After withdrawing a third of that and then losing just over another third, he now had around $20,000 in crypto.Īdam had seen some tempestuous trading in the weeks prior to DeTrade. When we spoke, it felt like he'd crammed years of trading into two months. Million-dollar jokeĪdam got into cryptocurrency last September. Just a regular day playing with altcoins, says Adam. In total, those behind the scam took in around $2 million. Adam lost his $2,500, but he got off easy. Those behind it, operating in the unregulated world of crypto, vanished. The LinkedIn profiles were fake, and the video of its CEO was a deepfake created with AI. The touted technology behind it wasn't real. Cons and fraudsters are everywhere, with traders vulnerable to scams at each step of the process.Ĭase in point: Adam's foray into DeTrade. Fortunes can be made and lost in seconds. The spoils can be life-changing, but there are traps around each corner. The most famous is Dogecoin, which recently shot up past 10 cents thanks to a potent combination of Reddit and Elon Musk, but there are thousands of altcoins, forming an Indiana Jones-esque Cave of Crypto Wonders. Bitcoin tripled its value recently, but many altcoins explode 30, 40 or 50 times over within days. Beneath Bitcoin and Ethereum, the second-best-known currency, is a strange underworld of different cryptocurrencies.Ĭalled altcoins or, sometimes, "shitcoins," these are essentially penny-stock cryptocurrencies. But while for many people Bitcoin is synonymous with cryptocurrency, it's not what crypto traders like Adam are interested in. On Tuesday, ahead of CoinDesk's listing on the NASDAQ, it reached an all-time-high of over $63,000, exploding almost 10-times in value compared to the same date last year. A newswire piece published on Yahoo touted DeTrade's technology as advanced enough to disrupt cryptocurrency.īitcoin is very much back in the zeitgeist. Adam had investigated the coin's development team on LinkedIn, and watched a video of its CEO laying out a roadmap for the coin's future. He was about to sink $2,500 into a cryptocurrency called DeTrade. But Adam wasn't trading on the NASDAQ, pumping GameStop stocks or investing in a startup. He'd made thousands of dollars on a single trade the night before, and was feeling lucky. It was a Saturday morning in December and Adam was feeling bold.
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