Human greed for money gives birth to a lot of scams in the world of business. Most of these scams are obvious or has tell-tale signs of some murky endings. But still people put their hard-earned money in these dubious schemes. Why? Because they too are very greedy and expect some miraculous returns on their investments. So actually, it’s greed that fuels all scams, scamsters and the scammed. It’s our greed that blinds us to those obvious initial tell-tale signs of a scam-in-making.

Fortunately, I was never scammed so far or I should put it in a better way that I never let someone scam me …until now. Yes, until I invested some money in the BellyRub Bank. Today, many people are surprised of this “unexpected” scam and still somehow feel that @zeartul had a good intention and their money will be returned back some day. But I was apprehensive of my investments from the day one. Here’s why:

How BellyRub lured me?

Three months’ back, I was quite new to this platform and hadn’t even started making my regular posts. I hardly had accumulated some 50 liquid SBDs by putting hundreds of comments on various posts I used to read here regularly. Thereafter writing a few posts, I tried using some bidding bots. Although they were profitable most of the times, it was a time killer for me. Before using a bidding bot, I had to monitor a lot of tabs, like to check the bot’s wallet for total payments coming in, bot’s VP for estimating the time it will take to reach 100%, bot’s last voting time to calculate the total payment in the current voting window, etc. And after trackng all these, there was still a chance to make a loss due to some last moment payment barging into the bot’s wallet.

So I was turned off by all these bidding bots. But I knew these bot owners are making a killing. And then came this new bot called @bellyrub. It was new kid on the block but working well with a huge upvote power. After a while its owner @zeartul came up with a bank called @bellyrubbank and made an open offer of 45% APR to everyone in return of their investment of any amount over 20 SBDs for 3 months' term. Now I had 50 SBDs sitting idle in my wallet. I thought it’s better to put them to some use. Being new to this world of cryptos, I thought such high APR offers are perhaps a norm here and there might be even better schemes going on, which I wasn’t even aware of. So this bank is probably making a competitive offer. After some days passed, @zeartul offered a 100% upvote from him and another random vote from @bellyrub to all investors for making their first deposit. Now this became hard to resist for me. However I wasn’t convinced so I decided to speak to @zeartul.

Tell-tale signs of a scammer:

1. When investments were asked for increasing the power of bot, I offered a secured way to do that by delegating my SP to the bot. But @zeartul declined my offer without any concrete explanation. He just boasted of the deposits coming in and offered me that as the reason to feel secure! Isn’t every ponzy scheme promoter asks you to look at other’s example? They ask people to find security and safety in numbers …follow the herd mentality.
   

   
   
   Wouldn't an investor feel more secure with SP delegation instead of completely parting away with her Steem or SBDs? What an absurd reasoning to make you feel secure! But I ignored it as I don't wanted my SBDs sitting idle in my wallet.

2. Since he was adamant to get SBDs, it was clear that those won't be used to increase the bot's SP. Neither did he tell me that he want to lease any SP for the bot. So I asked him what he wanted this SBDs for? To that he told in my face that he can't even disclose that! So he don't even wanted to tell what he wanted my money for and yet he was asking my money. But I was greedy as he was offering an incredible return!
   

   
   

3. He was offering all bullshit reasons like "see, the deposits", "see the success of the project" and just give me your money! I got little irritated and asked him a direct question that what is his guarantee when there is no security of any kind?
   

   
   
   Again his reply was just boasting about his net worth and status to make his offer credible. How does it matter to me if he has 100K SP or the bot has got 150K SP? What right do I have on those SPs when his intentions are mala fide? I clearly told him, "Your or bot's SP doesn't back my investment. Does it? ".
   Net worth doesn't imply anything about ethics and credibility of a person. But I ignored that too.

4. Now I realized the high interest rate he is offering is very dicey so I asked him to provide at least some security to my principal amount if not the interest. To this he tried to tell me that bot has got a very profitable business model with good curation rewards and deposits. At that time, I didn't get into more calculations and just surrendered my money to him.
   

   
   

From the Day-1, he didn't keep his commitments:

1. I didn't get any random upvote from @bellyrub as committed despite of my reminding him. (I did get his 100% upvote though).
2. When I asked to refund my $4 bid to the bot as it hasn't upvoted my post, he sent only $1 bid to the bot instead. Now I never use to send a bid blindly to harvest a profit, so a refund is the best way in case of a missed upvote. But he chose to directly send bid on his own and that too for $1 only! So when I asked him about the remaining $3, he didn't take any interest in replying to me.
3. He also lured me to send my money quickly to him by stating that next payout is on coming Monday. Now, it was very unreasonable to believe that he will give me a monthly payout for being invested for less than a week. But since he said that, I asked him, why my name wasn't there in the first payout list. He didn't reply to it.
4. He had assured a bi-weekly payment but after a fortnight he declared on his own that payments will be made monthly.
5. When one month was over, he made only interest payment where as he had committed that one-third of my investment too will be returned, but it didn't.
6. So did I had any right to be surprised when on the completion of the term he declared that payment will be given next month with bonus (amount of which is still undisclosed)?

I Wonder Why This Scam Wasn't Obvious To All?

I hope everyone must have had similar interactions with @zeartul. But no one said anything before. It's only now that they are crying or complaining. Was it only @zeartul at fault?

I know I was fully aware of vulnerability of my investment and didn't recommend it to anyone. Interestingly, looking back at my chat history, I found that I had clearly mentioned this fact to @zeartul at the time of making my investment 😊:

How 45%APR is feasible, I still can't get it! Did you?

For 100K SP you get roughly $10 upvote. So with 10 votes a day, you can get at most $3,000 upvotes in a month i.e. you get 3% return on SP if you make all self-upvotes. So that is the most a bot can earn if it's not delivering any profit to its users ...75% from bids and 25% from curation rewards. Anything more will mean a loss to the bot users and won't be sustainable. Let's assume the bot is successfully earning the maximum profit all the time. But then 100K SP will deliver only 3,000 dollars @3% per month and @zeartul is offering a 45% APR i.e. 3.75% monthly return. Did anyone calculate this to check the feasibility of the high returns on offer? Yes, there could be some other sources like over-bidding, missed upvotes, self-upvotes, private selling out of the voting window, etc. But are these ethical ways to earn? If not, then aren't investors who expect high returns indirectly pressurize the operators to make such unethical moves?

Why Do Advocates of Decentralized Blockchain Seek Help of Centralized Police System To Pin Scammers Here?

Cryptocurrency advocates always emphasize that they don't need any interference from regulations of a centralized government authority. Then why do we need them to regulate scams manifested on blockchain? Shouldn't blockchain be self-sufficient in monitoring and discouraging scams on its network? Couldn't such deals be regulated through some smart contracts? If we want a self-sufficient system on blockchain, we need to find out ways to restrict or counter such ill-intended moves to scam innocent users without involving centralized authority. Only this can make blockchain infrastructure more powerful and robust.

Personally, I concluded

(a) Reputation score tells nothing about the credibility of the account. User @zeartul has a rep score of 69 which isn't low by any standards.
(b) Age of account makes no sense when coming to such deals. Account @zeartul was created in July, 2016 and is one of the oldest account on this blockchain.
(c) High SP figures doesn't imply any credibility and can be deceptive.
(d) Talent doesn't prove innocence or reliability. I feel @zeartul was a very talented, educated and smart person. But this doesn't mean he can't kick your ass for no reason.
(e) Bottom Line: Incredible offers are exactly that ...Unreal & Impossible and shouldn't ever be trusted upon!

But yes, I'm thankful for the 100% upvote from @zeartul. To date I never got any 100% whale upvote and I can treasure one such incident though it was bundled with the deal. To each his own! Let's try to see the brighter side of the things! I wish peace, happiness, light and love for every one involved (including @zeartul)!

*****