I am asked to complete my withdrawal transaction with COT fee of 1200 dollars

Question

I was marketed by a lady online on some investment packages in bitcoin. ($200 to become $2500 in one week of trade). I indicated interest in this. She took me to a trading website to sign up.

I deposited $200 at the start. After trading for 2 days with earnings, they called me to upgrade the account with $450 which I did. They then traded for 1 week and the account balance became $6786.

I requested to withdraw $6000 from my account and they told me to bring a COT fee of $1200 to complete my withdrawal.

Please help me do a background check on them. Are they real or fake? Check the registration of the company if it is real. The marketer told me the company will pay her from the COT fee.

Answer 1

$200 to become $2500 in one week of trade

This is a completely utopic return of investment. I would even call bullshit when someone would suggest a 10th of that in a year instead of a week. This is so ridiculous, it can only be a scam. If someone would have a secret to make that much money in such a short amount of time, they wouldn't waste their time going on Facebook and tell people about it. They would start with their own $200, do this for 9 weeks and be richer than Jeff Bezos.

investment packages in bitcoin

Bitcoins do have some ridiculous price fluctuations from time to time, but even if you had the supernatural precognition powers necessary to predict these fluctuations in advance, they still couldn't result in such a high return of investment. Any regular human who can not look into the future is about as likely to lose money with cryptocurrency investing as they are to gain.

Account balance became $6786. I requested to withdraw $6000 from my account and they told me to bring a COT fee of $1200 to complete my withdrawal.

You could send them $1200, and they will happily accept them, but they won't give you the $6000, because they don't exist.

I'm sorry, but you unfortunately fell for a scam. Your original "deposit" of $200 and your "upgrade fee" of $450 are gone. The "account balance" you see on their website is a made up number which was invented to make you believe that they actually made you money. They didn't. Any further payments you make to that service hoping to ever get your money back will be gratefully accepted but will not lead to you seeing any money.

What you could do is report this to the police as an illegal ponzi scheme. But it is unlikely that you will ever get something from it, because the perpetrators are likely somewhere abroad and made sure that their real identities can't be found out easily.

Answer 2

This is a classic advance-fee scam

The old promise of "You'll have many, many dollars later if you give me a few dollars now".

Most often seen as the Nigerian Prince/lottery scam, where you'll have $11.4 million if you pay a $300 bribe, oh wait, there'll also be a $600 filing fee, and - forgot to mention - the $1400 business license, and - we're getting close - $3000 check insurance. We'll be able to release the money quite soon, though!

Note how the numbers escalate. They ask more as you gain confidence. In the above scam, they troll you out of $300+600+1400+3000, but you would've never agreed to $5300 at the start! This is gaming on a human mental fallacy called

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

This is the belief that "Since you are already invested this far in, it's better to follow through "to protect the original investment" or some such gobbledygook.

Otherwise known as "In for a penny, in for a pound".

In your case, having sunk $200 and hearing good news, $450 seemed sensible. And now, $1200 is an amount you're actually thinking about.

Well, that "somewhat more than doubling every time" is no accident. Because sociologically, that is what humans are most vulnerable to, and the scammers have figured that out. (they aren't social scientists, any more than the pigeons who learned how to beat the Monty Hall problem; they just know what works.)

If you really want to, you can send along $1200; but you won't get your $6000. You'll get some cock-and-bull story, and a request for an additional $2500-3000.

Predictable like clockwork.

Answer 3

There are lots of red flags indicating that this website does not belong to a legitimate company.

A big red flag is the wildly unrealistic returns that they promise: 10% per calendar day. Without reinvestment, this would come out to 3,650%, which is already completely ridiculous. With reinvestment, they're promising that your investment will earn 128,330,558,031,335,169% per year, which is obviously beyond ridiculous.

Another huge red flag is the fact that they're asking you to pay a fee up front in order to withdraw your money. If this weren't a scam, then there would be no reason they couldn't simply deduct the fee from your account and send you the remainder.

Another red flag is that there is no mailing address listed anywhere on their website. Every legitimate company that I know of has a mailing address somewhere in their "About Us" pages online.

Another red flag is that their site says that the company is registered in the United States, but they do not say which state they are registered in. Every company in the United States is registered in one particular state, district or territory, so it would be very strange for a legitimate company to say they are registered in the United States without mentioning a state.

Here's one more. Their website says that "You can find [us] in the official list of UK companies," along with a link to an official UK government website with a company profile. But that UK government page says that the company was dissolved almost a year ago! Even if the UK government page said that the company is real, you can see that the website hasn't provided any proof that it's actually affiliated with that company.

Answer 4

I was marketed by a lady online on some investment packages in bitcoin. ($200 to become $2500 in one week of trade). I indicated interest in this one above. She took me to a trading website to sign up.

This makes no sense. If you don't know how to trade, how does this help you? If you do know how to trade, what do you need her website for? Also, what does "to become" even mean here? How does she know how successful your trading will be?

I deposited $200 at the start. After trading for 2days with earnings, they called me to upgrade the account with $450 which i did. They then trade to complete 1 week and account balance became $6786.

Who chose the trades? Did you confirm that the trades were actually profitable? Or did they just tell you that you made the money?

There are only two possibilities:

1. There were no profitable trades. In that case, this is 100% a scam and you will never get any money.

2. There are profitable trades. In that case, forget about this money. Just make the exact same trades over the next few weeks on another exchange that has better withdrawal options.

But I'll bet dollars to donuts it's case 1. Presumably your trades were reported to you as they were made. If not, it's 100% definitely a scam.

I requested to withdraw $6000 from my account and they told me to bring a COT fee of $1200 to complete my withdrawal.

Only a scam does that.

Please help me do a background check on them. Are they real or fake? Check the registration of the company if it is real.

Who cares? Either they're giving you profitable trades or they aren't. If they aren't, they're a scam. Case closed. If they are, just string them along and make the trades on another exchange at larger dollar amounts.

But, of course, they're not giving you profitable trades because nobody can do that. So it absolutely must be a total scam.

The marketer told me the company will pay her from the COT fee.

For what? Did she claim she was your introducing broker? What services did you contract for from her?

Answer 5

You lost $650 to scammers. It is your choice whether you want to increase your loss to $1850 or not. Your $6,000 gains do not exist, and you will never get them.

If it wasn’t a scam, and there was $6,000 that you earned, and for some unimaginable reason there was a $1200 fee, any honest place would just send you $4,800.

PS. You got $650 worth of education about scammers for your money. If that experience stops you from giving more money to the next scammer, then it is money well spent.