One of chief appeals of Bitcoin is that it takes what should be a public good out of the hands of politicians and plutocrats who print and manipulate it and puts it back in the hands of the people. In the old days, the cash your pocket was yours to do with as you saw fit. And, once you that money had left your hands, there was little or nothing to stop that transaction or to track it back to you.

Now, though, cash is used less and less and every cent we spend is tracked and analyzed. Worse, if the government doesn’t like how we use our money, block who we can send money to and they can freeze or confiscate it with the push of a button. The money that’s in your bank account may feel like yours, but it’s theirs.

Bitcoin puts money back into the hands of the people, where it belongs. Unfortunately, that also means that we have to be responsible for that money and if anything goes wrong, there’s no one to go crying to. Knowing this, the scam artists and swindlers come out of the woodwork to chisel and steal our hard-earned coins. As a service the Bitcoin community, Bitcoin Warrior is running an expose of any swindle or scam that comes to our attention.

Today we are exposing:

BitClub
(visit at your own risk)

Just a couple of days ago, a giant Ponzi scheme was exposed in China. The perpetrators ran a funding site that purported to have any number of profit making projects underway. Participants would send in their yuan and were guaranteed a great return. This Ponzi has been making news over the last few days after the owners ran out of enough revenue to keep paying out. Chinese officials dug up 80 bags of records the couple tried to hide in their back yard and determined that as many as 900,000 people may have been bilked. (You can read more about that here).

It is incredibly easy in the internet age to get bamboozled into thinking you can throw money at a sure thing and get a great return. Ezubo, the Ponzi mentioned above, had no projects going. With Bitcoin, a common scam is the vaporware product ‘cloudmining.’ It’s an easy scam to perpetrate since most will have no idea beyond the notion that bitcoins are digitally mined and the perpetrators will have nothing they need to show to support their claims of massive mining farms.

I personally have always been a little leery of cloudmining – miners run on tight margins and the difficulty rates increase fast enough that I frankly can’t see how investors will recoup their investment. There are legitimate cloudmining services out there, but it’s just not a business model I’m comfortable with. For many, though, the lure of easy money and pictures of racks of miners may be tempting enough to get them to uncritically put up their hard-earned cash.

This likely scam came to our attention after a couple of posts on Reddit and then a post from NEWSBTC branded this operation a scam. The organization is apparently setting up Meetups and hard selling attendees into investing in their service. A look at their page shows that it is well-designed and attractive, but the About Us page also shows no information about the people running the site, only that they are a group of investors, financial professionals, and geeks coming together to profit from this amazing opportunity. A list of (fake) corporate officers might not be all that much better, but this shadowy ‘group of experts who know more than you’ is a well-worn tactic of these types of sites.

It may be that these folks actually have hashing power, but do some hard research before you decide to throw your money their way. Or better, go with one a more established company – with a location and people who are responsible – until these guys prove themselves.

If you know of a Bitcoin related scam that you think we should expose, email us at editor(at)bitcoinwarrior.net. If you are the owner of a site that has been exposed and feel you have been unfairly treated, contact us at the same address.