We all know about scams, it is a word that rings a scary bell in the minds of so many of us, because no one wants to struggle to make money and then lose it to individuals who feel smart. Regardless of how many people have fallen into the hands of these scammers and how many scam projects we have, it is rather unfortunate that every day another scam project is born and over again, people still fall into the trap of a regular basis. Let’s take a look at some examples of some old scam projects and how people lose money up to date.
Charles Ponzi is the father of Ponzi schemes, he told investors that they would be able to make 50% of their investment in 45 days and if they could leave their investment for 100 days, they will be making a 100% interest of whatever they invested. This scheme grew so well that people began to beg Charles to take their money, actually, he was not making any profit at the time as he was simply paying one investor with the money of another investor until he had enough money with him to end the scheme and make himself extremely wealthy.
One would have thought that after these numerous Ponzi schemes ended abruptly, people would have learned the necessary lessons but time and over thousands of schemes have been presented and people keep losing their money to it. The reason behind this consistent loss could be linked to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), these Ponzi schemes usually take over the media, and testimonies from different people would make anyone who isn’t a part of the scheme feel left out.
Williams Thompson used this scheme by dressing up in a high-class manner and then he would approach strangers and pretend to know them, a lot of people do not like the awkward feeling of forgetting someone who appears that good, so they simply play along. Williams would proceed to ask them if they have confidence in him to have him keep their watch until the following day and they would agree, he stayed in the business of stealing watches for a long time until he was caught.
These days, we can relate the con man’s story to trusting a scammer with our private keys until we lose our funds.
Upon completion of the Eiffel tower, it was really magnificent but expensive to maintain, Victor Lustig called some scrap dealers and told them about the nation’s decision to get rid of the tower completely but to do that under closed doors. These young men paid massively for it and Victor fled the country, he suspected that the scrap dealer would be too ashamed to come out and he was correct, so after some time, he came back into the country again to make another deal with another set of people to sell the same tower but only this time the police were already involved and he was arrested.
Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker now turned motivational speaker was the anchor of the pump and dump scheme. This worked for him by hyping a stock to investors who would invest heavily in it and that would increase the price of the asset, he will immediately sell his own shares and make huge money in the process. He was able to successfully scam a lot of investors before he was sent to jail for two years and was asked to pay a ransom. Now, he is a free man motivating people.
This is still considered the biggest cryptocurrency scam that has ever happened, this coin was launched by Ruja Ignatova, and people were told that it would be the biggest crypto project that ever existed but in actual sense, it had no blockchain backing. The scheme worked by selling educational material for trading, everyone who buys the material would be rewarded with their token, these tokens would then be used to buy coins, but the only exchange these tokens could be withdrawn from, was the one created by Ruja Ignatova and her team, in 2017, the exchange shut down abruptly with a worth of over 4 Billion Dollars, she has been missing since that time up till now.
New scam projects surface every time and we just need to be smart enough in order to discern which project is worth our investments. Going through old scam projects would give us an idea of what to expect in the next one. Thank you for reading.
