Bitcoin scam?

eskbanker

Do you know of any products that would have blocked the main central panel while displaying all the ones around the edges?

Zanderman

talexuser wrote: »

Does anyone still read print editions?

Seriously though my incredulity was it gains credibility from a nominally serious newspaper (with serious press under threat from "fake news" nowadays).

Oh, and the ads are now on Yahoo forums too.

Lots of people do. Just not nearly as many as they used to!

But I would argue that an ad on a newspapers's website is not 'in the newspaper' and that it is wrong to describe it as such.

Website ads are dynamic and change according to the user and the story being viewed and the circumstances generally. They are not under editorial oversight, at least not in the same way is in print.

The fact that the offending ad is appearing elsewhere suggests that this is no fault of the Telegraph.

(btw I'm not defending the Telegraph - it is, as Glen Clark posted above, a fairly dreadful thing in many ways - but I think it's unfair to suggest that this ad is somehow 'in' the paper - it's simply 'on' the paper's website - and you can't judge that by the same criteria. And, if ads like this bother you, just use an adblocker - Bowlhead's demo above shows how wonderfully these work!),

ETA PS plus use Ghostery to block trackers and the like - then the ads you get, if you still don't have an adblocker, won't be so targetted to you. You might want to ask what have you been looking at that has prompted this bitcoin scam ad to keep appearing on sites you visit - it's probably an ad following you around, nothing to do with the telegraph or yahoo.

ivormonee

I followed the links in the OP and looked for "Bitcoin Trader" but the links in the ad in question take you to a website called "Your Daily Wish". Also, a search for the same website yields no results. I don't know what to make of all this.

In terms of the premise of the alleged ad, I don't believe it is actually a scam per se, but it has dubious qualities in that it categorically states you will make money from trading using their automated system. The reality is that no such system can exist by definition.

It's not the first of its kind either. I have come across many so called "trading systems" that promise to make you money by automating your trades for you with little input from you other than your money! The deal for the people providing the system is that they either (a) ask you to pay (a huge sum) for the software and/ or (b) charge commissions on each of your deals.

The real winners are those peddling the software. Whilst not a scam as such, they are guaranteed to make money regardless of whether you win or lose from the trades that the system does for you. You have no comeback in the event that you lose some, all or more than you've got (money) as the small print in their Ts & Cs has a line that usually says something like they don't guarantee that you will make money but they operate the software and make it available based on the belief that it will execute your trades more efficiently than you.

Malthusian

Zanderman wrote: »

Ads on websites are difficult to police - so a few rogue ones are inevitable, but ads like this in the print edition would be shocking.

Ads on websites are extremely easy to police, especially if you're a large organisation like the Telegraph. Simply assign some people in the Telegraph's advertising department to solicit advertising for the online edition, and ensure they do due diligence on advertisers so you don't end up abetting an obvious scam. If this requires extra staff to take care of sourcing advertisers and doing due diligence, hire them.

Of course this might make you less money than simply handing over control to an advertising platform that allows scammers, but that's got nothing to do with how easy or difficult it is.

Malthusian

Incidentally, this is very definitely a scam, as no such Dragons Den episode exists. This element of dishonesty elevates the supposed investment opportunity from "ultra-high-risk virtually guaranteed loser" to "scam".

ivormonee

The link in the OP is actually a link to the bitcoin site and not to the Telegraph. This threw me. When you click on that link there are further links, on the site in question that would have been linked through to from any advertising, that would then take you to yet another site where you would register and input your credit card details for a transfer of your money onto their trading platform. The news story is an example of fake news and I got taken in by it even though I went in with my eyes wide open. This is very scary.

The conclusion: this particular site is a scam. It is not the same type of platform that I described in post #14.

Incidentally, the scammers, and I think we can call them that now that we have clear evidence, did not just use the dragons of the UK Dragons' Den, but the Irish and the Australian versions too! That was the proof in the pudding!

talexuser

Of course it wasn't a link to the Telegraph page, the ad could have changed at any time on the site (especially after I had mailed them and told them this was almost certainly a scam - even though I never received a reply) so it would have been a non post. Nevertheless the ad for it appeared on the finance page surrounded by genuine stories.

TBC15

Who would have thought that fake news would make it as far a MSE, I'm outraged.

me2intheuk

This same scam appeared on Facebook today! :mad:
It links to a long article with many pictures allegedly from the show and encouraging people to invest. It sounds so convincing but as always, anything that sounds too good to be true most definitely is precisely that.

londoninvestor

There was a spate on LinkedIn over the last couple of weeks, many of them "featuring" an ex-Apprentice winner. My "report" finger got a fair bit of exercise.

Mercifully they seem to have died down for now.