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I'm sure many of you have already heard about this, I just wanted to go back to it real quick from my own experience watching this ponzi scheme start out from the very beginning.

I am personally not sure if the victims are going to be able to win this case as it's not entirely sure who was behind Bitconnect, being able to find those people and especially the money will be a very hard task considering that if it's in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency makes it really difficult, especially if it has been traded and being held on anonymous currencies such as Monero.

That's only one part of it though, there is a difference being an investor in it as it might give you the advantage of receiving back the amount of Bitcoin you invested yourself in it (if the money were to be found) any profits though are supposed to go back to the people that invested after you. If you as an investor were not aware of it being a Ponzi then the chances of you going to jail are rather slim.

If you on the other hand offer to sell these tokens either directly or through promotion, which I'm guessing that's where the referrals come into play, then things change quite drastically as the Bitconnect token is an unregistered security in this case. Here is a snip from the SEC's rules of the promotion of Ponzi schemes:

It doesn't sound so nice, right?

a promoter is liable even if they are themselves victims

These are the dangers of promoting something where you aren't sure what it truly is. This is also why it's important for people to know what open-source technology means compared to Bitconnect's "trading-bot" that was never disclosed what it exactly did or if it even existed. Heck, had there been a trading bot they would've probably done much better than how things turned out now during this long downtrend of cryptocurrencies after BTC's ATH at 19k.

I want to take a moment to thank a user here on Steem who very early on realized that this is a Ponzi and did his best to try and flag promotions of it. Thank you @pfunk, I remember talking with you about it once as there were so many users coming to the platform promoting it with their referrals back when the price was still under $1 and you helped me see what was wrong with it early on and since then I tried my best to warn users not to invest or touch this coin. Thank you also to everyone else that did their best with this.

Now before and during the closing of Bitconnect there have been a lot of these promoters deleting their youtube videos or posts and comments on other platforms but there is something many of them might've not been aware of at the time and might come back to haunt them now as things are getting serious. That is the immutability of the Steem blockchain that records all posts and comments of all time, this is why it was important to try and warn people to not get involved in this currency which was not open-source and the founders were not made public as it was screaming red flags for so long.

I've said this a few times before, I know block-chain technology is pretty new and offers so many advantages to often seem "too good to be true", but with something like Bitconnect offering 40% returns a month it was just way overkill and people that invested in it were just really completely new to the scene or they knew it was a Ponzi and imagined they'd be able to get out of it before everyone else.

Stay safe out there, Steemians.

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