This blog was basically created for two reasons, one because I love crypto, I love what it can do for the world, not only with financial transactions but also with contracts and handling of legal relationships, but because I got scammed, scammed good and proper. So in this post I want to talk about how easily people lose their Crypto.

1. Giving out your private keys

Yes, folks, there are scammers out there especially on Facebook who promise to fill your account with Crypto and all you have to give them is your public and private keys.

This will result in them pretty quickly emptying your crypto account and running off into the sun.

2. Investing in miracle investments

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of websites that will take your crypto, may even give you a small return but will never give your whole amount back, let alone any profit. They scam you into recruiting hundreds of other people who also never get their investment back.

See, if you put in 0.01 BTC and get 0.001 a day you’ll say “oh it’s paying”, the truth is it is – but not paying you back anything like your investment.

3. Minimum Withdrawal

A lot of poorer people invest in things that they will NEVER get paid out from. Basically, because they will never earn enough to withdraw anything. So people with more Bitcoins are being paid from those with few.

4. Fake Mining Sites

There are so many of these it’s incredible. I’m amazed at the cheek of them, they often use pictures from legitimate sites like Genesis Mining, they are simply Ponzi schemes and after a while will just disappear off the face of the earth.

5. Miracle Software that “hacks the blockchain“.

Trust me, it is impossible to hack the blockchain unless you had more than half the worlds computing power at your fingertips. So thinking your Intel Celeron with 4 gigs of ram running Windows 7 would even have a hope is just foolish. These software programmes are often filled with viruses or when they’ve “got you 0.2 BTC” you pay them a small charge to get the coin and it never turns up.

6. The Matrix (not the film)

So this is where you fill a matrix with referrals but to get paid everyone must be a paying member. The truth is very few people will be able to fill the matrix with paying members. Kerching, a website makes a fortune and you get nothing.

7. The Fake ICO

Every day on Facebook I see idiots proclaiming that their coin is going to be bigger than Bitcoin. Dream on succours. There is often no proof of any mining, any blockchain at all. If the tokens are not in the Etherium network, or they have their own mine, guess what, probably not worth the virtual paper they are not printed on.

8. Bitcoin Doublers

Why on earth would ANYONE double your money for nothing? Really? Never seen ONE of these that pay and I’ve tested a few. The transactions shown on their pages are old transactions often repeated over and over so you can check them in the blockchain. Often times they don’t even try and hide when you look at the source code that you will not get paid. Some don’t even bother asking you for a payment address.

9. We’re drilling for oil and other scams

This one is pretty clever, they make out that they’ve got Forex traders (who on average should return about 1% profit), or they are mining gold, or drilling for oil and you are helping fund them. With the money they make they’ll pay you out. Trust me, if you were drilling for oil you would have no problem getting proper funding from a bank.

10. Losing your disk drive/hardware wallet

There is a famous story of a guy who had 100 Bitcoins on a computer and threw it away. Several years later he’s still in his job and has been searching the local dump to try and find that computer. If you have an offline wallet BACK IT UP, make sure you know how to recover it, computers and hardware go wrong, keep your Crypto.

There are genuine things out there like Genesis Mining, EOBOT and at the moment I’m quite keen on Powerhouse Network mainly because the founders are actually on Facebook and you can actually talk to them and they are based int he UK.