Crypto Scams
A Dive Into the Rabbit Hole to Study the Anatomy of a Recent Scam
So here I was staring at my monitor, looking at the crypto coins I invested in, all tanking gloriously, and suddenly the phone rang. After two bells, the phone went silent. Looked at the screen and found out that it was my buddy, Robin. I called back and asked,
“Hey Robin. Wassup Brooo?!”.
“Oh, were you asleep? Did I interrupt your sleep? “
“Huh, it is 8 in the morning. Agreed that I am between jobs, but I am so not going to spend my time sleeping all day.” Ten minutes ago, I was aimlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed.
“Oh,” Robin paused, “So… there is this fresh info I got from a Telegram group about a new crypto token which they claim to be revolutionary.”
“Hmm, isn’t that what all cryptos claim? What does this one do?”
“They say they are positioning as a meta coin, tying up with Amazon, the next big thing in the supply chain, getting listed in Binance...”
“Whoa, slow down mate! Did they mention all these things? Wait, what? Did you say Binance?” (Binance is the largest exchange in the world in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies.) My interest is piqued. No, wait, I’m sucked in. “Tell me more!”
“I will send you the screenshot of the message and let me know if you are interested.” Robin disconnected the call and sent me the screen shot.
Ermm… From Crypto Signal? Bit sus right?! Let me click on that YouTube link.
Whoa. They are going to team up with Amazon and get listed in Binance.
I frantically called Robin because the FOMO has hit right in the nads.
“Let’s buy it dude. We’ll split the amount 50–50 since their minimum investment is 200 dollars (and I only have half and some change in my savings.)”
“Yeah man, that’s why I called.”
“Awesome. Let me send you the money via Google Pay.”
“Nah… you do the purchase. I will transfer the money to your account. Give me ten minutes and I will reach the office and send you the money.”
“Cool. I will wait…. hello….”
Robin had already disconnected the call.
Robin was on his way to work and would be there in ten minutes, and both of us were wary of the fact that the pre-sale countdown for this coin was quickly coming to a close.
Alright. Given that I have ten minutes, why not read their white paper?
A whitepaper is a document produced by developers that describes the technology and goal of the project on which they are currently working.
Thus, I visited their Twitter feed in search of their website and immediately discovered something fishy. They had disabled the comment section on a tweet advertising their token’s forthcoming Binance listing. Why would they do such a thing? They also did not include Binance’s Twitter handle in this message, instead just included a picture (see below). This was appearing more and more like a scam.
When I visited their website, the first thing I did was download their white paper, which seemed to be rather solid, or so I thought. Just to be sure, I copied and pasted some portions of the white paper into CopyScape (a plagiarism analyzer) to see if they had plagiarized any of the literature from another cryptocurrency project. I went to the tokenomics section and checked out the very first paragraph and, lo and behold, I see the name of another token, Aora coin, managed by a Singaporean company called YVentures (not to be confused with Jawed Karim’s Y Ventures).
I quickly contacted Robin and told him this was a scam. It took me a solid five minutes to convince him it was a scam. Man… these people were good. What had they done to my friend?
If he hadn’t left for office a bit late, both of us would now be 100 dollars short and staring at a non-existent coin, waiting for it to be transferred from a non-existent address.
I knew the rest of the day was ruined. This close encounter with the scam and the scammers left me with a foul taste in my mouth, and I was in no state to let it go, plus I had plenty of time on my hands since I was between jobs. So I started scouring the web and followed the clues. Turned out this isn’t the scammers’ first rodeo. They pulled another scam a couple of months back with another token (well, there was no token) called Carden. People lost money, people got angry, and people then forgot. Someone even did a video about it and that was like three months ago.
These folks were relentless. They were everywhere. And many good netizens before me had already reported it. And yet the scam continued. Carden, Qardin, Qardcoin, Qarten, Qartencoin are some of the many names they had used to pull off this scam. And whenever they launched under a new name, they simultaneously opened Twitter, Reddit and YouTube accounts. They had their go-to stock footage showing the guy explaining about cryptos in general and nothing about the coin and then there was one where their logo was photoshopped on a Lambo. If you are wondering “Why Lambo?” I believe it was because of the “When Lambo?”. For those who are not following the crypto market, “When Lambo?” is a phrase used among the crypto holders, usually asking the founders of the coin when they (the holders) will be rich enough to afford a Lamborghini.
So how do they operate? FOMO — Fear of Missing Out — a marketing strategy (though when conceived it wasn’t a strategy, rather it was a state of mind) used since the start of the digital marketing years. It has conditioned us to believe that if we miss out on something, we will lose this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve our life, relationship, or financial situation. ‘FOMO’ is prevalent not only in scams but also in our daily activities.
And these scammers went all out while executing FOMO
- They set a time limit to ensure we jumped on-to the band wagon asap
- Used fake social proofs using bots.
- Quoted and mentioned the names of famous tech companies and crypto exchanges like Amazon, JP Morgan, Binance etc.
- Bundled the fake ICO (initial coin offering) with a Lamborghini as a prize and campaigned about it on multiple social media channels.
- Highlighted the opportunities / profits we will miss out on, by not purchasing it during the presale.
This is how a textbook ‘FOMO’ execution looks like. Here is an article from SocialPilot that tells you how to execute FOMO, but the context here is legitimate digital marketing and sales, and not a scam (click on the image to read the article).
The Wayback Machine really helped me to recover some pages of now defunct sites of theirs like https://qardin.finance, https://carden.one, https://qarddcoin.com.
Luckily one of their sites was still functioning (and still is at the time I am writing this) — https://qartentoken.com/ . Though there weren’t any activities, I could track the location (unless they had used some advanced spoofing) to a server in St. Petersburg, Russia.
And the webpage, well, it was just a WordPress theme from Envato’s ThemeForest. I hope they actually paid for that theme. Probably not, seeing the way things were going.
The YouTube channel they used to lure in the hapless folks is now called ‘Travel Blog’ with 12.6K subscribers and zero videos.
And then there was their reddit account. Flooded with either chatbots or paid engagements.
The digital marketing was awesome. Many content writers, for the sake of generating content, touted Qardin as the upcoming big thing in various journals without vetting the info. Even the scammers published articles on their non-existent coin in several of these publications under the guise of guests.
There is even a company profile in Crunchbase. I guess it was easy to list it in Crunchbase with no moderation in place.
Here are some of the screenshots of their twitter accounts in their current state.
And this one is just a gut feeling that they copied the logo from this company called Qardio which is into smart devices for the heart.
As a citizen journalist, all I can do is ensure that the Wayback Machine captures a snapshot of their digital presence, including that on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, so that someone with clout and social media influence can report them and create awareness. And that is what I have been doing for the last few days. I will put a link underneath the article that will take you to pastebin so that anyone interested in the story can contribute further.
Feel free to take the contents of this article (hopefully it is helpful) with or without any attribution.
Update: I was about to press the publish button and I see the scammers have resurfaced again. This time, they (or someone else) are labeling it as eQardcoin https://eqardcoin.com/.
Ha Ha. Talk about creativity.
Here is the link to the pastebin https://pastebin.com/wX9hZMXM
