Heard about Nigerian scammers? How they operate and milk greedy and not very clever people out of cash? Ok, this is nothing new about that.
HERE IS SOMETHING WHICH IS NEW.
These scammers are not far away. They are not Nigerian. They are international and are based in Russia. They target you, the one who wants to invest in new technologies and not the fools believing there is a hidden million-dollar account somewhere. They do not run away from you and they are always ready to meet you, to show their operations, to make you another promise, to be your good buddies, even give you some crypto or FIAT money in return from time to time.
BUT STILL THEY ARE SCAMMERS.
Why? The answer is obvious: Like Nigerian scammers, they promise huge profits for small cost. Like Nigerian scammers, they milk you for fees and expenses here and there and live a luxury life off your money, feeding you with promises of you becoming very rich very soon. Like Nigerian scammers, they are not easy to bring to justice. Like Nigerian scammers, as soon as they realize you cannot be milked for money any more, they stop being your friends, stop communicating with you and even threaten you one or another way.
AND THEY HAVE A NIGERIAN NAME: ADARA
For some time ago I was browsing the Interwebs looking for some interesting piece of mind and stumbled upon an article about how easy it is nowadays to set up a criminal scam operation dealing with cryptocurrency. The article described some Russian cryptoexchange startup operation which the author was asking a lot of questions about. Little could I know that very soon I will be talking to a lot of people about this set-up. I, as an investigative journalist, decided to find out about this scheme and started to gather information.
In the coming series of articles, I will give you an idea of what a modern scam is.
I will be telling you stories about a group of people who are somehow related to ADARA Cryptoexchange project.
Some of them are those who invested their money in hope to make profits and some are those who used this money not for technology development, but for living luxury life.
The first are, as you can understand, investors, and the second are ADARA Cryptoexchange founders and top employees.
To be continued (rather soon)
Armen Babayan, independent tech and finance journalist.