Gullible investors put more than $100,000 in a few hours into a crypto Ponzi scheme that turned out to be an “awareness campaign.”
A well-known member of the cryptocurrency community, FatManTerra, tweeted a fundraiser to invest in a “promising project.” A few hours later, he explained that he decided to teach his followers a lesson about blindly following investment tips. Within a couple of hours, he received over a hundred personal messages and collected 3.45 BTC from Twitter followers and 2 BTC from Discord followers. So, the total amount of “investments” exceeded $100,000.
In his first tweet, FatManTerra deliberately used buzzwords and promised a high return on investment, but he gave no specifics. This is an exaggerated example of a classic Ponzi scheme, and hence obvious. Tweets provoked lots of comments with criticism, but still there were trusting people who “invested” in attractive promises.
FatManTerra described his experiment as an “awareness campaign” and said that he had already returned all “investments” to “investors.” The purpose behind the experiment was to emphasize to “crypto bros [that] are far too gullible” that any promises of easy enrichment by opinion leaders in the form of trainings, tempting investment offers, or anything else are lies.
“I know I’ll probably get hate for the way I did this awareness campaign, but I don’t care. It’s going to get at least a few people to start thinking more critically about where and to who they send their money,” FatManTerra concluded.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, crypto scammers stole over $400 million via social networks in 2021.
