GM citronauts. Prepare for a vitamin C boost of crypto intel – we're squeezing every last drop of news from the digital fruit stand.
☯️ Two victims of separate scams became the perfect example of the polar opposite ways one can recover losses: the legal way and the way we #DoNotRecommend.
📰 News drops
| Crypto Market Cap $2.16 Trillion -2.9% (24H) | |||
| Name | Price | 24H % | 7D % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin BTC | $58,453.67 | -2.86% | -0.08% |
| Ethereum ETH | $2,581.58 | -3.54% | -1.59% |
| BNB BNB | $538.34 | -0.01% | 5.51% |
| Solana SOL | $142.77 | -1.53% | -0.07% |
| Prices as of 10:15 AM EST. Click here to see live data. |
The crypto market's feeling the chill today, with the Fear & Greed Index dipping to 28. However, this isn't a sudden shift - the index has been hovering around these levels for several days now. Despite the prolonged cautious sentiment, many remain on high alert for any signs of the much-anticipated bull market.
As always in crypto, the only constant is change, and the next market shift could be just around the corner. ⏰
Lemme show you how the same story can be written in two completely different fonts.
A woman from Florida, Maria Vaca, invested over $5M in crypto through an app called Yobit Pro, which she downloaded from the Google Play Store.
Seemed like a good investment at first, her balance jumped to $7M, the birds were singing, the sun was shining… until she decided to withdraw her funds and it all went downhill:
- The app asks her to pay an extra $500K "for taxes", which she does;
- The app asks her to pay $2M more, "for taxes" again, which starts looking sus, so she refuses;
- The scammers behind the app press the "anger mode" button, and Vaca starts receiving Whatsapp messages from random numbers threatening to unalive her, unless she pays the deposit.
Realizing she was defo scammed (and being scared for her life), she contacted the authorities. Her complaint was immediately forwarded to Google, who took THREE MONTHS to remove the app from the Play Store.
After this "quick response", Vaca sued Google, seeking at least $5M in damages.
Yes, obviously, Google isn't the scammer here, but still, what kind of evaluations are there in the Play Store, that a scam app (which, FYI, allegedly had over 12K downloads) was approved in the first place? 1 point goes to #TeamApple for this one.
Anyways, speaking of recovering from scams, while there is always an option to report, one guy chose to take the matter into his own hands. Deal with it the street way, if you will.
Major sidenote: the Daily Squeeze team does not condone this approach.
Back in 2016, a platform called BitConnect was launched. It was later found to be one big Ponzi scheme, which led to over 4K people losing an astonishing total of $2.4B. Among those affected was the protagonist of our today's second story, Shailesh Babulal Bhatt.
IDK if someone gave him the "face your problems" advice, but this guy took it literally—he, along with several partners in crime, kidnapped two BitConnect employees and demanded over 2K Bitcoin, 11K Litecoin, and $1.7M cash in exchange for their release.
Bhatt was arrested last Tuesday, and is now in custody of the Indian authorities.
Both outcomes considered, the fighter of choice in this scenario should be obvious (...I hope?). The villain arc works well in movies, but it's not the way to go IRL.
📰 News drops
⛪️ Faith meets fintech: a church group in Colorado tokenizes a chapel worth $2.5M.
💸 Dubai approves salaries in crypto.
🤖 Coinbase has launched a grant program to support projects that aim to merge AI and crypto wallets.
🧪 Ripple begins testing its Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin.
👽 CryptoPunk #5822, once sold for $23.7M in 2022, changes hands again in private sale.
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