Impersonating a customer service of major Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges, a fake crypto exchange swindled investors of millions of Chinese yuan.
Early this year, a large number of crypto investors reported that they had received calls claiming themselves as staffs of major exchanges such as Huobi, OKEx and Binance, inviting them to watch “the live broadcasting ” in a Wechat group. Every day, there would be live lectures about analyzing the market trend or explaining Fibonacci technology. The investors can make a small profit under the guidance of the so-called staff.
Shortly afterwards, the so-called staff sent registration invitations of unknown platforms named ‘ bitonex’ to the investors, stating that only on these platforms would the staff continue to guide them. After the victims deposits their crypto in the platforms, the group dismissed.
These bogus platforms can accurately know the details about those crypto investors. A blockchain practitioner said that more than 10 colleagues in their company had received similar calls as they all trade on major crypto exchanges.
Now, bitonex’s website can still be opened normally, but the pages are very crude compared with the formal exchanges. The trading sector is simple with only leveraged trading, and exchange infrastructure such as coin-coin trading is not available at all. The introduction of USDT appeared in the “security” instructions of the website as title and content of USDT were incorrect.
The bogus exchange bitonex did not disclose team information, but wrote in general that “the core members of the company are composed of professionals with long-term experience in product development and operation in the Internet and financial fields “. In the “Contact Us” column of the website, there is only one mailbox and a map of Singapore.
Before long, Huobi released an announcement on the impersonation of Huobi staff members to obtain user information, illegal personals impersonated as Huobi staff members on social media channels such as WeChat and Telegram, to obtain Huobi user account information such as passwords and security verification codes.
There have been many cases of calling and lecturing crypto investors and eventually leading them to the bogus platform in the name of staffs of major exchanges in China.
In fact, crypto investors’ personal information has been leaked on a scale, the bogus exchanges illegally acquire the mobile phone number of registered users through various channels.
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