Topic: How easy do you think it is to invest in trust feedback in order to swindle? (Read 439 times)

Things like this always happens if they already had an evil intention towards the business, they always have a target for running such business...Lemme say if campaign or business being established in the crypto space or in real world and they had a plan of scamming people some billions such persons don't mind spending several millions into the business in order to achieve their plans and they can run for long time till they met their target, it could last for years maybe 3 to 5 years working underway to make sure their plans are being executed but where the problems lays is identity.

Most people that has such evil intention do not always want their identity to be revealed and even if such people revealed their identity they go hiring people to showcase themselves but internally there are people who are running business and have evil plans to scam people because their minds already compromised towards that business. If the business finally gained ground or being established an gained trust then they strick people off that is why most scammers I mean those people who scammed billions or millions do not just sacrifice only 100k rather but would make it in away to gain trust from around.

I don't understand why anyone would want to do this if they succeed with launching a casino/mixer, it's not even a guarantee that if you start a casino/mixer that it will be successful.
I can just talk for myself but if I would start a successful online company whatever it is, that bring me an income every month. I would never destroy it just for some "quick & stressful" cash.
Rather be honest and proud then steal and hide!  

- Regards BabyB. 👼

The scammer on his long term mission to pull off an exit scam can easily use one of those International parcel forwarding services like shipito.com. All he will share with his trading partners is an address generated to him by the service, but not his actual address

I can think of a P.O. Box that you can hire somewhere far from where you live. The sender will know the country where you live and probably the region, little else. There are countries where you don't even need to hire a P.O Box, you can receive anonymous shipments in certain places:

If I remember this case correctly, I think that the mixing service requested to withdraw the money from the escrow and the money was sent to them without notification. I suggested the same thing to @WWM and it helped many people in getting their money back after the disappearance of WWM, so in the case of smartmixer the damage would have been minimized by using escrow money.



How will the receipt address be hidden? I think it will leave a loophole to know the whereabouts of scammer, which is the last thing any scammer would want, especially since you may be asked to pic Collectibles after receiving them.

There’s no way to prevent this since all of us here is anonymous which means we are relying on trust to each other same with the project that launching here in the forum.

I believe we can only minimize the damage instead of totally stopping it by reminding everyone to deposit only what they can afford to lose. A project will never be tagged as a scammer if they still didn’t commit the crime.

This is same scenario on other businesses outside the forum like exchanges that usually file bankruptcy when they are losing profit.

That kind of understanding, I personally remain optimistic, bad and good are two different problems, they can come and go based on situations, circumstances and actions that we don't want to expect.

The beginning was honest and good, at the end of the story it ended in fraud, my understanding is that in situations like that there are separate factors and reasons for this to happen, the essence of which is that every company or something hopes to be successful and develop in the future, no well-known company wants to end their career with the impression of fraud, except as I said above.

The success and failure of a company greatly influences the people who run it, even though the company was initially respected and ended up being criticized, whatever you have seen, my judgment is on the owner.

That's called a "long con", where someone pretends to be honest to pull a big exit scam. It happens, and there's not much we can do about it other than not trusting anyone.

There's a much easier way to "invest" in positive feedback: buy and sell a few Collectibles, even better if you use an escrow and the escrow leaves you positive feedback (for paying for their services) too.

Not that easy because a scammer would have to spend lots of Bitcoins just gain exposure and maybe some reputation, also having members use your platform to send huge amounts of money takes a very long time, but it's mostly with newbies. Old members in this forum prefer old trusted mixers. I think a one smartmixer.io pulled off such an exit scam and took someone's 10 BTC.

He made a mistake to mixer all the Bitcoins at once through a not so trusted mixing service that was still new.

There's always a possibility of getting scammed or manipulated when you make choices solely based on trust rankings and feedback.  Those can be faked pretty easily. 

But I agree that most businesses that have built up their rep over many years are less risky than some fly-by-night operation that just popped up out of nowhere and  the longer it's been around and the more resources the owners have invested, the less likely it is to be scam.  Why would you spend thousands of dollars setting up a legit business just to make a little bit of money scamming people? Not saying that never happens, but it's less plausible.  Still, even long-standing businesses can have some red flags if you know what to watch out for.  It comes down to how savvy you are at spotting sketchy tactics versus how tempted you are by deals that seem too good to be true.

Yeah, I initially planning to do that, to create a summary of active scam accusations against them and use it as my reference. But with me being me, I figure I might took some time to create it with desired format. Meanwhile, I visited CG earlier and noticed a good amout of open cases against them. I think it'll be better to place the warning with "temporary" reference link, to immediately warn users, before [perhaps] moving to a more established one.

Yes, the BC.Game case is what made me think about this, but in the thread I wouldn't want to focus on them, otherwise I understand that the right thing to do would have been a summary thread in Scam Acusations that could have an OP like your post or a thread in this section about the reputation of BC.GAME, their representative on the forum.

Am I correctly assuming this thread has a relation with a recent piling [unattended] scam accusations against BC.Game and their silence? A concern that it'll follow Betnomi's step? I've tried hard to reach them and encourage them to solve cases raised against them, but... well, ultimately, the decision is all theirs.

For the time being, I am placing a warning for forum members to use this platform with grains of salt due to the complaints, be it in this forum, or on arbitrators; regrettably, in form of negative feedback. I tried to delay this feedback as long as I can in hope that they'll deescalate the situation by addressing the concerns, but it gets piling instead of decreasing.

Allow me to borrow your thread as a list and reference point for my feedback. The amount of dispute on the open cases below can probably also help judging how serious their situation is. As for BC's representative, if you read this, hopefully the list below can help you on navigating the cases you need to attend.

---

Currently, these are the open cases against BC.Game, with the declared fund being confiscated:

BC.game asking me to lose intentionally, then confiscating funds by GekkeBelg | resolved | mBTC88
BC GAME LOSES DISPUTE AGAINST ME - AND STILL DOES NOT PAY MY WINNINGS by Jannn [a continuation to this thread] | resolved | $3,409
BlockDance B.V., BC.Game and its Fraudulent “Operator Verifier” by earlypaco | resolved | $7,111
BC.Game cancelled my bonuses and locked my account with $100k+ USD balance by -god- | resolved | $250,000
BC.Game - can't withdraw 7.97 BTC by dplay | resolved | BTC7.97

---

Edit:
Recent development:
[21.11.23]
- Case with dplay changed to "unresolved" as a result that BC stopped responding on AskGamblers after previously said they'll process the withdrawal immediately. The arbitrator marked the case as unresolved too.
- Case with earlypaco marked by CasinoGuru as unresolved.
- Case with Jannn marked by CasinoGuru as unresolved.
[24.11.23]
- Case with dplay got partially solved. BC asked AG to reopen the case and paid the due balance in USDT [124,000]. dplay got compensated with some amount of USDT, although not to what's agreed or desired. Thus, partialy solved, because the player still think he's not whole with the compensation but can't do much other than accepting the offer.
[26.11.23]
- Case with GekkeBelg got resolved. BC explained the misunderstanding happened that stemmed from the odds provider's side. Confirmed by GekkeBelg that he got the due amount and is satisfied with the result.
- Case with Jannn got resolved. BC acknowledged their oversight in details of the terms for bonuses, compensated Jannn in full with the amount due, and is planning fix the details to better convey the terms of bonus.
[27.11.23]
- Case with earlypaco got resolved. BC paid in full with current BTC rate.
- dplay got the rest of his balance as per requested, totalling USD 170,000. Pending for clarification and withdrawal, but for the time being, I am marking it as solved.
[08.12.23]
- Case with -god ruled as resolved by Casino Guru with the result favoring BC, where the casino has full right to confiscate funds under advantage play.

If you are dedicated enough, nothing is impossible. You can scam thousands of people here. All it needs a careful planning and following the plan step by step. You can start a business which looks perfectly legit, hire reputable members to shill for you...

1- Your legit looking scam business may actually produce profits. In this case taking it down and scamming people will cost you more than keeping it running. Many people will go after you, you will be a target and for what? Taking down a good business. That's stupid. If you are clever enough to get this far, you can continue to run this business and print money.

2- If you are not making profits and hemorrhaging money, then it is inevitable. You can only survive as long as new people join your establishment and when that pool of new players dry off, your ponzi scheme will collapse and then you will have to make a choice: "Me or them". Since people are greedy and selfish, of course you'll say "fuck em"

I am not informed with the details but the casino you mentioned probably went with the second option.

I remember similar scammers who presented their “projects” in very colorful ways. This was in 2018. A time when bounty projects and sites with shitcoins for investment were created daily, several of them. So, a couple of scammers started an activity here on the forum that was difficult to determine at first glance as a scam. They created websites and created videos with the public, who were supposedly very interested in the project. They rented offices and hired actors who were excellent at speaking and inviting slogans for investing. I remember that our old scammer hunter discovered their location in a completely different place from where they positioned themselves.
Everything was very well organized, but all the investors and our hardworking bounty hunters never got anything.  Scammers were found on social networks with colorful photos of a beautiful life.
Nowadays, new technologies make it much easier for scammers to create fraudulent projects. With the advent of AI tools, it will do everything for them. And if we say that investors today want to trust something new, it is really very difficult for them to determine future fraud.
Therefore, one stable option to avoid falling into the clutches of scammers is to trust Bitcoin.

In general, I see there's no way to make sure the project will not scam except:

1. The project is created or a part of high ranked account, since we all know most users care with their reputation, if they're a creator or a part of the project, this will decrease the probability to exit scam since they risking their reputation. I know there was a campaign manager suffer from this case, but it's not easy to build back his reputation.

2. The creator is really transparent with their bankroll, this will make people know how much the money inside the casino. Even better if they willing to set up a 2 of 3 multi sig wallet where the creator, escrow, and manager hold the key.

3. Escrow a huge amount of money (see Whirlwind)

Remember, before the signature campaign achieve 30 months old or long term, they need to start from week 1 and they can scam after few months.

If I look at a scam scheme, in my opinion there are 3 things that could possibly happen.

1. They planned to cheat from the start

2. His business was not going well so he abandoned his business because it went bankrupt

3. The business is too difficult and they don't want to continue. The brand chose to abandon the business and walk away with the customer's money

In my opinion this is the best answer in the thread, but I am without smerits as of now.


Yes, if you look at the OP I say something similar, the exit scam would be more of a backup plan in case things go wrong.

There is no way to stop scam completely - it will continue to happen and just requires awareness and vigilance. This forum never moderates scam - meaning each user is responsible for not being easily scammed and also not being greedy about anything. Do analysis and anything that can make you sure that you won't be easily scammed – that's what people do to minimize unexpected losses.

I don't know about Betnomi and I won't talk about it. Any platform can turn out to be a scam - even some trusted casinos can be accused of scammed one or more users. So always be careful because scammer will always be around with their various clever tricks.

Scams are a super broad term.  I think as some folks said already, most businesses don't start out trying to rip folks off.  There's usually other stuff going on that sends them down that road, or sometimes it's just plain old incompetence at the wheel.  Take FTX Exchange for example.  Was it meant to be a scam originally? Heck if I know.  But it's obvious the people in charge didnt have the skills to pull it off proper. and  If their plan was to take the money and run from the start, they could've done it ages ago - changed their names vanished somewhere off the grid where no one would find 'em.  But they didn't do that, so maybe it wasnt a scam after all.  Just lousy management.

That’s often the likely scenarios about some projects that later turns out to be the unexpected or scam projects.

I don’t see any reason as to why, a successful business would choose to run away over people’s money and end what could have generated continual and regular funds for the owner. Of course that’s not how someone who hopes to create a lasting brand would think or perhaps, it just wasn’t there line of business at all but even that could be developed on when the going gets good.

I don’t know for the Betnomi project but, I think I’ve been around a while to see them conduct there affairs here and they were okay.
Most times, you just don’t expect the sort of wins that you might experience on your platform and when your not meeting up your ends to the payment, you become a scam. Not to mention the lots of abusers that would be exploring the platform on different levels.

Why would you open a business, spend thousands of dollars, and run after a small profit? If the business is a solid business and is running smoothly continually generating you a revenue stream, then your obvious goal would be to keep it running and keep it legit right?

You mention Betnomi so I want to talk about them for a second. I think we all learned a lesson on that 1 as warning signs were there, we just kept trying to give them the benefit of doubt as eventually they always came through. I had stopped working with them long before any of the scam happened, but there were issues then otherwise I would have never stopped working with them. I'm still not convinced the owner ran off with thousands of dollars, but I could be very wrong. I think he couldn't pay what users had in their accounts, had no way to come up with it and decided to get outta dodge.

I don't know that we can stop scammers 100% but we should definitely always keep our eyes open and learn from the past.

This is difficult to detect from the start if you look at the comparison between their expenses and income. Just to get a positive score, they are spending multiple thousands of dollars per week for their exposure in one place while they are unlikely to earn that kind of revenue as a new service.

The only thing that can prevent this is that you have to be more selective about which positive scores are relevant to their services. Personal transactions by account representatives do not conclude that the service is completely secure.

I do not know if there is a way to prevent this completely. I just do not think its possible.  But we can fight back by getting the word out about these scams and their shady tactics.  The best defense might be awareness - the more folks know what to watch for, the less these jerks can take advantage and  its like community immunity - safety in numbers.   I believe its a collective effort to keep the space safe. Plus if we make it a thing to always double-check everything, and fostering a culture of due diligence, instead of just trusting blindly, that helps too.  So maybe be skeptical of anything new or anything that seems too good to be true. 

What do you think could be done to make these scammers' lives a bit harder?

This is an anonymous platform and bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous, anyone can do anything here and since the legal framework is not that advanced to convict someone for a crime like this, such incidents are not uncommon.

Another example, other than the OP's one, is building trust by taking loans from reputed lenders and then one fine day scam the last lender. Yet another one is a bitcoin physical collectible owner making name for themselves and even meeting some users in real life and then scamming them (the yogg incident).

The fact remains that while dealing with someone on the internet, deal with then with your bag of paranoia. Any site/coin/person can go to the dark side and thus you have to risk your money on that, without putting faith in older trust ratings. All ratings are subjective and hence should be taken with salt.

The longer the period and investments, the less the possibility of scam. For example, ChipMixer invested more than 100 bitcoins in the signature campaign, and therefore they will not scam for 10k. In fact, Sinbad and YoMix campaigns are doing it now, as I assume that the cost per week is $4,000, and therefore they worked for about a year or 48 weeks, and we can say They will not scam you for small amounts.

In general, I can say that any signature campaign that is more than 30 months old is safe for small transactions of less than $10K.

Therefore, all scam campaigns do not last more than a 10 months and if you check, you will find that all scam signature campaigns were closed before tthat due to the high costs compared to the profits.

Note here that I took one criterion to determine scam, which is signature campaigns, and I did not take details trust system.

+ If you notice any DT member placing positive trust without having tried the service and/or dealing with this member, it is best to remove him from your trust list.

I don't know anything about  betnomi and whatnot, but if you wanna stop scams, don't go after scammers and waste your time, there are more than 8 billion people on this planet, and potentially 500 billion online identities if they wanted to, so there is no shortage of scammers since one man can come, scam, get caught, leave and come back again with new identity to rinse and repeat.  So the best course of action is to educate people, if people are educated and vigilant, there will be little to no scams.

Educate people like this :  DO not spend-invest-deposit more than what you can afford to loose, that way a few will burn, but people start to understand how things should work, you either trust a person or a service which has a trusted face/name behind it, or if the service is a mixer and no one would put a face on it, then play as low as possible, meaning to deposit-send what you can afford to loose.

Because of a case that I don't see clearly lately, I've been thinking about this.

Let's think about someone who knows the forum well and plans to make a scam beforehand. He launches a casino or a mixer, the most typical, and for that he makes an initial investment. He hires people to make him an Ann, maybe design something, and run a signature campaign, things like that, which most likely will earn him positive feedback.

So the business starts to work, and the only question I have here is that if it works by doing it honestly, why are you going to rip people off, but it could be like a backup plan for when the chips are down. You stop withdrawals, you stop responding, you disappear with the money.

It sounds to me like some recent cases might fall into this category, like Betnomi.

I don't know if you share my reading of this, and if you can think of any way to prevent it.