One of the biggest Bitcoin scam to hit South Africa has resulted in over 27,000 cryptocurrency falling victim to it.
The Hawks' commercial crimes unit are investigating complaints lodged against BTC Global, a company asking investors to send their cryptocurrency to their wallet address.
A lot of their victims were South African, but a lot of victims included people from the both the US and Australia.
The extent of the scam is estimated to be around $50 million, which means more victims could come forward with time.
The Hawks are investigating the company (BTC Global) for the violation of the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act. They could not confirm whether this could be a Ponzi scheme and whether or not the people behind the company are South African.
Some of the victims from South Africa who came forward said that they invested between R16,000 ($1,041.65)* and R1.4 million ($91,143.95)* with BTC Global.
The selling point for BTC Global was that they had the skills of a "master trader", Steve Twain, who many of the victims who have come forward believe does not actually exist. Because of this "master trader", BTC Global promised its investors who send Bitcoin to their wallet would received guaranteed returns of 14% per week.
On 1 March 2018, the website displayed a message stating that Steve Twain is missing and called for the investors (victims) to stop threatening harm to their admin team. Their website has since been taken down and the domain is up for sale:
Before investing in any form of cryptocurrency schemes, take five minutes to do a Google search about the supposed investment company, its promises, and its public image. Doing this will, hopefully, raise some red flags if the company is not legitimate and most probably a scam. Be careful out there guys!
*$1 = R15.36 at the time of writing.
