Topic: Historically, how good has the Community been at detecting scams early? (Read 206 times)

The scam accusations in the forum are longer than the OP's list, the scams that were covered by mainstream media are just too few than the countless list of scam in the forum since the time of ICOs.  The long list I guess proves the community had accomplished a great community of combating the crypto thieves and there could be more coming.

And the ones that are not published here in the forum to try are probably the ones going to succeed somewhere, which is why when I see someone in linkedin PM me about the project, I will always try to ask the link of the ANN thread in bitcointalk.

Detecting most scams is easy. Plagiarized websites, plagiarized whitepapers, fake teams, stolen pictures, Ponzi structures, ridiculous giveaways, fake Facebook/Twitter/Instragram/whatever profiles, etc. Once you've been active for a few months, you will be able to pretty rapidly get a good idea of what is a scam and what isn't within 20 seconds of reading their thread/website. The community are pretty good at detecting these things early and putting warnings in the relevant places. The problem is that people don't care. They do no research in to either the project itself or in to the reviews for said project. Time and time again we see people complaining that they lost money on scams which have already been outed on this board, or to users with walls full of red trust, or to some shady exchange or mixer that they found via Google, or some cloud mining nonsense, the list goes on.

Avoiding scams is also easy. If you want to use a new service, website, or exchange, that you haven't used before, look on here or on reddit for reviews first. Don't use something brand new or without positive reviews you are sure are from real users. If you want to trade with a user, insist on using a trusted escrow unless you are absolutely sure you can trust them. If you want to invest in an ICO, just don't.

Firstly, I want you to understand that the community are trying their best to figure out scam project as much as they can but they can't smell out all scam project because scam are done in many ways and it not only project that the team run away with investors fund are scam.
I will advice you to go through user
ICOethics post history though he's not online these days, Shasan, tvplus006, Tmfp and o_e_l_e_o

The community in this forum is pretty good at detecting scams imo. It is sad we can't flag the scam projects unless someone loses money first but we can still give negative feedback and that is still fine If you are a research before invest type.

Years ago there was a ponzi scheme called "cointellect" when mt.Gox was happening too at the same time and people warning the others that it was a scam. Many people didn't listen and lost huge money.

Similar stuff is happening right in front of your eyes while I'm typing this post...

For example:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/bitcoin-sv-2371095

Check his posts, this account just screams "SCAM"

This may not be a instant/short term ponzi scam like bitconnect&cointellect once was but it is a long term gonna make you poor slowly like scam. (like bcash too.)

theymos would probably oppose his flag since he didn't scam somebody personally and directly in this forum but I think this flag system is complete bullshit anyway so I supported the flag.

Oh that part rankles huh? lol fragile soul.
It confirms your first statement, but refutes your 'that's not true'.

Cheap-assed nobody or not, your link confirms my statement.

Wrong. http://trilema.com/2015/new-mpex-fee/

Lol idiot don't lash out at me. I got bored of you ages ago as you don't seem to be scamming people any more. Not right this second anyway.

Or are you? Still scamming?

That’s not true, but your account didn’t register until 3 years later so it’s OK that you don’t know what you’re talking about. I guess a BTC is only a BTC when it fits your narrative. I can also understand your hostility, being called out for being a hypocrite & scammer sympathizer.

It was fifty big ones you cheap-assed nobody.

The puppet for the guy who charged 30 BTC just for you to be able to trade on his illegal securities platform? What was the ROI on that investment? Funny the things you call a scam and the people you think are trustworthy.

You can't go wrong with MPOE-PR. There are lots of links here on scams from days of yore:


Yes obviously we are more seasoned. We can detect them better now but there's little we can do after that with the big and/or non-Western ones. For example bitconnect and plustoken got away from us (the limits of the forum). Although it must be said tmfp goes after and exposes some big fishies.

The scam rate in legacy finance is far higher, even without adjudging taxation as a scam!

With the community, yes, if you observe this board or even on beginners and help, lots of scam website are posted, shared with the people who help and volunteer to let the community know the new and common scams.
But even though, there are still people who are thirst for money and st*pid fools who are risking out of nowhere even though there's a higher chance that a service/project are scam.

Oh yeah, and it's much longer than those ones above.  I haven't even heard of at least two of them and I'll have to look them up. 

I'm more aware of scams that take place on bitcointalk than I am with ones in the larger crypto world, and I can tell you that there are some very good forum detectives that try to bust scams before those idiots can fleece people, and I've seen that mainly in the ICO market which, to the best of my knowledge, is dying a slow and agonizing death.  Deservedly so, I might add.  But I'm not 100% sure how many scams were stopped before they started, because nobody has that kind of data.  I don't even know who those poor suckers are who invest in those ICOs or how much money flows to and through them.  I've always wondered about that.

But this is why DT members try to be proactive when it comes to tagging members for shady activity.  You can't do that out in the real world, but you can do it on bitcointalk.  Unfortunately that didn't happen with members like Master-P who pulled off a relatively large scam.  Nobody could have prevented that one if I remember correctly.  I don't think anybody could have prevented Cryptsy from scamming all their customers, either.  That was another big scam that I vividly remember.

Scam is something very old which has been there even before the era of bitcoin or even this forum. Where there is currency/money, there is scam. We can try to fight it, at least in this community, but we can't stop it from happening because there are lots of gullible and greedy people out there who will still fall for the scam tricks.

Being in this forum atleast helps one to be aware of existing scam tactics and scammers and hopefully prevents them from getting scammed but out there, there are still so many ignorant people.

So people here just volunteer, it's not like they are specialists in scam detecting. They just try to warn the community whenever they come across any scam/scammer.

Just getting started, made my first small coin purchases recently.

Very fascinated by the extraordinary history of scams, frauds and thefts surrounding crypto in Bitcoin's decade old history. Craig "Satoshi" Wright, Mt. Gox, Quadringa, Josh Garza, OneCoin... a very long list could be made. While there's good information about the scams themselves (and I'm reading as much of this Scam section as I possibly can), it's difficult to search through all past posts on a name/business chronologically especially from years ago to understand how it all went down (pun intended).

So are there good posts/stories of users (hopefully right here in this forum) who could smell out scams early or exposed them?

Overall, people keep on getting scammed in every single year (the $100s-of-millions numbers are always surprising given the overall crypto market cap) so are we even becoming better at detecting scams..?