Yobit.net has recently raised a significant amount of controversy and potential unethicality surrounding their broken platform and recent institutional pump. Well, today I am examining their community, which seems to be fraught with the foul stench of Yobit.net scammers.

These scammers pose as official YoBit.net support or staff, pretending to offer assistance. They are obviously not part of YoBit.net support, though they mimic the broken English found on the official support chat. This broken English on part of the scammers is used either to increase believability and consistency, or by happenstance. I reached out for comment and was refuted by them (I guess a scammer doesn’t want to talk to the press, ha!)

The YoBit scammers I have come across are your typical fraudsters, we’re dealing with fairly high-level con-artists. These scammers are people posing as official YoBit.net support staff and are well trained and prepared to take your bitcoin.

One group even has the ability to send emails that seem to come directly from YoBit.net’s own official account.

If you aren’t careful you too may fall victim to this scam involving users of the already misleading and unscrupulous YoBit.net crypto-exchange.

YoBit.net scammer anatomy

Scamming unsuspecting people is easy when the scammer has a plan.

Points of a scam



Scammers seem legitimate They live far away They use impressive claims to support their scam They give short deadlines Use of unusual payment vehicles They send little information after payment They can be undone by simple homework Scammers abuse trust

The scammers in the YoBit community seem to use the behaviors presented in points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (but usual for the crypto space), 7, and 8. I never paid any of them so I can’t say for sure if 6 applies, but we can assume it does.

Scammers seem legitimate

YoBit.net scammers do seem legitimate. They use names that reflect that they are part of the company team, even going as far as using names of the support staff. They even control a very large official-looking Facebook account named YoBit.net. with over 30k likes, which seems legitimate – but it is not.

Once you reach out to this page, they have you communicate with an unaffiliated email address by the domain extension “YoBit.help” which is not official. They then ask you to send them some arbitrary amount of bitcoin or other cryptos for support.

Once the BTC is sent they are never heard from again.

This specific instance was about the deactivation without warning of a coin called Capricoin (CPC).

CPC has an active community, updated source code, live support, and reasonable 24hr volume. This is what you can expect to get from one of these scammers. DO NOT fall for it, they are not affiliated with YoBit.net and will be unable to fix your issue even after payment.

The YoBit.net scammers even use the threads of the official YoBit.net Twitter to claim themselves as support employees. Without any in-line replies from the official YoBit.net handle – so it may seem reasonable that support is in their official thread. It is not, these are scammer accounts attempting to use the official YoBit handle’s thread to get new marks.

The scammer above was able to send emails to my personal address, and they looked like they came from the official email of YoBit.net “Mailer@YoBit.net”!

The email above looks to be legitimate with but one major key difference. The question mark icon to the left of the sender’s information. If you hover over that question mark it says “Mail couldn’t verify that yobit.net actually sent this message (and is not a spammer)”.

Most people would not consider checking into a communication this far unless they already suspected this to be a scam.

This email is “unverified” which means it was signed by another SMTP (Simple Mail Protocol Protocol) server. This means that the scammer can send emails that on the surface look like they are directly from YoBit.net themselves but are not.

We took this information and asked YoBit.net support on the official ticket submission page of their site. Just asking if they knew about this, and just to make extra sure that it was an unaffiliated group.

After explaining that we had received a message from their official email address support replied with “Scammers don’t pay on scammers Telegram or Twitter?”. The medium of communication was not shared, this was direct email correspondence. This shows that YoBit.net knows they are being used as a method for scammers to take money from unsuspecting individuals and does little to stop it.

The scammers live far away

This is true for the YoBit.net exchange location and probably for the locations of the scammers as well. The YoBit.net cryptocurrency exchange keeps their personal affiliations very well hidden. The most that anyone has found about the YoBit.net exchange is that they are run by a company in Russia (and may have been under Russian investigation).

The scammers are likely just as far away and certainly as hidden. I reached out to a couple scammers for comment, but they said I had to pay them 0.5 BTC to get the information, as scammers are known to do (Ha!).

I think it is obvious that I was not going to pay the “talking fee” and was subsequently blocked.

They use impressive claims to support their scam

The YoBit.net scammers do in fact use impressive claims. There are many avenues that these scammers use to appear believable.

Within YoBit.net’s official Twitter handle @YobitExchange thread you can find unaffiliated users posting solutions to commenter’s issues. The scammers claim that they can fix your issue within 24 hours, and that is a hefty claim since there are 100’s of coins on YoBit.net that have had their wallets deactivated for months.

24 hours seems impressive to those that may have spent the last 6 months trying to get their community’s coin wallets back online.

They give short deadlines

The scammers that leverage YoBit.net social media threads do keep their deadlines short. They create a need to act now, not directly but indirectly. The YoBit scammer will make you an offer with an incredible sounding turnaround time, giving an incentive to make the payment.

Although the scammer never gave me an ultimatum to transfer in so many hours, it seemed unnecessary to wait.

Use of unusual payment vehicles

This one is a bit tricky, in crypto BTC payments are completely normal. However, it is unusual to pay an exchange through an unaffiliated address delivered by email. IF the exchange was wanting you to pay them, it would be on their official web platform.

They send little information after payment

We never submitted any payment, we know many people were scammed by this process however we have been unable to get a testimony from any specific person yet.

We will update this section as we get more information.

They can be undone by simple homework

Checking the validity of the sender’s email is the first step and it will save you some heartache. A

lways check with the source for validity whenever possible. In this case, submitting a support ticket with the inquiry and waiting a few days for a reply is the best course of action.

Scammers abuse trust

These scammers are not dumb, they have a system in place of reaching people during their most dire time of worry. When there is a comment to the official Twitter handle of YoBit asking for help, the scammers jump into action! They claim that they are part of the support staff and are interested in helping to fix the problem they are having.

Once this happens and they get you on another platform or in a direct message conversation they begin their process to get you to pay.

YoBit.net unethical practices

YoBit has been known to practice borderline unethical activities. The exchange has over one thousand coins and tokens listed with a significant portion deactivated and many with misleading names. For instance, most crypto traders would believe that the ticker “OMG” is OmiseGo but on YoBit it is OMGame, which during its release caused an uproar with angry traders realizing they had bought coins in an otherwise unheard of crypto instead of with OmiseGo.

They also had listed “SUB” which to the vast majority of the crypto community is Substratum. Well, YoBit.net listed Subscriptio as “SUB” which is obviously misleading. This coin was released on the YoBit platform with the potential intent to mislead traders into thinking they were getting a great deal on the real coin, Substratum and/or OmiseGo. Here is a full list of coins that are available on the exchange.

Back in 2017, there was some news about YoBit.net being investigated by Russia and potentially blocking Russian IPs over fraudulent exchange operations. Which, given their track record, should have happened far before now.

YoBit.net official comments

We had reached out to YoBit.net support for comment on these and a few other topics in the only official method offered – support tickets categorized as “other”. They immediately closed the ticket and have not made any comments to support or refute any claims of incompetence or negligence within their own community.

My personal opinion is the exchange is claiming no responsibility for anything that happens on their platform, social media threads, or by large unaffiliated social media accounts using their brand. This is detrimental to the crypto community and harmful to the members that are being scammed.

What can we do to avoid being scammed?

Be cautious when sending any form of money to anyone you do not personally know.

Always check to make sure the source is accountable for the process by reaching out to them directly.

Always take a second look at everything just to make sure the transaction is legitimate and makes sense. Chances are, if it is a scam then all you need is a bit of time to research for it to fall apart.

I would also advise not to use YoBit.net for any reason, one could transfer their coins to their exchange and find themselves with a wallet that has been deactivated without notice indefinitely.

If you have been scammed by YoBit.net directly or have been scammed by an unaffiliated 3rd party saying they were YoBit.net contact me directly via email. Blakely@CryptoInsider.com.

If you want to share your frustration concerning YoBit and the network of scammers using their name as a way to take advantage of YoBit.net’s userbase share this with them!