This morning someone mentioned an investment opportunity called Everest AI which apparently is an investment platform. The platform is the brains of Elon Musk, Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer. This perked up my interest immediately more about red flags that any opportunity. They then said that if you invest R4800 the return would be R16000 before the end of this year. Great opportunity if it is genuine and told them to do nothing until I had done some quick research.
This Everest AI was obviously a scam which it was because those of us in crypto are aware of most thigs that are legit. If you mention a new investment opportunity with 3 house hold names especially with Musk you would have heard about this via Twitter (X).
When you are in crypto you do tend to know what is happening and stay well informed compared to those on the outside. Apparently this scam has been around for a while in different forms, but always uses the names we know to front the idea it is legitimate.
What is different however is that the company fronting the scam and where the investment takes place deny any knowledge. They advertised the scam on their platform receiving money for the advertisement which makes them liable. This is actually quite interesting as those sites that advertise such scams cannot deny ignorance as their defence. They have helped legitimize the scam by allowing their site to be used and to receive payment from the investors plus receive ill gotten rewards via the advertisement.
This is not something new that is just happening as we know legitimate sites in the past were paid to have adverts run on their space. I saw this on Leofinace a couple of years ago when a scam was being advertised and a number of other sites. I did a post about it at the time but a lot has changed in two years so hopefully this wont happen again. I am not sure how this all works and if whoever you made the advertisement deal with just has a bundle of adverts that no one ever checks. In the future this could have legal ramifications and why my advice is we need to highlight if we see anything questionable appear. If you receive advertisement payments you are seen as helping the scam and are part of the problem.
The Everest AI scam lured in 150 investors with the biggest one so far being $300K with the total sitting at around $5.5 million. The worrying part is there are other scams using the same concept and possibly the same company. People are ignorant when it comes to investing because they are blinded by greed only seeing the return on investment.
