In July, Mr. Zhu (pseudonym) from Hangzhou thought he had been doing legitimate transactions on a well-known foreign digital currency trading platform. What he didn't expect was that the platform was actually a copycat. His investment turned out to be "for nothing", and he lost a total of 470,000 yuan. What happened? Let's take a look!

You thought it was a tutorial post, but it was actually a scammer's trick to attract traffic

One day in early July, Mr. Zhu saw a short video about virtual currency speculation while browsing Douyin.

The investment logic mentioned in the video convinced Mr. Zhu and made him want to try investing, so he left a message under the video to ask related questions.

Not long after, Mr. A privately messaged Mr. Zhu, saying they could discuss the trends in the cryptocurrency market.

Upon hearing this, Mr. Zhu thought to himself, isn't this just what he needed? So he decisively added Mr. A's WeChat.

Mr. A chatted with Mr. Zhu for a bit and then added him to a cryptocurrency exchange group.

In this cryptocurrency exchange group, Mr. B added Mr. Zhu's WeChat, chatted for a bit, and then added Mr. Zhu to another cryptocurrency exchange group.

The second group is the key, whose group leader is a 'senior investment master in the cryptocurrency circle', and everyone calls him 'Teacher Wang'.

'Teacher Wang' would send screenshots of profitable trades in the group every day, which surprised and excited Mr. Zhu.

A few days later, 'Teacher Wang' actively contacted Mr. Zhu and recommended an APP to him, telling Mr. Zhu that the profits from trading coins through this APP were very high.

Mr. Zhu was also worried whether this was a scam, so he searched online for information about this APP and found that there really was this platform, which seemed to be legitimate and quite reliable. Therefore, starting from July 7, Mr. Zhu began to invest on this platform.

At the beginning, under the guidance of 'Teacher Wang', Mr. Zhu's account was consistently profitable, and seeing his soaring profits made him incredibly happy!

But after the early morning of July 9, Mr. Zhu's account began to incur losses.

At the beginning, 'Teacher Wang' comforted Mr. Zhu, saying that the risks and rewards of trading coins coexist, and urged Mr. Zhu to prepare more funds, promising that he would soon recover both the principal and profits.

However, in the following investments, Mr. Zhu's account continued to show losses and he was unable to withdraw funds! Mr. Zhu finally realized that he had been scammed, and by this time he had lost over 470,000 yuan.

The scheme has been cracked! How did this gang 'grow strong'?

The Hangzhou Shangcheng Cyber Police Team immediately launched an investigation into the case and found that the trading platform mentioned by Mr. Zhu was a global digital asset trading and exchange platform registered in Singapore.

The fraudulent APP involved in this case was verified to be a counterfeit platform, although its content and icons were highly similar, it had reached the point of being indistinguishable from the real thing.

After further analysis of the fraudulent platform, it was confirmed to be a counterfeit APP developed and managed by a certain technology company in Hangzhou.

Continuing to dig deeper based on this clue, the police found that the technology company had six subordinate agents.

The agents used various means to attract traffic, and then employed the WeChat group 'teacher' guidance, as well as the atmosphere created by gang members, to falsely claim that high profits could be obtained through guided trading on the virtual currency investment platform, thereby inducing victims to invest in this fraudulent platform.

Subsequently, the 'teachers' in the group used reverse guidance methods such as high leverage, heavy positions, and unreasonable stop-loss and take-profit strategies to quickly cause losses for the victims, and added a pin module in the software to artificially alter K-line data, leading to client liquidation to achieve the 'pig-killing plate'.

The scene of the arrest, catching them all in one net.

On September 17, the Hangzhou Shangcheng Public Security Bureau organized over 200 police officers to carry out arrests against the platform development company and six subordinate agent companies in locations such as Hangzhou, Xinjiang Yili, Jiangxi Ganzhou, Hubei Wuhan, and Shaanxi Xi'an.

The operation resulted in the arrest of 93 criminal suspects, seizure of 6.74 million yuan, and a batch of related items including servers, computers, mobile phones, and bank cards.

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