How does this Bitcoin scam work?

I dug into this, cause I also got the Discord message. Felt too good to be true, right? Well, yes, it is too good to be true.

I set up a new Browser, with no history in it, made a temporary email and signed up. I entered their "You have won" code, and sure thing, they did deposit 0.48 BTC on the account I just made on their site. Cool.

(They probably just edited a value in a database somewhere though, so I doubt there is any real BTC under that value)

Alright, so lets withdraw that to a newly made wallet, right? Nope!

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So this is how the scam works: Make you sign up -> give you "free BTC" -> request a really small deposit (to prove you are not a bot) -> take that small deposit and laugh all the way to the bank. (Just like @Demento predicted)

Until I have significant proof from multiple credible sources, I would not trust this.


Based on the provided information it is hard to tell exactly, what's behind the scam. The site is really new (domain was registered 4 days ago), which makes it even less credible.

I visited the site and it is actually really well made design wise. It presents itself as a normal crypto trading platform. From my perspective there are two most likely vectors behind the scam:

  1. You have to transfer some funds for eligibility. They want to trick you into believing, that you will get paid after making a small investment yourself, but never pay you in return.
  2. Someone is misusing their referral program. I doubt that this site offers a legitimate service, but if that's actually the case, someone might be after the referral program. They want to trick you into registering an account with their referral code, and if you should decide to stay and actually trade (although your win was a hoax), they earn through the referral program. In this case, the scammer is a third party.

To investigate further, you would actually have to register an account and play along, but I consider the scenarios above the most likely.


I've got a similar message but for an amount of 0.32BTC. Made an account over there without entering personal info and got 0.32BTC credited to the wallet on the exchange after entering the code. Did nothing else at this moment so it's still on the exchange wallet.

I tried to withdraw to my cold wallet, but I can't until I deposit 0.05 BTC. So, there is the scam.

Tags:

Bitcoin

Scam