Cryptofxfund Trading Platform is a company based in the United Kingdom that offers binary trading with cryptocurrencies. They offer this service to many countries around the world but they also lie about how much you need to deposit in order to make any withdrawals. You need to deposit at least $5K to your account before you can withdraw anything, and then there’s a fee for withdrawing from their site which can be up to 10% of what you are trying to take out.
It’s unclear whether their website is legitimate or not, as it looks professional but a closer inspection reveals grammatical errors and broken links that they need to correct. In addition, there are conflicting details on the site about who they are insured with and if they’re registered with the SEC. Overall, the site doesn’t contain enough information for potential investors to gain confidence in this company.
You may also run into their agents on Facebook, under such benevolent names as Christopher Robin (hello Pooh Bear). They can be very nice but they “forget” the details such as that pesky $5K deposit. We found someone who took the whole system for a spin to see how it would turn out (it’s like gambling for non-casino people).
Here’s the setup: Investing only a small amount of $1,500 is supposed to generate over $18,000 in profits over a week–guaranteed. We are given a bitcoin wallet address to send the initial investment to.
Wait…never send money to an individual’s bitcoin wallet…
…that’s like sending money to the dark side. It’s important to know you can’t just hit a undo button with bitcoin. Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, no matter what company you’re trading with or if a trusted third party is lending the funds for a transaction. For example, if you send bitcoin to your wallet address and that company shuts down in less than 24 hours, it’s impossible to retrieve those bitcoins from that specific exchange.
But let’s pretend we don’t know that and send over the $1,500. Well first oops, they forgot about this “fee”, please send a couple hundred more. Oh sure, let’s play along. At this point, you get a nice reassuring email from the company which, regardless of poor grammar, also leads you to their website. The website, cryptofxfund.online, is very professional-looking and even allows you to create a login so you can see your account.
Things go quiet while your investment is “working”. Then the fun begins. Your funds are ready! in this case, $24,000 is now in your account for you to withdraw and spend on your heart’s desire…but wait…remember that deposit we mentioned in the beginning? Now your new friends need that $5K deposit that is SEPARATE from the investment you already made.
Our response: “not happening Cryptofxfund”
Since we were dealing with one of the “Account Managers” through Facebook, there followed several exchanges of “Please make the deposit so we can get you your profits” and slowly the deposit needed went from $5k to $2.5K to $500. At the $500, we said sure; many people who end up in these types of programs will borrow money from friends so it’s reasonable.
After depositing the $500, suddenly management “couldn’t do it” and needed the rest of the $2,500. At this point, we just said “no can do” and stopped the conversation. After a month or so, our Cryptofxfund manager came back around with a new deal. He so badly wanted to get us our funds that he would drop the deposit to $200.
The final flag…
So, knowing that this would be attractive to someone hoping for the $24K windfall, we transferred the money to the deposit address listed on our account. It’s important to note this is the address listed on our deposit page so one would think it goes straight to our account-WRONG! After the deposit is sent, the manager says they “can’t find it” because “there were a lot of transactions at the same time”.
This was the final sign of fraud that made us categorize cryptofxfund as a scam. If they were as professional as they have been portraying themselves, then why are transactions being “lost”? This and their inaction led to our further investigation. We confronted them directly about the issue, asking for our money back (bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed). After a lot of back and forth, they credited the $200 to the account but then demanded an additional $200 deposit to access the money. This time the manager wanted the funds sent to a different address despite saying the deposit address was working just fine. Really? So how did they lose the first $200?
We didn’t follow all the steps they wanted but a regular person hoping to get started in bitcoin probably would not be able to hand over $7K. We offered to let them take the $5K from our account but they couldn’t do that–they needed more deposits. Why wouldn’t you be able to use the money in the account? Most likely because it isn’t real and in the end, something will always happen to string you along.
Increasingly complex scams…
There are limited details about the company on the web and while their Facebook page is full of “success stories” there is a lack of content and substance. Accounts which post recommendations for the company are all new accounts that have no information for you to understand their reliability. Given this, it’s important that more information is available before you deal with them too much.
Here are some other red flags we found along the way
- – This platform has no customer service number and the support email never replies. The only contact option is a Whatsapp number
- The website domain was only created in May 2018 which means they have not been around for very long at all
- They offer binary trading but do not provide much detail about how these trades work
We want people to be aware that online scams are getting more sophisticated in their methods. Scammers use great-looking websites and a long, involved process to establish trust with potential victims. It was only by going through the process (and losing money) that we could see what was happening and write this warning for you.
So, the answer to “Is Cryptofxfund a scam?” is most likely a yes. But this isn’t everything–we will do some more research into cryptofxfund and post an update if we find anything interesting so stay tuned!