Let's start off by saying I'm an idiot. If something is too good to be true then it probably isn't true. I'm pretty embarrassed about this whole thing. Anyways I will now describe this scam so that it hopefully does not happen to any other potential idiots in the future.It all started with u/Montana02115, AKA Dean, reaching out to me on reddit.He asked me about NKN and why I thought it was a good project, even though it continued to plummet in value. I gave him an honest response and we chatted about crypto for a while. He said that I seemed like I knew a lot about crypto and that he worked with a team that would participate in private sales (first red flag). He invited me to join their team so we met up on TeamSpeak3. In the first meeting I met the team and we talked (8/20/2019). The leaders name was Laurence Purcell, from England, and there was another guy named Moshe, from Israel. There were another three of them from Israel, three from the Netherlands, and three from the United States. We talked for a bit and Laurence said "if there aren't any objections we would like to welcome you to the team to research upcoming private sales".The next day we met again. They sent me a SAFT for Perlin and they were going to buy tokens in the private sale that day (8/21/2019). Laurence went down the chat, from person to person, and asked how much they would like to contribute to the private sale. Moshe sent him 1100 ETH, this is the transaction: https://ift.tt/2HjZOs0 .Everyone else sent ETH to Laurence (I believe they were all in on the scam) in vast quantities (supposedly, but I do not have the transaction ID to back that up). The total ETH in the sale was 1100.Finally, Laurence got to me. I was hesitant. I'm a college student so I didn't have nearly as much ETH as these guys were boasting. I decided to take the risk and send my ten ETH to Laurence for the private sale. This is the transaction: https://ift.tt/2ZmAs2O .The next day Moshe sent me Perlin, I believe its a fake token. This is the transaction ID: https://ift.tt/2Hmccri .This is the contract address of the Perlin token, which I believe is fake: https://ift.tt/2Zin3sp .At first I thought, "Oh Binance holds some, it must be legit!" But then I remembered that anyone can make a fake token and send it to Binance's wallet. I did some more digging and I found out that Perlin hasn't even had the token generation event yet.I brought this up to Dean (u/Montana02115) and I was immediately banned from the GroupSpeak. At this point I realized I had been scammed. I messaged Dean on reddit and I told him that I wasn't accusing them of scamming me and they let me back in the group.The next day they were supposedly doing the private sale for sovrin (which also hasn't had a TGE yet lol). I decided to skip this private sale to see how they reacted. Dean messaged me when I wasn't at the meeting and asked why I wasn't participating. He exclaimed how good of an opportunity it was. I gave him some bullshit excuse. The next day Dean messaged me again and said that a lot of the team wasn't around for the sovrin private sale so they were gonna hold it today (obviously bullshit, they just needed me there so that they could take me money). I got on the groupspeak today and Laurence said they had some left over sovrin from yesterday (two stories that didn;t add up) and they asked me if I wanted to buy some. I said I was low on funds and he immediately banned me again.So there's the scam. I went from thinking I had the opportunity of a lifetime, being a big shot crypto researcher to having no crypto left. lol the irony, watch out guys, these scams are elaborate.I have Laurence's and Moshe's phone numbers from Whatsapp and Laurence's email, will look into what I can do moving forward.TL;DR: Elaborate crypto scam where private sale investment team asked me to join them, took my ETH, and gave me fake tokens.
Submitted August 23, 2019 at 02:09AM
No comments:
Post a Comment