Belgian watchdog reveals investors lost $12 million to Forex and crypto scams

Belgian financial regulatory body FSMA has warned citizens about the dangers of investing on fraudulent platforms. FSMA, which stands for Financial Services and Markets Authority, revealed this in a detailed report released on October 5. Scammers stole about $12 million from investors in the country.

According to the report, scammers used fake advertisement on social media to lure unsuspecting victims to invest in different cryptocurrencies. This scheme has proven to be profitable for these criminals as they looted around 10 million euros from May 2019 to 2020.

Different methods to lure victims

Investors are warned to resist from such platforms that mandate them to provide their personal information. FSMA further revealed that the platforms used aggressive methods to persuade victims to invest large sums of money. Some even go as far as convincing their victims to let them control their PCs remotely to make certain payments.

It was also revealed that some of the scammers used phone calls in the victim’s own language to convince them and offer them to manage their assets. Another scheme was to offer unrealistic and high return on investments. FSMA also estimates that these fraudulent platforms offer different forms of investments including binary options, Forex and various financial contracts. However crypto fraud is the most popular due to the anonymous nature of crypto assets.

Belgium has experienced a huge surge in crypto fraud cases with the country’s economic inspector reporting in 2019 that fraudsters had extorted around $3.2 million in 2019 which was an increase from the $2.5 million recorded a year earlier.

To mitigate against these problems, the FSMA has blacklisted more than 100 crypto scam websites and have also made regulations to punish offenders. Despite these steps, it is believed that a lot of investors lose their money daily with most incidents going unreported.

Crypto scams have become rampant since the crypto boom of 2017 and is a major problem within the crypto sector. Most top exchanges have begun to take actions regarding scams on their platforms and there are different measures that have been taken to sensitize against the dangers of fraudulent crypto platforms.

Never click on a crypto advertisement to protect yourself from these scams.