Crypto Opinions & News CryptoCurrency Trading app Fraud - iEarn Bot

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upnorth

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Thousands of people are believed to have lost their savings after investing in a cryptocurrency trading app called iEarn Bot.

Experts who have investigated the company say it could be one of the largest crypto scandals to date. Trading in cryptocurrencies has become popular, with people often promised large rewards over short periods. But law enforcement agencies warn of a growing number of scams and recommend investors conduct "due diligence".
In Romania, dozens of high-profile figures, including government officials and academics, were persuaded to invest via the app because it was sponsored by Gabriel Garais, a leading IT expert in the country. Mr Garais says he too was fooled into investing his own savings in the app and lost his money. But Roxana insists, had it not been for Garais's sponsorship, she would have never considered investing. "We had the knowledge to think this might be a scam," she says, "but the fact that, in between us and the company there was a reputable teacher, meant that we didn't check too much - we didn't doubt too much." What happened in Romania is not an isolated incident. Nor is it unique to Romania. When Silvia Tabusca, a Romanian organised crime expert from the European Center for Legal Education and Research, began looking into iEarn Bot, she discovered that many people in other countries had also lost their money in the scheme. What surprised her most was the scale of the operation.
"From what we have seen, the number of investors is quite high," she says. "In Indonesia, for example, they [iEarn Bot] claim they had 800,000 customers." "At first the app works very well," says Ms Tabusca.

"When they have enough investors and enough money invested in a specific country, they don't allow that country to withdraw any more - and they open other countries." iEarn Bot presents itself as a US-based company with excellent credentials, but when the BBC fact-checked some information on its website, it raised some red flags. The man whom the site names as the company's founder told us he had never heard of them. He said he has made a complaint to the police. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alongside companies such as Huawei and Qualcomm, are all named as "strategic partners" of iEarn Bot, but they too said they have no knowledge of the company and they are not working with it. On the website, the company does not provide any contact information. When the BBC checked the history of its Facebook page, we learned that until the end of 2021, the account was advertising weight-loss products. It is managed from Vietnam and Cambodia.

iEarn Bot places a big emphasis on pushing investors to recruit more people to join the app. "The way people in this company operate is more similar to a Ponzi scheme, than an actual business," says Ms Tabusca. The BBC has also seen chat conversations where people, who claim to be from iEarn Bot's customer service, told investors that in order to withdraw their money, they must pay a 30% fee. "Some people were quite desperate to get their money back, so they paid the fee - but they still couldn't withdraw," says Ms Tabusca.
 

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