I've recently given it some thought. Earlier this year I was scammed by someone who had misrepresented themselves as a Citibank financial advisor. At first I just pushed her away thinking she was trying to sell me stocks or crypto or something else I wasn't interested in. I've only been interested in baseball cards. But she persisted, and I thought what the heck; it was kind of like having a pen pall, right? Well, she eventually confided to me how she had a little secret way of earning money through short-term cryptocurrency trades and that her nodes formulations & calculations could earn her big money regardless of which direction the crypto went. That should have alarmed me right there, but those hand-written derivatives formulas were pretty convincing. So I traded with her, and it looked like I had earned over $40,000 in just two sessions. However, I believe she was able to manipulate the app in a way that made it look like money was moving around, but it was just numbers, not money or actual crypto.
Anyway, it was a very sophisticated scam, and in the end I wound up with my life savings snatched away. I actually found out when a third party contacted me out of the blue, and when I mentioned what was going on she told me it sounded eerily similar to what one of her friends had experienced with a netizen who had created a bogus crypto app and then made it disappear along with a ton of his money! In my case, I believe the app was legitimate, but was hacked.
So then I became suspicious. But my next move made things worse - with a Google search, I contacted a person who had misrepresented himself as a fraud specialist, and this guy also defrauded me through dummy transactions.
So in all, I wound up losing $130,000. It was enough to make me weep and think about selling my collection, as I went from just over $100,000 in the bank and $25,000 in debt (zero percent credit cards) to very little in the bank and $50,000 in debt, with higher interest bearing debt. But instead I opted for a personal loan, and thankfully still have my collection, although I did sell some graded cards I thought were pretty ugly and planned on selling eventually anyway.
I'm not sure why I am sharing all of this in the context of replying to another member's deliberation about selling, except that I do feel a kinship toward this community overall and have dealt with many of you guys over the years. Maybe it's good to make stuff like this known just to reduce the potential for it happening to someone else here. And if you're in the middle of something like this, get out before you start trading. A local detective whom I know personally told me that my money would never be recovered, and to stay away from crypto!
|