I fell victim to a bot scam, an Arbitrage robot that would generate an income for me over a set period of time. I had a target amount of XRP that I wanted to get, I was close to that figure and saw an opportunity to get there more quickly. Like many people my greed got in the way of good sense. I looked at the company and in spite of some of the flags that came up, I justified these to myself. I didn’t discuss these with anyone as I should have done. My justifications were
it’s a new company, there won’t be many people on their documents yet
they probably cannot afford a big office so have registered this company to a mailbox
There are some spelling mistakes and grammar errors for a professional company website, maybe they don’t know yet
I don’t understand the tech, but it’s clearly working for these people
Why should I miss out on something like this?
This will allow me to exceed my dream figure, I could do so much more
How much I could have made already instead of thinking about whether to invest
If I had stopped for a moment on this path, my justifications for why these red flags didn’t really matter, instead of connecting the dots in a pattern that suited me I wouldn’t have lost out. No-one put a gun to my head and forced me to do anything. I rationalised my choice using irrational thinking. Greed overtook common sense. The scammers’ tricks worked on me because I thought I was too clever to fall for any scam.
​
Be very, very aware of your emotions before you invest. Any initial euphoric feelings will be countered by feelings of abject despair if you lose your investment. Guilt, embarrassment or shame are all common emotions when you’ve been scammed. Panic can set in and all your irrational thinking that led you to invest into this scheme in the first place will resurface. Except this time, you’ll be listing off all of the reasons why you should never have even given this ‘offer’ a second glance. The spelling and grammar mistakes from the website come back to haunt you, you remember seeing a comment about their customer services not responding to someone.
​
I remember when discussions sprung up in my chat groups about my particular Arbitrage robot not paying out. I went to try and withdraw some of my profits as I had done in the past but the system was temporarily down. I went back to the discussion groups to find that something had happened across the whole arbitrage robot platform, all the bots weren’t paying out. The start of the ‘exit scam’ had begun.