The next scam to consider is what's called rug pulls. Now this is

how it works. Developers create fake tokens or

DeFi projects. They attract a lot of investment and then they

withdraw all the funds from the liquidity pool. All I can say

in this case is one, don't have all your Bitcoin

or crypto or money tied up in one exchange. One

of the biggest scams in history, I hate to say, was only

in 2022. Now it was the FTX collapse. Now what

happened was the lesson here guys is don't have all of your crypto or

Bitcoin tied up into one exchange. The best thing to do is

to use self-custody and take possession of your

own assets. I'm Matthew Fraser and this is Crypto Collective.

After making millions with Amazon and e-commerce, I realised

that if I was starting again today, crypto would be

my first choice. I'm here to help you take your first

steps and build real wealth. Ready to set yourself up

for life? Let's go. Hey guys, welcome to Crypto Collective.

My name is Matthew Fraser. And in this episode, I'm

going to educate you on the scams to avoid because

as you can appreciate, the internet is full of scams, right?

So let's break down some of the biggest crypto and Bitcoin scams over

the past few years. And I'm going to break down some of the very sophisticated

scams that you must avoid. One of the biggest scams

in history, I hate to say, was only in 2022. Now, it

was the FTX collapse. Now, what happened was FTX

was once a major exchange. It was so big

that it had a race car team named after was

the Mercedes race car team had FTX on their jerseys and

FTX on the race cars, the Formula One race car team. They also

had an FTX stadium over in America. They had

so many celebrities endorsing FTX. So

from the outset, it was very easy for the common person,

and there were a lot of people, who just believed that

this was a legitimate organization. But they went bankrupt

after revelations of misused customer funds. Now,

this left investors with billions in losses and widespread

disruption in centralized platforms. Now, aside to

this, a friend of mine had his life savings of $40,000 tied

up in a company called Celsius. And unfortunately, Celsius was

simply a casualty of the FTX collapse. So

even though all of his money wasn't even in FTX

but because FTX went down the other company also

went down and he lost all of his money overnight. So

the lesson here guys is don't have all of your crypto or Bitcoin tied

up into one exchange. The best thing to do is to

use self-custody and take possession of your own

assets. The next biggest scam in

history was Mt. Gox. Now this was between 2011 and

2014 and essentially what happened was some

guys, some scrupulous criminals, they tapped into

the server which was based in Japan and stole at

least 647,000 bitcoins over that period. Now,

Mt. Gox was the largest Bitcoin exchange in existence at

the time, handling around 70% of

Bitcoin transactions globally. As you can appreciate, this

was the early days of Bitcoin, so it really left a

very bad stain on the Bitcoin industry as

so many people lost so much money. So I've just highlighted two

of the biggest scams in crypto history, but let me just

say this as well. There's also been people that have lost

money, not just from crypto, but also from banks. So

don't think that just investing in crypto means you're going

to lose your money. There's been widespread corruption and scams and

losses in the traditional finance sector as well. Now,

now we've spoken about that, let's move on to some of the day-to-day scams

that you'll find all over the internet, especially social

media. And these are the ones that you really must have your eyes

open to, because they're very easy to get suckered into. So number one,

pump and dump schemes. Now this is how it works. Influencers

or groups, they artificially inflate the price of any

coin or token by hyping it up all over social media

and saying it's the best thing since life spread. And then what they do once

the price has gone up, they sell it off and take

the money away from the asset, right? And this, of

course, causes the price to crash and you're left

with absolutely nothing. Now, how to avoid this? Do

your independent research and avoid jumping into any hype-y

cryptos that you think seem to be the best thing since

sliced bread. The second one would be phishing scams. Now

how it works is scammers mimic legitimate platforms

to steal your login credentials or private keys through

fake websites, emails or DMs. So an

example of this might be you log on to a website that you think

is Coinbase or Binance, one of the really

big exchanges. It looks legitimate. So

you start entering in your login details. But

in actual fact, it's a fake website. So you've now given in

all your login details to the scammers, which they now then

use and go into the real website and start siphoning out

all of your crypto and money. So how to avoid these? Double

check the URLs and never share your private keys or

seed phrases with anybody. You can obviously use some very

good software tools to help identify scam

or fake websites, because they'll flash up with a warning if

you accidentally go to them. So the next one will be social phishing

scams. Now, this is how they work. They leverage the comments and

social proof on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms. Now,

even just the other day, I went into my own YouTube comments

and there starts to be a lot of them. They're generally made by

bots, right? It's not really real people just sitting there typing out this

information and this is what they say. They'll have a comment that'll

say I've just made $60,000 in the last month. My

life has been completely changed. Thank you to Mary Jane from

XYZ Finance Company. She's been amazing." Then

another comment will pop up, also fake, saying, yes,

I agree. I also made $10,000 profit last month. This

person is amazing. Then another comment will pop

up. This is also fake. It'll say, wow, I

would also love to change my life. How do I get in contact with this

person? Then another fake comment will come up and say, here

are the details where you can contact them, but time is limited. She

probably won't take on many clients, so you better act fast. So it

gives you that sense of urgency. You've got validation from

other comments there that make it seem like it's legit. The

other thing to identify these as well is quite often is

the username is some weird name generally ending

with, you know, some 2XY710, right?

That's in their username so it looks a bit off. So

use your common sense. I would definitely not be contacting anybody through

a WhatsApp platform because you know it's probably

going to be a fake. Hey, just quickly, if you're ready to dive deeper into

crypto and Bitcoin and build real wealth, join my free

crypto collective community. It's where I share exclusive insights

and strategies and live discussions to help you succeed, whether

you're a beginner or scaling your portfolio. Click on the

link in the description and join us today. Now back to the episode. The

next one is a fake doubling of your

crypto offers. Now this one I personally came across only

in recent months. And I was watching YouTube and

I'm always looking out for obviously big people in the crypto space,

namely in this case, Michael Saylor. Now Michael Saylor is

probably what I would call the Jesus or the

evangelist of Bitcoin right now. And a lot of people rely

on his words when it comes to the Bitcoin space. Now, he had done

a video or an interview with the PBD podcast

people, with Patrick Bet-David. And what the scammers had

done is they'd simply taken the original footage and

changed Michael's audio. So in

the scam video, it said, hey, we would love to

help people make a lot more money with Bitcoin. We think it's generational wealth.

All you have to do is tap on the QR code that's

on the screen and then Just send us any

amount of Bitcoin. It could be $5 or $100 or $100,000. And

once you've done that, we will then return the same amount

of Bitcoin back to you. So if you send us $500, we'll

send you back $1,000 worth of Bitcoin. The voice that

was on the scam video was generated with

AI, so it sounded nearly identical to

Michael Saylor. Now, because I listen to a lot of Michael Saylor myself,

there was just some red flags even as I was listening to it because

I remember I was actually mowing the lawn at the time on my ride-on mower

so I didn't actually see the footage but as I was listening I was like that

something sounds right and I stopped and then pulled out my phone to look at the footage

and then realized wow this is a scam a lot of people are going to fall for this And

this particular scam was rolled out with not just himself, but

other big celebrities in the Bitcoin

and crypto space, including people like Luke Belmar

of recent days. So you have to be careful. If it sounds

too good to be true, like send us some Bitcoin and we'll send you double back,

you know it's absolutely not. And a lot of these platforms will

not ask you to do that. Michael Saylor would never ask you to send him

Bitcoin, clearly because he's got enough. and I would

never be clicking on any QR codes. Assume everything

is a fake. So the other one to think about is influencer deepfakes.

Now just like I mentioned in the previous scenario where people use Michael Saylor

or other big-time celebrities in the space, they've also getting

tricky by using what I would call the lesser-known people

but known to you. So for example, it might even use

myself reaching out to you and I'll have

my my picture in the icon it'll say hey thank you

for so much for following my channel I've got an amazing opportunity

and it might be done through either whatsapp or it might be done through

the comment section or some other means now

you think wow this guy's just reached out to me this is fantastic oh

this is so good he wants to work with me but it turns out to be a fake

now this exact scam happened to me only

this year. And it was a guy who

I knew, not personally, but I knew of

them. And what had happened, they sent me some messages through,

I think it was Instagram. And

my initial thought was, wow, this John guy's

contacting me, isn't that nice? Oh wow, he's obviously realised I've

got a YouTube channel. And when I checked out the social

media page, I then realised that there were two pages that

looked nearly identical. Except the Scammer Instagram

page had very limited comments and limited likes. But

the pictures, the initial headline, the bio, looked the

same. So, very quickly though, within our discussion

with the scammer, myself with the scammer, once he got to the point where he

said, hey, I know someone who can help you make some money, contact

XYZ person through this WhatsApp channel, then I

knew for sure that it was a scam. So it can happen to

everybody. The next scam to consider is what's called rug pulls.

Now this is how it works. Developers create fake

tokens or DeFi projects. They attract a

lot of investment. and then they withdraw all the funds from

the liquidity pool. So what they'll do is they might create some sort of

a meme coin, let's call it Mr. Elephant, and

then they'll hype it up through social media, people will pile

in, and as soon as the price of

the Mr. Elephant coin has gone up, they'll pull

all the funds out pulling all the liquidity out and then next

thing you've got no money left to sell your tokens because they're

now worth nothing now the way to avoid these would be to

do a lot of research only purchase things

that are verified or have strong use cases now What

you'll also find is that the more legitimate type of

cryptos will be on higher profile exchanges like

Coinbase, Binance, or in Australia, Coinspot or

SwiftX. Some of these lesser known type of

tokens will be on some DeFi platforms

where anything goes. It's like the wild west. So

if you want to avoid these types of scams only stick to perhaps the

well-known exchanges. Now this is going to become as an obvious one

but these types of scams are called Ponzi schemes disguised

as crypto projects. Now how it works is the projects

lure investors in with promises of high returns

and use new investor money to pay off earlier investors. There's

absolutely nothing behind the project, just other

people's money. So you put more money in, and then when it's

your turn to get paid out, someone else's money is used to pay you out,

right? And the cycle just goes on and on and on. Now, this type

of Ponzi scheme scam is not just for

crypto, because of course, the term Ponzi scheme has been

around for many, many years, not just in crypto, but in the traditional finance

sector predominantly. It's just simply now they've transferred the

traditional finance Ponzi scheme over to crypto. The scam is

the same. Now, how to avoid these types of scams? Be extremely

cautious of platforms with guaranteed returns or

recruitment-based growth models, like a

multi-level marketing type arrangement. Now,

as you can appreciate, guaranteed returns is

probably a number one red flag because in any type of market, you

simply cannot guarantee a particular return. So

guys, let me tell you some of the things that you must adhere to

if you don't want to get scammed. Let me just say this too. This is not

to scare you into crypto. It's not to make you not

want to invest in anything into crypto. It's just me wanting to highlight

some of the things that you may come across and my ultimate goal

for you is to protect your crypto, protect

your wealth. So, first thing, expect everything

is a scam. Second thing, don't click on

any unknown links. Third, assume

that the high profile person contacting you for an amazing opportunity

is either not them and not real. Fourth, never

ever give out your private keys or your passwords. That

is a big, big no-no. That is just a recipe for disaster. Number

five, never give your Bitcoin or crypto to

anyone unknown. And six, just

treat everything with absolute suspicion. So guys,

thank you so much for joining me in this episode. If you want

to find more about scams to avoid and also how

to make money in Bitcoin and crypto to create generational

wealth for you and your family, come and join my free online community.

It's called Crypto Collective. Find the link in the description. Thank

you so much, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Take care. Thanks

for tuning in to Crypto Collective. If you've enjoyed this episode, the

best way to show your support is to leave a five star review on

Apple Podcast or Spotify and make sure to subscribe to

the YouTube channel so you don't miss an episode. You can also find more

of me at I'm Matthew Fraser on all