I hope the moderators and users here could help to share the article, trying to get as much reach as possible so that the scammers get hit in their operations.
Why not post the full story here?Was wondering the same, especially as the story is not that long and OP has already made a well written chronology of the accident on his blog. My best guess would be this post served two purposes: to report the unfortunate event that OP got and to promote their blog --I honestly can't think of another reason why redirecting readers to the blog and not just copying the entire article here; well, I'm not saying that the practice is not allowed or wrong, just stating the obvious-- given the blog is about scams happened in crypto world --three articles so far. If I may say... it's quite ironic, someone who tried to raise awareness of scam got scammed... LOL?
Anyway, as a good citizen of crypto community, I dive through the --again-- story that's not too long and could be simply copy-pasted into a post here, the tl;dr were:
OP got a message from random user on Instagram, claiming that she's a senior accountant, promoting a new exchange site, tried to play with fire by depositing and withdrawing several times at low amount, and suddenly they gave rules that if you made profit that is larger than the amount you deposited into the site, they'll charge a 20% tax that can only be paid by transfer, deducting from his wallet's balance is not an option. Thus, OP can't do his final withdrawal.
The full story, snipping the whole introduction and scammer's IG profile as it is clear that the profile is fake goes:
Quote
Around late Dec 2021, Started off with a very small amount transferred into Cryptogro platform, made some profit and did a withdrawal successfully back to a well known crypto exchange, Huobi. Started to increase funds to trade and made some profits, then still quite unsure, skeptical about this Cryptogro platform, so did another withdrawal successfully.
Out of a sudden, chenxialing mentioned that CBOT has bought over Cryptogro, so we need to transfer our account balance from Cryptogro to CBOT. This was the part that is strange, because there isn't any news about the acquisition of Cryptogro by CBOT at all and the strange thing was there was a minimum transaction limit in order to do withdrawal, but this transfer from Cryptogro to CBOT does not has this limit. Nevertheless, the transfer from Cryptogro to CBOT was successful, able to do a successful small withdrawal.
On CBOT, followed chenxialing's calls to make several trades and made quite a fair bit of profits, she then suddenly remembered that if the profits made was more than the invested amount, there will be a 20% personal tax on my account balance in order to withdraw any funds! And the tax cannot be deducted from my account balance, unless new funds are transferred into the platform.
That's when a realisation that something is very fishy! Checked around with some other Crypto traders and they all caution against paying this personal tax. When attempted to do withdrawal, this error message was shown:
After this, chenxialing stopped replying me on Instagram and LINE, even the Customer Support within CBOT don’t respond.
SCAMMED!
Please be careful, do research before you invest your funds or trust anyone that reach out to you online or any social channels.
Out of a sudden, chenxialing mentioned that CBOT has bought over Cryptogro, so we need to transfer our account balance from Cryptogro to CBOT. This was the part that is strange, because there isn't any news about the acquisition of Cryptogro by CBOT at all and the strange thing was there was a minimum transaction limit in order to do withdrawal, but this transfer from Cryptogro to CBOT does not has this limit. Nevertheless, the transfer from Cryptogro to CBOT was successful, able to do a successful small withdrawal.
On CBOT, followed chenxialing's calls to make several trades and made quite a fair bit of profits, she then suddenly remembered that if the profits made was more than the invested amount, there will be a 20% personal tax on my account balance in order to withdraw any funds! And the tax cannot be deducted from my account balance, unless new funds are transferred into the platform.
That's when a realisation that something is very fishy! Checked around with some other Crypto traders and they all caution against paying this personal tax. When attempted to do withdrawal, this error message was shown:
After this, chenxialing stopped replying me on Instagram and LINE, even the Customer Support within CBOT don’t respond.
SCAMMED!
Please be careful, do research before you invest your funds or trust anyone that reach out to you online or any social channels.
One question for the OP though, was the 100K USD you claimed you lost is the amount you deposited into their exchange, or was it the sum of what you deposited and the profit you made? If it's the latter, then the actual amount scammed is not 100K.
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.
All in all, as this thread's role is to warn people who do their DD of potential scam by typing certain keywords into the search engine, I'll wrote some key factors here so anyone typing this on google --or duckduckgo-- will get this thread on their search result.
scammers name: (allegedly) chenxialing 陈曉玲
scamming method: contacting through DM, LINE chat, and WhatsApp with these numbers +1 (406) 319-5868 and +1 (706) 578-8023
