Cryptocurrency scammers absconded with the worth of more than $ 2 million money of investors
Today, a lot of start-up is open in the name of cryptocurrency trading business. But how many of them are fake and how many of them are true, nobody knows. Investors who believed in these kind of business have lost more than $ 2million, trusting the idea of start-ups.
There are lot of fake start-ups, who attract investors towards their business by making fake profiles at social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and others. They create false IDs taking any person’s picture from Google. The main motto of such fake start-ups is to collect funds from thousands of investors in the name of Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
ICOs all around the world
An ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering, a method to raise funds for the business from public. This is the new technique that is being used instead of raising funds from venture capitalist. The start-ups involved in ICO call people for investing and trading in cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Ripple and in return, they have to buy their coins that will further provide services in exchange of those coins or which may attain higher worth in future.
There is huge Money involved in ICO. According to CoinSchedule, a popular website which keeps track on ICO, Last year total investment was found to be of worth $3.8 billion whereas this year people have invested $2.8 billion.
There is no central authority or any regulation regarding ICOs in many countries. That’s why investors who invest in ICO may not enjoy the benefits as they do while spending in stock markets. But, some regulatory bodies who take care of these kinds of activities are keeping a close attention towards start-ups who call for public funding named ICO to lower down the number of such scams.
The fraud is done by the start-up called Giza. They started calling for ICO in the month of January, investors told that they found it legitimate but did not know that their money is going to sink. The ICO was carried out for the start-up by false picturing the idea of establishing secure software that would allow people to store their cryptocurrency.
They start provoking people to invest in their start-ups for the sake of ICO (Initial Coin Offering). The start-up GIZA raised total of 2,100 Ethereum coins with the total worth of $2.4 million. But, $16 worth of those coins is gone. The scam was revealed at the time, when GIZA announced on the internet that they have cut ties and they might not be developing anything. Also, GIZA’s website was removed last Friday although an archived version can be seen here.
One of the questions arises here is that money invested in, can be traced. Money was sent through multiple cash wallets that store cryptocurrency and exchange where investors trade in cryptocurrencies. One can track the passage of money by following the wallet address. Most amount of money from GIZA is sent to distinct wallet addresses. During the investigation, it was found that the money was also sent to Bee Token, an ICO related to another big scam.
Cal Evans is one of the advisory of GIZA firm, he runs Gresham International, a cryptocurrency strategy & compliance firm. He said that investors started to talk to him when they found something is going wrong. He further said that he was convinced that when it was started, everything was found to be legitimate, but when they started talking to the people they also cut ties last month with GIZA. Lastly, he assured that we are going to search those frauds, no matter what it takes to find them.
