I know what you may be thinking, no, the title isn't a click-bait, pretty much this happened some months before the huge bitcoin spike back in 2017.
PS: if the numbers look a bit random it's because I am converting the currency from MXN to USD.
PS2: Also pardon if some sentences are a bit wonky as English is not my mother tongue.
PS3: I'm a bit fussy on all the dates and numbers, but I'll try to be as specific as possible, also I'm an artist so don't quote me on my math.
So story time: both my aunt and uncle are pretty well established financially. My uncle is a retired veteran pilot from the US so he gets sent some money to his bank account monthly, and my aunt it's a pretty popular tattoo artists in our area and since we all live in Mexico their income is waaaaaaaaay above the average, which makes them also somewhat entitled. A bit unfair if you ask me.
Anyway, my uncle isn't tech savvy person but he is rather passionate about learning. He'll ask me from time to time very specific stuff like "What's a MIDI?" "What's a tracker on a torrent". What I mean is that he does research on his own and just ask me stuff when he's completely stuck.
So this all started in December 2016 I think, my uncle came visit so we could talk about cryptocurrency. At this point I wasn't an expert, but I knew a thing or two, and with some research we got a very well understanding.
Both he and my aunt wanted to invest a huge amount of money into cryptocurrency, it was I think around $500,000 Mexican pesos, which is around $26,326 USD. They got this money because back in the day when land was cheap, they purchased lots of it to build big houses which then they sold for a lot of money, so for them this is somewhat pocket change.
We looked into buying ant miners, investing into different cryptocurrencies, etc. We decided that one of the best possible options was to invest some money into buying bitcoin, as well as a couple ant miners (Special computers that calculate bitcoin but they use a LOT of power). And with time buy more ant miners.
One mystical day near the end of December, my aunt and uncle invited me to a very sketchy cryptocurrency conference, so I could be there to verify if the information said there was trustworthy.
Well, I didn't suspected much at first, but as soon as we got to the event hell broke lose. It wasn't an MLM it was straight up a pyramid scheme. The conference talked wonders about "Be your own boss" "Young people are becoming millionaires, this is how" "Never work a day in your life again" etc.
It was for this "new cryptocurrency" called sCoin, if you google it you will find a bunch of results in Spanish many of which have the word on the title "Is it a scam?" so... yeah this was a clear scam from the get go.
They talked about how you can buy different packages with different benefits. Get a $526 USD for each family member, and just wait for it to bloom and they can all become millionaires!, and if you get your friends or other family members to join under you, you get 25% of their revenue! And by the end of the year you could earn 10 times the money you invested! how cool is that!?!????
It was something like that.
Once the conference ended, we got to the car and I said "No fucking way, this is a pyramid scheme scam" Now, unfortunately my family has been into pyramid schemes from as far as I have memory, and I've never been able to explain to them why they are so bad, this time was no exception.
My uncle said he was a bit skeptical, but my aunt was like "Well it's just $526, we can buy like 10 packages it isn't much money" to which I internally screamed "IT IS A LOT OF MONEY"
So the next couple of weeks was mostly me and my uncle checking on the website, waiting for any updates and stuff, they would constantly send us YouTube videos, where people talked how big this sCoin thing was going to be, and the scary part was... these videos were recorded on a way that made them seem very relatable.
Each video featured one person talking to the camera ala VLOG style. Some presenters were 25-ish years old, while others were 40-ish or even 60-ish. They all where recording from their garden, showing how big of a house it was they lived in, showed off stuff like their cars, and talked about how entrepreneurs like them reached success putting their earnings into cryptocurrencies. The videos were very poorly edited, but I think this was done intentionally so they seemed more like "We are normal people like you and your friends, we aren't a company"
The videos had 200 visits at most, and comments were disabled in most of them, by the end of January every-time you googled for sCoin you would find about 50% videos made by these people explaining how big sCoin was going to become, and 50% blogs talking about how it was a pyramid scheme scam.
For people like me, this was clear it was a pyramid scheme, but for my relatives, the scheme blogs were clearly written from people who were jealous of the big entrepreneurs.
February arrived, and with it the supposed release of the sCoin... but oh? what's this? nothing happened? the website dint had any changes and when talking with their contacts from the sCoin they just said there was a small delay, now around this time two very big events happened which should've made it 100% clear this was a scam:
- We were given the "Address" of the company, whose roots are in Berlin, Germany, of course it had to be "Germany" all the big things in the world come from there, except it was a lie, see, back in the day I went to college with a couple German friends (I studied abroad in Canada and so did they). Locally one of my friends lived in Berlin and when I asked her if she could check the address she literally told me: This is the address of a mall. So when you by any chance looked for the address on street view you'd just see a big building and assume is the headquarters, given how everything is written in German but truth be told it was far from a corporation building it was just your average mall.
- The page was updated to sell sCoin through PayPal as a means to make the scam seem more legit. This was great because I have plenty of experience with PayPal, as I mentioned before I am an artist so most of my income comes from commissions paid through PayPal, I told my aunt that PayPal didn't allowed the purchase of any cryptocurrency to which she told me how could I know, I don't work there, so I got my laptop, opened my PayPal account, looked for the contact phone number and gave them a call to directly inquiry about the legitimacy of selling sCoin through PayPal, of course they said they don't allow such behaviour they would look into it and to be careful as this was most likely a scam.
Now I know for a fact PayPal looked into this, because not even a week passed by and we all got an email saying that unfortunately the people at PayPal were not entrepreneurs and they are morons who didn't wanted the opportunity to become millionaires through selling sCoin but once again, they told us sCoin IS NOT ILLEGAL.
By this point I was getting pretty annoyed, there were dozens of google searches saying this was a scam, their headquarters was a scam, their deal with PayPal was a scam, their supposed "big launch" never happened, but still my aunt and uncle believed these people were legit.
March came with another conference, this time for the people who have paid, my uncle in an impulse to participate on the conference bought 10 packages, they even put one of them to my name, so when I'm a millionaire I can put my own business and become an entrepreneur, yeeey thank you so much! Call me a ChosingBegar but I much prefer a bag full of dust it would've been more useful.
This conference was key because two big names I have read before were present, I don't remember the exact names, but when researching information about pyramid schemes one of these persons were mentioned as a lawyer from Guatemala who has been trying for years to make pyramid schemes legal and destroy their bad reputation, this lawyer has represented lots of companies who have gone to court for scamming people off.
I was like "I'm outies, this man in front of us is a literal criminal who helps other criminals why can't you see all that is wrong here?" Unfortunately my aunt and uncle decided to stay, what harm can listening to them do? I mean they already bought 5 packages of $526 USD each...
I couldn't stomach it anymore, I took a taxi and went to the bus station to come home as the conference was in another city. Both my aunt and uncle were upset I did this because I missed so much wisdom about how to be an entrepreneur but by this point I didn't cared anymore.
At this conference my aunt and uncle were convinced to invest a lot of money on sCoin they ended up investing the money they would've otherwise used on bitcoin and ant miners, investing a total of $26,326 USD
Month's passed, the launch date kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed, until around June, I watched a Philip D Franco video that talked about a huge boom on bitcoin. And by this point I started checking Bitcoin rate religiously, until August when it had it's biggest boom: $4,670 USD exchange rate.
My aunt and uncle gave sCoin $26,326 USD around the time where bitcoin costed $1200. If they had followed our initial plan of investing that money into bitcoin, they would've quadrupled their investment. They would have gotten around 389% their original investment which translates to around $102,408 USD or $1,943,387 MXN which is almost 2 million Mexican pesos.
Naturally, my aunt and uncle are pissed that they lost such a chance and they blamed me for a long time, to this day we don't talk to each other anymore, because of this and other reasons.
To this day, sCoin has yet to be launched.
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