South Africa has been flooded with get-rich-quick schemes that are using the mystique of Bitcoin to try and hide old scam techniques. One of these new scams that has been spotted advertising on cars around the Durban area is Smart-BTC.
Navigating to the scheme’s webpage (smart-btc.co.za) revealed what appeared to be a standard high-yield investment programme (HYIP) scam.
The website lists six seemingly arbitrary packages that are categorised into “short term” and “long term”, with each category containing silver, gold, and VIP packages.
All of the packages claim to offer a return of 20% interest every week. This is the first red flag that Smart-BTC is a scam.
The Consumer Protection Act (CPA) expressly prohibits schemes that promise a return that is more than 20% above the repo rate. It defines these as “multiplication schemes“.
South Africa’s current repo rate is 3.5% per annum, which means that any scheme that promises an interest rate of more than 23.5% per year is considered a multiplication scheme.
Smart-BTC’s annual interest rate works out to 1,040% per annum. Compounded weekly, this would generate an effective annual return of over 1,300,000%.
Digging deeper
The “About Us” page on the Smart-BTC website contains suspicious wording such as “Ranked 4th on Transparency International”.
A quick search revealed that this statement, along with all the others on the Smart-BTC about page, have been used by people who market a scheme called Elamant.
Elamant is a scam purporting to offer all kinds of benefits for paying members. It also offers a compensation scheme by allowing members to become “paid consultants”.
According to the Elamant website, these “consultants” earn income based on the number of people they have personally recruited into the scheme, and the overall size of their referral network (i.e. referrals of referrals).
The Consumer Protection Act prohibits schemes were participants receive compensation derived primarily from recruitment, rather than from the sale of any goods or services. It defines these as “pyramid schemes”.
While the Smart-BTC website contains the same wording as recruiters for Elamant, it does not appear to be directly affiliated with the scheme. Instead, it seems as though Smart-BTC simply plagiarised the text on its “About Us” page from Elamant recruiters.
Headquartered in Bangladesh, scamming all over the world
Another suspicious element on the Smart-BTC website is the scheme’s address, which is listed as: “Garden Street, Ring Road, Shyamoli, Dhaka 1207, Bangladesh”.
A search for this address returns a list of websites that all look almost exactly the same as Smart-BTC: forexopts.com, mybinaryprofit.com, forexcapitalfx.com, digitalsmartinvest.com, autocryptominers.com, platinum-assets.com.
Many of these websites contain links to a company called TheSoftKing. The previous address search also leads to TheSoftKing website.
Your own Ponzi scheme website for $69
TheSoftKing is a web development company, apparently based in Dhaka, which offers several website templates that seem to be specifically designed for scams.
Two of the products it sells are PonziPRO (priced $199) and ePonzi ($79).
It also offers several web templates under the tag “HYIP” — which is just a euphemism for Ponzi scheme. The HYIP website template that Smart-BTC appears to be based on is called HexaTrade. TheSoftKing sells it for $69.
In other news – Boity Thulo’s ancestors saves her from being scammed
Boity Thulo’s ancestors have saved her from giving money to a trickster. A tweep took to her TL to shoot her shot as she asks the star for money but it seems Boity used her sangoma instincts to spot the trickster. Learn more
Source: mybroadband
