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I've seen a good-looking website for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, should I trust it with my money?

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Here's a few checks I'd advise anyone to do.

  • Does it promise to earn you more than 10% profit in less than a month? If so it is a fraud.

  • Does it make implausibly impressive claims like "SEC awards {businessname} as one of the best Trading platform of 2018 with 247 contact"? (hint: that's not the sort of thing the SEC ever does).

  • Are there very many spelling errors and poor grammar?

  • See if the website is a copy of another website. Take a jargon-phrase from the website, it should be around a dozen words and not include the business name (or other things copiers change) and put it in quotes in a web search engine. See if other websites are using the same phrases. See if any found websites are nearly identical copies. e.g. "We are the only binary options broker that truly places emphasis on you" (LOL!)

  • Use a "whois" service to look up the domain name registration

    • if the website is http://example.com/ look up example.com. Was it only registered a few months ago?
    • Where was it registered? Is the registrar located in a faraway country with a poor record for investigating online crime? Do you want to deal with a business that you have no way to sue? A place with no feasible legal remedies for you as a foreigner?

  • If the website claims for example "7 years of forex experience" but was only registered 1 year ago you should regard it as probably untrustworthy.

  • Check the website for contact details. Does it give a physical address?

    • if not I'd say it is untrustworthy.
    • Is it a full address or something vague (one site has "west midlands UK" as a contact address - which is obviously deliberately vague and useless as a contact address).
    • Use something like streetview in Google Maps to view the contact location.
      • Some websites give an address that is actually a small wooden home in farmland or suburbia - this is obviously a fake address chosen at random.
      • Some websites give an address in an office building that rents tiny offices by the day - this is suspicious

  • Look for company registration details. For example, if the site says it is registered company 123456 in the UK, go to the UK companies house website and look up that company number.

    • If details don't match, don't trust the website
    • If details do match check how long ago the business was first registered and whether they have filed accounts etc in the last year. Are they shown as active or inactive, have they changed names. Look for evidence of a bad business - sometimes you find a winding-up notice or de-registration notice.

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Main points I'd look at are check the contract. Make sure real people and real addresses are involved if they are some new groundbreaking idea like "crypto as a utility".

Attempt to find out if the contract has been audited by a reputable company.

and a personal one is...Have the people promoting it said "kindly" way more often than you'd hear it on a regular day.

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