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My First Encounter With A Scam Coin

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So the crypto market has been booming sinds March. It has been a great year for early investors and also people who joined mid-way. However, not everything is wonderful in crypto paradise as there are many scams going on, and many which has yet to surface...

One of the first crypto tokens I researched immediately set off a red flag:
ROUND token, supposedly used for e-sports betting, which was build on the Ethereum blockchain.

For a moment ROUND was the "top" ETH token by market cap $185 million.

Lets look at where it is now:

Yep almost at the bottom....

ROUND peaked at $200 million and is now at $5 million. That is a loss of 40 times your investment if you bought it around the peak.

Exchanges such as Liqui have removed ROUND from their listing. It is no where tradable now, so its value is as good as gone. I wasn't sure about how many cryptocurrencies would do, but I was sure ROUND was going to fail. I am surprised it hasn't gone to zero yet and that it took months for people to realise what they were buying

How to recognize scam coins?

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I'm afraid we are going to see more instances like ROUND. People who invest without knowing what they are buying are going to lose the most money.

Some scam coins are doing a good job in hiding it, but there are general clues. I am going to share what sets off a red flag for me, while using ROUND as an example.

1. The website

A bad looking site doesn't immediately means that it is a scam, but it shows how much the creators are putting effort in their work. This was how ROUND's website looked liked:

This is a screenshot I found from reddit, as I am afraid to enter their website again (which is supposedly removed btw). I remember this was the only image I got, and also some description about "a decentralized e-sports platform". There were no links to other pages, only one front page.

After a quick google search I learned that they had plagarized the design of another website. Which was: http://www.web-freeks.com/

Identical!! Only the words Round and Web developers have been switched.

2. No links to Social Media or LinkedIn

Scammers want to be as invisible as possible. Most of the time they will avoid putting Social Media links, and if they do try to click on it to see where it leads. Most of the time they link to the websites' home pages or don't link to anything at all..

On ROUND website I didn't find any links at all. If there are zero links to social media this is a huge red flag that it is likely a scam.

3. No information about the dev team

The biggest red flag is when there is no information about the creators. Naturally, no scammer is stupid to give their personal information. Instead they could pretend to be other people and give false information. I always pop their name in a google search, to check for legitimacy.

4. The white paper

Look at the white paper and look for grammatical errors, simply language or seemingly complex mumbo jumbo, bad layout. These all are red flags and when you see this, it is most likely a scam.

ROUND based their whole white paper on the one of Firstblood (a real e-sports coin). On reddit I found this post:

Be careful guys!

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It's funny how the guy in the Reddit post said "They might not be a scam" after finding all those stuff. We gotta be on our toes for these cunning scammers out there.

I hope this was useful!

If you have a similar experience to share

Let me know in the comments!