The Rise And Fall Of Trevon James

realmsofcrypto (50)in #bitconnect • 7 years ago

This is the saga of the now infamous YouTube personality and accused scam artist extraordinaire Trevon James.

Beginning

The story begins in January of 2016 when an unshaven and unkempt humanoid bipedal named Trevon Brown, AKA Trevon James, opened an account with YouTube.com. Little is known of his life before launching the account, but he has elaborated that he was a recipient of food stamps and that his life was at, quote, "da bottom." His first video was posted on Jan. 16th 2016. At first his videos were not very popular, as with most new channels on Youtube, and they garnered maybe several hundred views on average. However the overall theme of his channel has consistently been about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, except for a few random topics ranging from his father buying a 2016 Cadillac ATS to "Walmart is the government."

While Walmart is pretty crappy, it is also obvious from these and all his subsequent videos that we are not dealing with a high IQ individual. Trevon has admitted in numerous posts that he does not actually understand how cryptocurrency works. Yet even though he lacked this knowledge he still switched his channel to exclusively crypto related topics. As he began building a following so to did the frequency of the videos.

Bitconnect

While at first he would discuss a wide range of crypto topics, including Steemit on occasion, one in particular would consume more and more of his time. And that was the now defunct pyramid scheme Bitconnect. A bit of background on Bitconnect for those still out of the loop. Bitconnect was a high yield investment program started in February 15th, 2016. The company promised investors 40% a month in returns for them lending money to their trading bot that was supposedly making money trading bitcoin price volatility. The problem was that this so called bot never existed, and old investors were likely just being payed out by new capital flowing in.

While it is not exactly clear when Trevon began shilling for the platform since he has recently removed all videos talking about BCC, it was likely some time in early to mid 2016. As his following grew the shilling increased exponentially. Every video had his referral link embedded, and many people used it wanting a piece of that bitter sweet fruit. Likely millions of dollars were invested by viewers of Trevon James into the Bitconnect scam, leaving him with a hefty portion in referral bonuses. With those funds he reportedly purchased a new BMW and a house for his family.

Who could see this and not think it was 100% percent legit?

James utilized many of the characteristics and strategies used by other renowned snake oil salesmen including Tai Lopez. Combining giveaways to viewers with stories of revenue he had accrued his own personal wealth increased immensely. But for all the talk about intangible assets it appears he had no idea what he was actually talking about when it came to the underlying technology. The channel just revolved around how much money he was earning and for his viewers to use his sign up links.

Collapse

Well Bitconnect obviously wasn't going to continue forever. The reaper comes for whom the bell tolls, and toll it did. For in January of 2018 the house of cards came tumbling down much faster than they were put in place. Cease and desist orders were issues by the U.S states of Texas and North Carolina. Simultaneously driven by the correction of the price of bitcoin, BCC took a nose dive from it's all time height of $463 in December 2017 to $5.92 on January 30th 2018. All while BCC was nose diving Trevon continued to claim that Bitconnect was "fine" and only experiencing a "healthy" correction. He even went as far as to tell his followers he was buying more BCC at a "cheap" price.

Because of the fact that Bitconnect was using later inflows of capital to pay earlier investors, when the market corrected and collapsed the scheme they could only issue refunds in the BCC token, which lost 95% of it's value. So how did Trevon James respond? In a video filmed in his car, one payed for mostly with Bitconnect referrals, he stated quote

"Listen up, you didn't lose your money. Now you have your... Technically you lost your money."

Those are the absolute words of a genius right there. I could not have said it better myself. It seems that this man, one who can't even formulate a coherent sentence, much less deliver sound investment advice, was a trusted source of cryptocurrency related information for over 122 thousand people. It just goes to show the sheer amount of mindless individuals out there who get wrapped up in the schemes of nefarious people.

Exodus to Steemit

As the fallout from the sinking ship that was Bitconnect began to spread, James had to act and he had to act fast. He still had a large following and large sums of crypto with which to make money, so what better place than Steemit. He has had an account on the platform since June of 2016 and had been intermittently active on the site since then. At times he was posting everyday. But about 5 months ago the posts dwindled to a few times per month with lulls in between. However recently he began powering up tens of thousands of STEEM into SP, likely in hopes of pulling significant amounts of money from the reward pool.

Bernies Anders Goes Nuclear

This is when the story of Trevon James get quite a bit interesting. When he resumed his normal posting schedule about 21 days ago from the writing of this article, he was raking in a fairly decent amount from his posts. Yet the last post in which he received a payout was 9 days ago when he posted about STEEM's blockchain activity being the highest of any blockchain of crypto at the moment (Which by the way is totally awesome.) After that his posts are all greyed out. So what exactly transpired?

Well if you guess coordinated flagging campaigns led in large part by the fabled Steemian and Whale's War veteran @berniesanders then you would be correct. Originally prominent user The Marky Mark blacklisted Trevon from his upvote bot @buildawhale and got numerous other upvote bots Trevon was using on board with the sanctions. Other bot providers to join in the blockade included @randowhale, @upmyvote, @ipromote, and @minnowbooster.

It seemed James was running out of places to run, but there was one more hit he was about to receive shortly there after. See Bernie wasn't quite done yet. He had one more option at his disposal to disable the guy who literal facilitated the theft of millions of dollars from everyday people around the world; and that option was going nuclear. Approximately 2 days ago Bernie began sending his own "cease and desist" warning to users commenting and voting on all of Trevon James posts and in general cracking down the whip. "You will be automatically flagged. Do not support this piece of shit." began appearing everywhere on Trevon's posts, effectively sending them to the abyss.

And thus the damage was done. Trevon effectively stopped posting 3 days ago and is likely trying to either figure out places to delegate his Steem power or power it down. The former will likely become increasingly difficult as Minnow Booster has recently declined Trevon's delegation of SP.

Conclusion

So what does the future hold for Mr. Trevon James? He is still promoting likely scams including Davor coin and others. And unfortunately for him he has being sued in Federal Court in Southern Florida and has also begun to actively receive death threats. Videos have been posted online of him and his family and also videos of his possible whereabouts. Whether he will be held responsible in civil or criminal court has yet to be seen. Much is being debated on the internet of whether he was an active promoter or a victim himself, yet it is clear he made money from the endeavor and will likely be asked to forfeit some or all of the proceeds to help others in recovering their losses from the scam under penalty of contempt of court if he refuses. However someone taking matters into their own hands unfortunately is also a possibility. People kill for little amounts of money and what we are talk about here are some peoples life savings. That in and of itself can be very dangerous and I hope does not occur.

And a bit of advice for those who lost money either through Trevon's videos and Bitconnect or ponzi schemes in general. Traditionally safe investments earn around 1-3 percent per annum. Russian government bonds currently yield between 7-8% annually, and Venezuelan government securities earn roughly 35% in interest payments per year on 20 year bonds and the overnight was a whooping 450%. So Bitconnect was paying a better rate of return than the Venezuelan government.

The SEC wisely advises on it's website to be alert for "high investment returns with little or no risk" and simultaneously to "be highly suspicious of any "guaranteed" investment opportunity." With low risk comes low reward, and with high risk comes high reward. That formula is very simple. and to add to it, NEVER INVEST WHAT YOU CAN NOT AFFORD TO LOSE.

#cryptocurrency #trevon #james #scam