Avoid all HYIPs - Don't be scammed.
Some of you may have heard of HYIPs (High Yield Investment Programs), but for those of you who haven't? This post is a warning of what to look for and how to avoid being scammed out of your precious bitcoins.
Have you ever seen a website offering to pay you 1% per day, or even as high as 9% per day interest just by making a deposit? That's a HYIP.
You usually deposit some bitcoin, payeer, or perfect money, and your payments then start to be returned.
That is until the day that they decide they've collected enough bitcoin, and stop bothering to pay anyone.
As part of my research into the world of cryptocurrency for my new site Crypto Canuck, I thought I'd give one of these programs the benefit of the doubt and go ahead and make a small deposit (0.001btc) to see what would happen.
And guess what?
12 days after I made my little deposit, the website stopped paying people.
No big deal to me, I lost about $10 worth of BTC. But others most likely lost far more than that.
This video explains just how easy it is to create one of these scams:
(Please excuse the image, but not my video sorry!).
In short, the warning signs are as follows:
- High interest returns - If you earn between 1-9% per day, how long will it take to earn ALL the current bitcoins in circulation?
- Registered company - So what? You can buy them online easily and cheaply.
- Check on http://who.is to see the address linked to the domain name. Then,
- Check Google maps - Where are they based? (If it is an "virtual office" you know you're in for a scam).
- Bitcoin, Payeer and Perfect Money as the deposit methods is another major warning sign. And lastly...
- Don't believe anyone saying "it's paying, look!" because that's exactly how they sucker people in.
If this post prevents just one person from being suckered into a HYIP scam, then it has been a success.
If you have any other recommendations for scams that I should list here: https://cryptocanuck.com/scams/ please let me know in the comments.
Always remember to keep your coins safe, and don't buy into the hyip hype.
This is a valuable lesson for newcomers to crypto. You can pretty much assume that any high yield income program is a scam. Don't do it, even if the advertisement or recruiter sounds tempting.
Thank you for sharing the results of your investigation!
Thank you for your comment @catotune!
Especially this part; "Don't do it, even if the advertisement or recruiter sounds tempting." Exactly right, just avoid them.
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