My mom and her friend are buying into this new "cryptocurrency" they heard about from another friend, and now they're trying to get me involved. Currently my mom's friend has poured about $5000 into buying these coins from the "creators" before the coin is even available to mine, and when I look them up the only thing I can find referencing them is their own website. Also a huge red flag for me is they asked for social security information to set up their wallets?
It sounds entirely like a ponzi scheme. I don't know a whole lot about cryptocurrency and I was hoping to get a second opinion on all of this.
They have two versions of their website both on the same domain but seem to be separate as I can find no way to access the other page from the links at the top: one which sort of just describes what cryptocurrency is but is full of grammar mistakes and jargon that doesn't mean anything
http://millenniumusa.net/products.php# and another that seems to be advertising a program you can purchase to trade coins for you but has no real info about it.
http://www.millenniumusa.net/ Looking at their white paper
http://millenniumusa.net/WHITE-PAPER-v1.pdf (which only actually works on one of the sites) and ignoring the fact that their starting price and projected growth for their coins sound absolutely ridiculous, they say they're trying to get listings for their coins on Cryptopia.co.nz and Coinexchange.io (both of which i can only find info of them existing sometime last year) which, when I look them up, have a ton of reviews each saying that they're scam sites that often lock people out of their accounts once they get coins in and when the transactions do work they charge high fees.
When looking up the the Managing Director for Millennium USA Ruben Rivera I can find two sites saying he formed their LLC about 8 months ago but it gets lost in results about the baseball player, so that's convenient.
So, is this a scam? If it is, is there any way to get the 5k back? Also if this is a scam, is there someone I can contact to get this person to stop running an ICO scam? They are having me talk with the 'creator' on Monday in a phone conference and I'd really appreciate help getting more points to call him out on. Any help is appreciated.