Hi all,
I have recently been scammed and lost about 7,000€, and I´d like to share my experience so you guys can be savvier that me in the event that someone approaches you with similar intentions. Here we go:
I met this girls on tinder in mid September this year. She was from Hong Kong and was living in Hong Kong but she said that was trying to match with people from Madrid (which is where I live) because she was planning to come to Spain in November. She must have deleted that tinder profile because I can´t her pictures nor the conversation anymore but I remember after the first quick chat she suggested to continue the convesation on whatsapp.
We chatted for about 3 days in a row about our lives in general, nothing that made me suspicious about her but she said she worked in finances for a company. After that, we didn´t talk at all for about 2 week until she began to talk to me and started chatting agaig. Looking back now, I notice that she was starting to introduce this scam in the conversation very subttlely sending me screenshot of what she would call “her work”.
Then this girl tried to get me in to “investing” in this cryptocurrency called HC from www.housecoinex.com, I didn´t take it too seriously and said no a couple of times but she kept on insisting and I thought it could be a scam but at some point I said okay, I’m going to put 100€ if they are gone they are gone, it’s not the end of the world. I had never invested in cryptocurrencies before, all I knew is that a lot of peolpe are starting to invest in this thing and can be very profitable so it may be worth the risk – I´ll try and see what happens. Also, I am probably too naive but she really came across as an honest person and someone that actually makes a living out of investments.
So, she guided me through the process of transfering my money to my account on www.housecoinex.com and convert it to HC. I would send her screenshots of where I was and she would send them back to me indicating with an arrow where to click. The process is basically as follows:
1- you transfer money from your bank account to your www.coinbase.com wallet, then
2- convert it to BTC and send this to your account on www.housecoinex.com.
3- Once your BTC are in www.housecoinex.com you have to exchange them for dollars
4- And finally you exchange dollars for this coin called HC
I tried to withdraw the Money from this website back to my coinbase wallet just to make sure I was able to, and I was! Even tough I just withdraw 5 USD, that made me trust the system a bit more. And the website didn´t look to dodgy either.
At the time I transferred my first 100 USD HC was worth between 2 and 3 USD and the laidy said that it was expected to increase up to 10 USD over the next three months, which was very tempting. After a few days she suggested that I should increase my investment and I was more that keen to do it. I sent 2000€ and told myself that was it, I wasn´t going invest any more that that. After a week or two of seeing how the value of the HC was increasing day after day I stopped questioning whether or not the website was legit and decided to invest more money little by little, 1,000€ here, 2,000€ there… up to 10,000€.
One morning about two weeks ago, for some reason I googled “cryptocurrency scams”, which led me to an article that described a type of scam very similar to all this story. The article said that victims of this scam usually usually find out thta the have been scammed when they try to withdraw their money once the investment “is completed” and they can´t do so. I googled the cryptocurrency to see whether or not it was a fictional currency and it does exist. However, the actual value of HC is approximately 0.8$ and not 5.2$ as www.housecoinex.com was showing. Even though I was already panicking, I thought, maybe there are 2 different HCs that are not worth the same, so I compared their respective value graphs and found out that graphs were pretty much identical until a few months ago. I did a few more searches and saw that the domain www.housecoinex.com had been registered on the 30th of August 2020. That was the moment I knew I was seriously screwed.
That same morning I began transfering part of my funds back to coinbase, little by little to stay under the radar. Managed to retrieve 3,000€ before my account was “frozen”. This girl keeps claiming the website was legit and that she had recharge 50% of her funds before to unfreze her own account as well.
The transactions where made from the following addresses in case some of you are keen to dig into this:
bc1q0dzcktvjf8dxla5esl8lyfh5l0cp9kguagj340
33bxiTCiTamStgTHiTLPcaNVfJPx11Afyq
38VGuL26Rgqoi3xp6L2sTbVC5ReNRUpB74
3Eu1Qi62eWnGGskqgzVP5tywvEuqr9YXax
bc1qplh086atdp4ent74sl5uk3f8p8dg5jerfqa0cu
33mwLhknhNWvVXmSuffs7aHneyEJBvDuRC
32zywPz1PV59kLkEUuBEG8nuE6k9KCr8Kh
Cheers,
A.
