We as humans are wired to naturally trust people. While we might think we are good at spotting a lie or a scam history has proven we are extremely bad at it and continue to fall for it time and time again. In this post I’m going to go over get rich quick marketing tactics and why they still work to this day.

In fact the most recent case of this that was worldwide would be Dogecoin. A blindness trust factor that influencers like Elon were going to send this coin to the moon (literally and figuratively) and make us all millionaires.

So why do we as people or majority of people continue to fall for this. Throughout history there has been scams and get rich quick. You’ve seen them from door to door salesmen, tv infomercials, the internet and yes blockchains.

I wanted to create this post to bring awareness to this so maybe it will help some people recognize when it’s happening and make smarter decisions moving forward. General rule… If it sounds too good to be true, well listen to your gut and stay out.

I’ll do my best to apply these to cryptocurrency since this is an area I now heavily work within.

Tactic 1: Advance Fee Scam

• In general this scam tells you about promises of riches and that you will get a loan or tokens for free. Until you go to actually claim them and you see now you have to pay a fee in exchanges for the promise of making a lot more money later.

We can apply this closing to what we see in crypto today as ICO’s where you can buy tokens up front in the hopes that this token will take off after the ICO sale but honestly there’s nothing stopping the person, persons or company behind the token creation to simply exit with the money and 1) never launch the token or 2) drag it on a bit longer asking for more funds to help out and make the token more valuable.

AKA The Nigerian prince scam

On smaller scales this can come in the form of twitter or discord where someone says send them 0.5 ETH and I’ll send you 1 ETH in return because I believe in this project and want to give back. Well you send that 0.5 ETH never to see it again. It’s shocking how many people fall for this and a recent case would be the twitter cases in the example above.

Tactic 2: Pump and Dump

Yep, I’m sure you hear about this one ALL the time in crypto land. I mean honestly you could in a way apply this to wallstreetbets and Elon if you really wanted to. The general idea here is to hype something up and get people to buy into something that is “worthless” and at some point dumping it crashing the price. This is often done by whale holders. To buy a lot of one crypto or have a stock pile of it, talk it up with false promises and hype and just when it’s looking awesome they dump their bags crashing the price.

We now see reddit groups and other groups that constantly pick a cryptocurrency and pump it’s price from a bunch of people buying it and then dump the price.

I hate to tell you this but for every 1 person that made it big from that rise hundreds of others got screwed over. The money has to come from somewhere.

Tactic: 3 Ponzi

This ones very simple to understand. You get investors to buy into some fake product and those early investors are simply paid out by new investors coming in. The most recent example of this would be Bernie Madoff on a large scale. It’s very possible we can see some of this happening with some cryptos though there’s no reason to suspect that it’s not currently happening. These tactics are just like those used in Fiat if not more easily take place in crypto. In fact, the most recent case of this would be bitconnect. If a company is offering you a SET APY/APR on your investment that should ring a major alarm bell right away. It should be a APR that increases and decreases based on numerous factors like we see in DeFi. If it’s fixed it screams Ponzi or simply at some point it won't be able to pay this fixed rate any longer to so many people and will go belly up.

Tactic 4: Pyramid

Much like a Ponzi but it’s different. It’s based on recruitment of where you have to bring enough people in to get paid. However if money is generated from products outside of the recruitment then the MLM is fine. It’s only when the product is rather worthless and requires constant recruitment in order to get paid.

Tactic 5: Coaching

Paying money for the training/education to make more money. This comes in the form for paying money for a product that says it will deliver you the world only then to ask you for even more money. They often have rags to riches stories, social media proof/testimonials and sense of urgency.

Why I write this is to bring awareness, awareness because you need to be smart and really do your own research before investing.

One more very recent case of this was 2016 when onecoin was announced as the “bitcoin killer” raised billions of dollars in funding. Some very recent examples of this that I see are things where ICOs take place. The selling of tokens/coins with a 1% bonus for taking action now. It then goes to launch and falls flat with the owner nowhere to be found. A classic exit scam with all of your money. It’s so disappointing as I see so many of these currently raising millions in funds a totally illegal operation with false promises and it seriously makes me worry that we are headed for another scam invested 2017 like we did with shitcoins. 2020 was rough on a lot of people and many are still trying to recover from it all. That opened up a prime opportunity for people to start scamming again in cryptocurrency with promises of riches from new defi projects or ICO clones of safemoon and at some point it will implode.

Now not all DeFi projects are bad or have ill intentions, some are legitimate projects with legitimate people behind them. However that doesn’t mean there aren’t 10 bad actors for every 1 good and by buying into any of these bad actors it is seriously damaging to the entire adoption process of cryptocurrency.

One of the things I hate the most is people investing in some crazy new defi projecting thinking they will miss out on the next millions only to be rug pulled and simply say oh well it’s ok on to the next. That mentality has got to stop and it’s seriously a reason why I feel we will never be fully decentralized. There are too many bad actors and too many people that fall for the same tricks and tactics over and over again.

Now that I beat you over the head with this I want to say this. If you fall victim to any one or multiple of these you are not alone and there’s nothing wrong with you. Trust is what makes our world a place we as humans can live in. Without it the world falls apart. For the most part there are many people we do trust and that trust is never broken. Don’t let a few bad actors use tactics above to make you feel as if you shouldn’t trust anyone again. Just take a step back, evaluate the situation and make your best judgment call. If you happen to fall victim to this don’t beat yourself up and feel confident in yourself that you made the best decisions you could at the time. Or learn from the mistakes you may have made and you for some reason looked passed while others were warning you. These are learning experiences that many of us need to make ourselves in order to learn on our own.

My number one rule to anyone to lessen the damage. DO NOT INVEST ANY MONEY or TIME YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO LOSS. That simple rule will keep you from making extremely costly mistakes but still allow you to try and succeed with projects and investments moving forward.