How I have seen arise and finish the biggest BTC Ponzi scheme in Brazil - PART 1

The beginning

Today I will tell you how the biggest Ponzi scheme involving Bitcoins from Brazil came to light, grew and ended. A fraud of more than 10 million USD. This story will be a little long and I will omit some names for privacy reasons. It all started in early 2016, information about BTC was scarcer than it is today. Yes, you may not believe it but even today, finding reliable information on the subject is difficult. You just can not find them anywhere. My country is infested with scammers, financial pyramids and various frauds.

At that date, appeared the first automated ROBOT of trades in BTC of Brazil. He had his own Exchange and worked with leverage of 1/10. The BTC was floating between 700 and 900 USD during the period. I must say, everything was very well done. You sent the value in local currency that was converted into USD and subsequently, converted into BTC . According to the site, it worked with only 50% of the total value because if the robot went into a negotiation with loss, it would generate a reverse trade and recover the money. When you explaining this to an average person seems to make sense. To someone with more knowledge, this would only be possible if the robot worked with future options. But apparently, everything worked and people were getting monthly profits of 30% to 40%. Everything seemed possible in the fallacy of the BTC.

The scheme began to get very large and soon the developer's wallet (which claimed to only receive donations of 15% of each participant's profit) was moving thousands of BTCs per month. And out of nowhere he got very rich, posted pictures of trips and imported cars. He claimed to be the son of a farmer, owner of a large coffee company. Who decided to venture into the digital currency market and became a millionaire.

All very nice on paper, I confess I put 200 USD, despite having experience, I just demonstrated what many behavioral economists say: 

Even those who distrust everything can be lost for greed

I saw my money in 3 months moving from 200.00 usd to 3,000.00 usd. It was too good to be true, and I decided to look hard at it. No matter if I was making money, I wanted to know the truth. We've created a whatsaap group to discuss the issue. We began to investigate thoroughly. We discovered information that would make anyone rush out of this scheme. And the most interesting, the information was all on the internet, it did not have to be a hacker for that. I just needed to have the goodwill and the curiosity to search. The developer was being accused of several frauds in old business. Several front companies, many of them using the MMN (Multi Level Marketing) strategy that all the current ponzi schemes love to use. Many lawsuits. The more we searched, the more the fraud he was applying became clear. We just had no concrete evidence. Right now, we all go out and get our money. The timing could not have been more correct, so the whole scheme began to fall apart.

The beginning of the end

And out of nowhere the BTC jumped from 600 usd to 1300 earlier this year. Without any information, BTC exploded in value. The so-called Exchange that made the worldwide withdrawals was trading on BTC, but reported the USD converted amounts. Instantly everyone who was in the business earned about 30% more. It was the beginning of the breakdown of the scheme, to avoid that everybody took out his money he began to delay the payments. The developer always came up with the excuse that he was just the owner of the automated Robot and not of Exchange, that he was also in arrears. She seemed to be a good person who helped everyone.

To be continued...