Just in the early part of last year, I made one of the biggest mistake in my life by allowing myself to fall a victim of a Ponzi scheme. It was around the end of March when a friend of mine recommended this particular trading platform to me, where I could invest money in it and with a particular timeframe, I would be able to make lots of money out of it. As usual, I flagged it to be just some nonsense just like all those fake investments. What really made me have a second thought was that, he had shown me several screenshots of his cash outs over a small period, now who am I to resist after seeing all those huge sums of money entering his account.
That was then, I made a step to create an account with the platform calledcgzg and that was then I was doomed. So the starting point for you trade with was $30 and by then, I had about $100 invested in some coins. Mind you, this was just when I started to have some little knowledge about crypto which was also recommended by my same friend. After depositing my $30, I was then told to join a telegram channel where they will be dropping trading signals, it was basically either Buy and Sell signal given. At the end of each day, we would then make 7% profit from our investment.
After a few days, I realized I wasn’t moving fast like I wanted so I decided to top up with about $50 to make it up to $100. You know with these Ponzi schemes they make it in such a way that, when you deposit more money, then you make a large amount of profit. There was this calculator they provided us, you put in your account balance then it’ll generate something like an eight step plan for the buying and selling signal. So, he’ll give a sell signal and if it doesn’t work you move into another step with a different amount until he gets the right signal. What made it more believable was that, there was a refund to all if should incase you reach the last step and the signal is wrong, they knew very well that it will never come to that since everything was controlled by them.
Immediately after each trading session, we were then asked to take a screenshot of our balances and compare what we have made to make sure we hit our daily target of not less than 7% profit. The instructor would be the first to drop his screenshot in the channel too. To even make it more interesting, there was a referral program from which you would earned a percentage of profits of the people you invited to the platform. Withdrawals were very swift and smooth as well and we could see people praising the service of that website, it was good while it lasted. I was actually lucky to have made some money out of it, removed my funds I had deposited and only traded with the profits since I wasn’t completely trusting that investment.
It continued for about a month I think… at least when I joined. One faithful day, I think about 1 pm when we were tracing, a glitch occurred when we were trying in the 6th step so when you put in and amount, the would automatically deduct your whole account balance. When that happened, the instructor who was called Suresh came in and said, oh… he has realized there has been an error in the website and that for those who have lost their funds would sure be refunded but some people still had their funds intact. The trading kept on for far too long than usual, that’s when it become fishy and people started to panic and withdraw. I think people are still waiting for their funds to reflect in their crypto wallets till date lol 😆.
Apparently, the telegram channel was somewhat program with a bot to give those signals, so the trading signals kept coming in the whole of that day until late in the night when it stopped. Nobody could chat in the telegram channel to even begin any sort of complaint or whatsoever. We were left sitting there like some dump people, it was sad but funny because we invested in it but still had our suspicions. That’s why I withdrew my initial investment. Immediately, Suresh’s telegram account was no where to be found… it had been deleted, so now who do you direct your complaints too.
From then, I learned a lot from that wrong decision I made by falling a victim to such a scam but one thing I never did was to invite people into it since I also had my doubts about it. I would have been in big pile of problems if I had invited people into investing. It’s sad some people may still fall victim to such activities, there are others like that still operating and I know they will get others to invest. Because human beings want things served easy, and the ideology of fast money is everywhere especially the youth, we don’t like to work hard and make it the right way.
Thank you for reading, I’ll end it here with my experience of a Ponzi scheme. Have a great weekend ahead :)
