Investigators Brought Down A $6M Bitcoin And Gold Fraud Scheme

A cooperation between French, Belgian and Israeli investigators brought down a new scheme which defrauded €6 million ($6.64 million) from French and Belgian citizens as a January 29 press release shows. The latest Bitcoin scam shows that there are more and more cases where people are defrauded in the cryptocurrency industry.

In this specific case, the fraudsters promised significant returns for the victims’ investment in what appears to have been a Ponzi scheme. The international network of fraudsters was apparently masterminded by a French/Israeli citizen and the authorities arrested nine suspects connected to it in 2019.

Meanwhile, the entire investigation case started in 2018 but it is now (two years later) when the investigators brought down the scammers, coordinating with Europol and Eurojust.

The criminals, as the cryptonews shows, reportedly set up a system which promised large gains from investments such as Bitcoin, diamonds and gold. They also offered their “services” on undisclosed online platforms.

The fraud clearly shows that investigators brought down a Ponzi scheme worth $6.64 million and that the organizers of it promised returns from 5% to 35% and then pretended to manage the users’ wallets and invited them to invest even more money.

As investigators brought down the masterminds behind this new Bitcoin pyramid scheme, we can see that organizations were also targeted – the report shows that a “big French private company” and a local French authority fell victims to the scam.

Meanwhile, the fraudsters managed to collect at least €6 million and there are still some outstanding invoices for several million more. Authorities managed to recover more than one million euros and the rest have been transferred outside of the European Union.

Right now, we can see that French regulators are seeing a significant increase in crypto-related scam threats in the country – and the syndrom is apparently spreading everywhere. The news from the market show that BTC is at $9,373 with a 0.32% increase on the day, while Ethereum (ETH) is at $181 and Ripple’s XRP token is finally at $0.2400 – the psychological level that it tried to breach before.

Today, the 24 hour volume is at $109 billion already and the BTC dominance sits at 66% which indicates that altcoins are in a solid momentum as well.