Topic: Scam Alert - CBOT / Cryptogro / Instagram Fake User (Read 445 times)

I’ve been there, it’s terrible to find out you’ve been outsmarted. Anybody telling you they’ll flip your bitcoin or help you make large profits from investing your money is definitely a scam. The profits shown on their website is a made up figure, the money isn’t real. It took me series of payments to realize I was being scammed after I was getting no real money back. I spoke to FBI but I still couldn’t get my investment back. I went online in search of another means to get my investment back and came across the vaultech team who says they can help me retrieve all the payment I made via bitcoin. We had a conversation through   vaultechservices @ protonmail . com  where I was told to provide my proof of investment. Thanks to this team, I got all my money back within a month. I’m talking about well over 500k, I’ll be damned if I had lost that.

Mine was same scenario and app, and my conclusion about FBI response is same as yours.  They wanted me to hit up my retirement funds as well but I was already on to them by that time.  Sorry your number is so big, pctiger. I thought mine was bad. Still, they ruined me.

First I got withdrawal errors "Filed to verify" (misspelling).  Flag!
Subsequent withdrawal attempts just stuck in pending.  The handler and support chat people implied I had to complete advanced id verification. Actually sounds normal.
It took 2 weeks for advanced verification to be approved but withdrawals were still getting stuck in pending.  This time, the handler said I have to pay 100K for 'VIP access'.  At the same time, the support chat handler said I had to pay 200K to get my 'credit rating' up to 100. So many layers of BS were piling up by this time, I knew I was toast.

When I reported it to local police, the officer told me of another guy caught in a similar scam a week earlier who reported when he already lost 500K.  They told him don't pay more, but he did anyway, to try and get his money.  He ended up losing 1.1M.  Don't pay!  They have a whole handbook of excuses to get more money.

Unfortunately reporting doesn't mean it will be investigated but the bigger the case becomes the more likely it is to gain their attention.


One of the main reasons why this pig butchering scams worked is because the victims were in a closed space called PMs where outside opinions are less likely to go thru, hence it's not a good idea for anyone here to immediately slide into people's PMs unless we're talking about information that is not suited in public communities.

My scam journey is similar to lor3kcaj. It started with a LINE chat to my phone number by mistake and started a friendly chat and eventually got curious about crypto future trading on the fake CBOT exchange and invested more and more money due to greed and now am out of over $1 million IRA money invested in the fake website and can't withdraw the balance unless I paid the tax which is final kill in the so called pig butchering scam scenario.
I hope my experience served as a warning to others and save them from falling to the scam in time. Looked like cbotcen website will be shutdown as soon as the final butchering phase is complete. Unfortunately, the FBI won't respond in time to catch them while the site is still active

It would be nice to share how you found out about Ree's website. This is because there are a lot of scammers online nowadays and they are trying different ways to scam crypto users. Since you have already fallen into their trap and become a victim of this scam.

So now you have to wait until you get an update on the result of the complaint. Social media is now in the hands of scammers, so any type of offer should be investigated in detail.

astrox411, I've enabled newbie to send me personal messages. Feel free if you want to chat via personal messages to share scam experience. Thanks.

BTW, another url Cbotage also point to the same scam site!!!

Just like astrox411, I’ve scammed by Cbotcen website and it’s asking me to pay 20% capital gains tax separately rather than withholding directly from my account balance! I’m still in contact with my crypto mentor who introduced this website to me and urging me to pay the tax. I’ve already file a complaint to FBI IC3, but do not expect them to respond immediately. Should I continue to stay in contact with my mentor as not to alert her?

Thanks everyone for the advice on taxes.  According to the tax section at http://globalantiscam.org it appears this type of scam can be considered a ponzi scheme and is 95% deductible (USA) if no recovery occurs.  Still I will check out https://cointracking.info/law/ as Potato Chips suggests.  I see conflicting information regarding deduct-ability. 

BitMaxz, you make a very good point about not feeding their rankings by providing a backlink. I should have just wrote 'cbotcen'.  My original thought was that putting in the link would allow future folks to find this thread and identify the site as a scam.  My initial google search on the URL and 'cbot' did not turn up anything suspicious.  I only found this thread after searching again later after it was too late.  It would have saved me.

My testing indicated that there are personal URLs pointing to CBOT instances and any activity on a given URL gets reported to a particular handler.  I won't say here how I found this out, but lor3kcaj mentioning cbotour site in the blog post confirmed it for me.  I would also note that I found cbotcen site was created in early April of this year despite the cbot copyright statement going back to 2018.  One of the first flags raising my suspicion.  In any case, I am expecting them to kill the web site soon since they are at risk if they allow time for investigation from Law Enforcement.  Killing it would be the next step if they were following the playbook described in this video about pig butchering scams:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V95fbNNonAw&t=21s
The vid describes it pretty closely so far, and notes that the next to last step is to demand a fee of some sort in order to get funds released.  I will not be doing that :-/

They were talking about reducing the taxes they owe by declaring losses. If eligible (since not every loss is tax deductible), a portion of their taxable income would be reduced.

I suggest you better don't help them to get a link(backlink) here because that way you are helping them to promote the website you just simply remove this below so that it won't link here.



Same to you don't quote the post that includes the scam website because there is a big help in that website to boost in rankings if you have knowledge about SEO you shouldn't help them to get a link(Backlink) here. If they have a link here on the forum they can easily rank up on the SERP(Google) and more people will be a victim of their scheme.

Do not send them any additional money. The truth is that there is nothing in your account except just figures.

About the taxes. I am not so sure about the taxing policies in your Country but what I have always known is that they mostly tax capital gains, not losses including money lost to scams

It's a blunt scam where you sent money and lost. Not an investment where there was any hope of making gains.

That could be a way to minimize losses but can be another problem if done wrong. I suggest consulting a local CPA who has experience with crypto taxes, this list could help: https://cointracking.info/law/.

Thanks OP for sharing your story. Mine is similar but unfortunately I found out too late and I lost much more than you from CBOT.  It appears that different scam team members use different URLs which point to the same web app.  In my case, it is https://cbotcen.com. 

Like you, they gained my trust after allowing a withdrawal.  Since the charge is 1%, I went small, but the alarms went off after subsequent withdrawals did not work, and I was given stupid reasons for the failures.  They eventually stopped responding to my support queries, and I knew at this point I have been slaughtered.  They are now trying to extort additional money from me, saying I have to pay 200K to get my "credit rating" up to 100.  It was in fact 100 until I started complaining about inability to withdraw, then they suddenly reduced it by 20 points "because of multiple withdrawal attempts".  They claimed the system does it automatically, but the log says the reduction happened at the same time I made my query. 

I have already filed a report with local police and a complaint with FBI, but I am doubtful there is any help or recovery coming.  I am now just focusing on how I can at least deduct it on my taxes.  My initial research does not give hope since theft losses are not deductible.  I have some hope that I can claim it as a "rug pull" which may be considered a capital loss. 

hey @Potato Chips, thanks so much for sharing the evil manipulation pig butchering scam scheme, from the article that you have shared, I found a local support group, consisting of many victims, we are working with our local police dept on investigation and fbi in hopes of getting the scammers discovered and exposed! Should any victims out there reading this forum post and you require help / advice / support - you can visit http://globalantiscam.org for more info.

Thank you again @Potato Chip, if I have known of such highly trained manipulative scammers, this wouldn't be such a costly & painful lesson.

It's totally possible you may have responded to them on a whim and ended up falling deeper into the pit due to their manipulation tricks. Take note that the person you've exchanged with could be highly trained for it, see this leaked (apparently 80-page) training manual for this scheme.

I now ponder as well, with much much regret.

Not sure what the heck was in my mind then, I could have filtered it away, not sure what i started have conversation on WhatsApp with her. Tested with very small amount on the platform and above to withdraw successfully back, probably since then my defence system went down.

Got suspiciously 2x more times, but still able to withdraw successfully.

Definitely not due to lust or having any sly convo, on hindsight, I guess it was greed of the investment returns, which locked me in and then screwed ball.

For people reading this thread, if you have this suspicious feeling in your heart or mind or any cell in your body, please trust it. Don't get blindly like me. FUG me.

Why do you trust this Instagram account where the number of followers of that user is very small. Because of the amount of transactions that you are talking about, trusting an Instagram account in this way, joining any platform and making large amount of transactions does not seem reasonable to me.

hi @holydarkness,

Saw the very faint liner. Yes, I am the victim that was being scammed that is raising awareness.

Thanks for copying the content over and summarising.

In respond to "I am leaning toward a very likely scenario where their trading platform is rigged so you'll easily made profit to lure you into trusting them. Thus, let's say you deposited 1,000 USD and made 99,000 usd of trading "profit", the total amount scammed is not actually 100K, but rather 1,000.", according to the screenshot, the customer told me to pay USD101680, that's 20% of the account balance. I invested around 100K USDT and followed chenxialing 陈曉玲 to flip to around 500+K USDT (which obviously everything is fake now). See below screenshot as evidence:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi5zpb4ZyCpZZYzgPa6p-0cjPcfX6J4gN9jYpNo3uk9BcxVdwrKtSdXVbejTrnRIijRKjlBPHA-oWSm6yvBBW8ahDLkT4sM5G-cLsqUtspsyvYVEek72ptLfbwfirhKl8PN3q8aZuGyJG7oOF14ErXQZXtNhmfYZUfmSa1JZTTmR11LfojIIg1LalKS4w=s320
(sorry, i don't know how to add an image inline)