The FBI Outlined Key Features Of Fraudulent Offering Schemes: A Warning To Everyone

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, known as the FBI, is in the daily cryptocurrency news because of an interview in which a spokesperson outlined the key features of the consistent threads running through fraudulent initial coin offering (ICO) schemes. FBI’s perspective was first shared in an interview with the Netherlands-based financial news site the Paypers on February 19th.

As the FBI noted, the key strategies of scam artists in crypto include misrepresentations of their directors’ professional experience, which is an engineered false impression of how much traction the ICO has garnered in the industry and the unrealistic promises of prospective returns of its tokens.

“Like any investment product, rates of return can never be guaranteed and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

The FBI also warned investors to conduct due diligence on all schemes and the individuals behind it – as well as to always be on the lookout for entities that appear to be exclusively internet-based where a physical address or any contact is hard or impossible to come by.

The Bureau also suggested that investors should be aware of which jurisdiction the offering is registered in (if it is at all), as well as to which laws and regulations it falls subject to. FBI advised that the public can use the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s BrokerCheck system to verify the identities and registration status of entities.