 100%.