Cryptocurrency: The first time I was scammed and what I learnt
Thinking back now, it was 2018 when I got my first knowledge about crypto; that was the year cryptocurrency was topping all search engines. I got to see it everyday and most of my friends were talking about it, I had no teacher or any expert to put me through but i have always had an interest in finance so it got my attention.
I started doing my research about cryptocurrency, and I was doing some research on Quora and Google. Yeah, crypto seems like the next big thing to a financial breakthrough, and if you don't buy into it, then you will be left out. I was just a student living in his parent's home without any source of income, so there was no way to buy bitcoin, which was the leading cryptocurrency at the time.
According to my research, if you can't buy bitcoin, you should be able to mine it for free, but I never did extensive research on how to mine bitcoin. I only had shallow knowledge about mining it. During my pursuit to find a way to mine bitcoin, I stumble upon a telegram group where you can mine bitcoin on your phone, and this excites me a lot because, at that time, 1 BTC is 2.5 million Naira in my country's currency.
My aim was to get 1 BTC no matter what, so I started mining on my phone daily without missing a day. The bot attending to people in the Telegram group was very good because the person who created it was an expectant.
The bot will show you balance, other menus that I can't remember, and remind you to keep mining daily, which I did. In a month, I was able to mine 0.9 BTC. I was getting close to my goal. I kept on mining the following month, and my balance was finally 1.6 BTC. I placed a withdrawal, and I was asked to prove my BTC wallet. I immediately opened a Luno account, got my wallet address, and submitted it with the hope of becoming a millionaire in a few minutes. After submission, I got a strange reply.
The package you are using cannot make such a withdrawal; upgrade your account and place a new withdrawal.
I was confused, but then, because I wasn't ready to lose 1.6 BTC, I clicked on the upgrade button and was asked to make a deposit of 0.0025 BTC to upgrade my account. I didn't have any money; I had to rely on my savings. I used up my savings to get that amount of BTC, then sent it to the address provided since I would be getting a huge return.
After I had send the BTC to the address, I got a processing kinda message, I kept watching my phone and it was still processing. After some few hours it showed done so I made another withdrawal and it was processing, so I waited some few month and nothing was hitting my wallet.
After waiting for a month, it dawned on me that I have been scammed.
A very important thing to note: Do not send any amount of crypto to anyone if you are expecting a pay from them. I learnt the hard way
There are still scammers out there with more sophisticated way
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