With All These Crypto Crime Wave, Are You A Smart Investor?

The boom in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology along with benefits has reaped loads of shortcomings too! The rise in cryptocurrency crimes off late is simply alarming. To quote Financial Action Task Force (FATF), “besides small-scale drug trafficking and fraud, the link between virtual currencies/crypto assets and other predicate crimes appears to be growing.” Talking about the crypto crimes a lot comes into mind — right from hijacking to money squandering and many other disastrous misdeeds has left police and governments around the globe clueless of how to stop these crypto acts! This article may highly subjective but will sure throw light on some of the crypto crimes which one needs to be aware of and with thousands of options for Altcoins out there how you can become a smart investor.

A very common kind of crypto crime is ICO Scams!! Most of the times, this leaves one oblivious of how it happens. Investors send Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), USD, and other similar currencies during Initial Coin Offering (ICO). During when the only disparity is that fake projects retain the funds, without dispatching tokens in return. Quite alarming is the fact to note that in most cases these fake project team will use fake profiles of well-known celebrities or big — fat entrepreneur.

Recently a fake ISO raised $830,000 by using actor Ryan Goslling for a fake profile under the name Kevin Belanger. This project which was called Miroskii kept everyone puzzling of the huge amount of money it heaved fraudulently. Very little or hardly anything is known about this scam because of the unavailability of online information and charges against this project. Though the project owns a website till today which is running, there is nothing about “Kevin Belanger’s” profile or anybody else in the team associated any more. Similarly ico scams like Centratech, Pincoin, HoweyCoins, The Smominru Miner, OneCoin etc force us to think how all these scams could manage to sneak their way in to the industry.

Talking about crypto crimes, Money Laundering cannot be missed. To launder proceeds for drug dealers, Thomas Mario Costanzo allegedly used cryptocurrencies! Costanzo used crypto to purchase drugs and let people purchase drugs online without a required KYC authentication process; hence he was arrested during a USDHS-coordinated raid in April 2017. Once caught, the sentence for this crime is hefty — in Costanzo’s case he had been charged with five charges, bringing him to 20 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine. In recent days, the international law enforcement cooperation has been on their toes, clenching such criminal acts, way and beyond

Looking at the ICO crime scene picking up so fast, rigorous measures are taken to prevent this. Making things worst is the absence of a well-laid regulatory framework for public fundraising at international level. FATF in its report to the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors has said that it has been asked to proceed with the global implementation of its standards. It further elucidated that this work will be initiated under the US presidency up until 30 June 2019. The US presidency will lend its technical assistance to countries on this regard.

Without a speck of doubt, crimes associated with cryptocurrency will continue to rise as the popularity of cryptocurrency increases. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of cryptocurrency or people should stop investing in it.

With thousands of options for ICO Coins, Investors should do their research before investing in any coins. To sum up we can base our view on the criteria’s like White Paper, Technology, and Team, How they use the fund, Profit distribution. If we look in to the first criteria White Paper, we will get a fair idea of the purpose of the business. If you are not convinced with the purpose of the coin, it’s probably not worth to invest. Secondly look at the Technology, analyse whether the technology is going to benefit its user or it’s just another copy of Ethereum, bitcoin cash etc. Third it’s always good to do research on the people in the Project Team. If they don’t have a team or the team prefer to remain faceless, it should be a major red flag. Next have a look at their funding, how the team is planning to use the fund and it will be an indicator for the future practices. Finally give a look at their profit distribution, like who will be controlling the majority of profit among the whole network , how does the transaction fee will work etc. To conclude, its better to investigate and read as much information as possible and write down all the important aspects, positive and negative, before making an investment decision.

Tron Weekly Journal is not a financial advisory institution investing in ICOs are you own risk we wish all our reader will become a smart investor

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