Bitconnect is a scam that's been plaguing the cryptocurrency world for the last few months.
Today, government officials in Texas have ordered them to halt activity immediately - citing fraud, and knowingly misleading the public.
There's been others with the same fraudulent business model, but none have grown to the size of Bitconnect, which launched with perfect timing, just when cryptocurrencies exploded over the last year.
Everything about Bitconnect is made to fool people new to cryptocurrencies - if you're lucky, you probably never heard of it. But if you're in some of the social network corners filled with new crypto investors, you can't avoid the endless spam. Mainly on YouTube and Facebook.
In a nutshell - they get these ignorant people to believe they have a bot that will trade cryptocurrencies automatically, and if they loan money to that bot, they'll receive a return on their loan.
They are rewarded in the form of a totally useless cryptocurrency called "BCC". Which looks just legit enough to fool someone who doesn't know what they're doing.
They point out that the coin is listed on "multiple exchanges". What they don't tell people is - those exchanges are the ones that accept any coin submitted, and even then - nobody wants BCC on them. There's zero demand for the BCC coin outside of BCC's own website. Legitimate exchanges have openly refused to hold the BCC coin.
So they have all their victims on their own exchange, bidding against each other and raising the price on a coin no one else in the world wants. What happens if a lot of people want to turn BCC coins into cash all at once? It all comes crashing down - because there's not enough buyers if there's ever a lot of sellers. That's how this ponzi scheme eventually collapses.
So far Bitconnect has been able to pay people cashing out with new money coming in. But their growth has already begun to slow, and many YouTuber's who made a killing referring others to the scam are now saying they've taken their money out before the full collapse happens. Warning their followers before they have a lot of people angry at them.
Even worse - the entire 'company' is set up to disappear into thin air. At first their site was an obvious scam - horribly written broken English - you could tell this was a 3rd world operation. Since then they've cleaned it up and made it look as legitimate as possible.
However - whoever registered their business later in the UK, apparently forgot their own birth date - it doesn't match from one form to another. The name leads to no real person.
Their office addresses? All places anyone can rent a work desk at for a day, for traveling businessmen. One YouTuber tried to call every Bitconnect "office" - no one at any of them ever heard of the company. You can listen to those calls here.
Today, the state of Texas which is expected to be the first of many, filed an emergency cease and desist. Stating they violated at least 3 state regulations - as well as crimes of "engaging in fraud" and statements "likely to deceive the public".
The full legal documents can be viewed here.
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Author: Ross Davis
San Francisco News Desk
