China's crypto currency scam - how to spot a scam and falsehoods

Bitcoin and other cryptos are banned in China, and for valid reasons. China wants to develop its own central bank crypto. The expectation for the coming Chinese crypto is electrifying. It is not just because the Chinese market is huge, but the people are already in tune with a cashless society. It is an opportunity that all those who missed out on the explosive booms of Bitcoin will never want to loose out a second time round. That's probably 6 billion people. 

The Yuanpay Group calls itself "the only officially approved and controlled legal crypto platform in China". It claims to have worked with the government and banks in the development of this new crypto and is licenced to sell and trade in it. They are now open for business. You are likely to see their advertisements everywhere on how to turn $100 into $5,000. 

I blog a lot on investment related matters and I have a feeling Yuanpay's advertisement will turn up fairly often. So I want to take a few moments away from tracking Temasek's bad assets and sound the alarm bell on Yuanpay specifically and touch a bit on some quick ways to smell out a scam.

I saw this innocuous advertisement:

The advert does not tell who they are and the copywritng is an obvious click bait. That's the first give-away.

I was interested in the currency image. I want a bigger image that I could use in future, so I clicked. It brought me to what is known as the landing page.

So I landed at a page in what looks like Forbes website with headline "China Officially Backs a CryptoCurrency and Establishes it as their Official Coin".

It also says "In fact, China deputy minister of finance, Liu Kun, informed us that their new official coin starting price is just ¥0.12 cents!"

The article goes on to entice the unwary with the great opportunities for the early birds. A common feature is to show what billionaires know and you don't. This article did'nt disappoint. It has the good Sir Richard Bronson to beckon you on.

The article gives a brief on Yuanpay Group and salivates you with examples of real people making easy money. It then provides a link to click to Yuanpay Group website where you can sign up. That's called funneling. The landing page funnels the unwary to the page where they sign you up.

The Yuanpay Group page provides the sign up forms to fill up. A give away here is the page is devoid of any info about the company. There is no menu and the usual about, contact, directors, products, technology, news, etc. 

Here are 2 simple things you can do to authenticate the stuff you see.

Check the domain name:

Firstly, is the Forbes article even true? Why would Forbes a reliable institution allow themselves to be used? The first thing to do is check the URL of the Forbes article which shows as :

https://agitated-mccarthy-31dfda.netlify.app/?campaignid=10974806131&adgroupid =107289741269&creative=460148792551&placement=fintel.io&matchtype=&device=
.  

The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a locator ID or unique address for each webpage or resource such as a file or image. In the URL, look out for the Domain Name which is the unique name for a website. A simple domain looks like this :

www.(name).(suffix)
www - this defines the content, which is the world wide web. This is not shown in browsers.
(name) - this is the name the owner has provided for their site.
(suffix) - this identifies the type or location of the site, eg 'com' is for US, 'com.sg' is for Singapore, 'gov' is for government, etc.
 
There are other characters that make it look complicated. But it is organised like this :

www.xxx.xxx.(name).(com)/xxx/xxx/xxx/xxx

The 'xxx' on the left are sub-domains (consider them as folders and sub-folders and are separated by a period).
The 'xxx' on the right are pathways to the specific resource or webpage and they are separated by a slash.

The prefix 'http://' is the scheme which dictates what protocol must be used to fetch the webpage or resource. 'http' stands for hypertext transfer protocol. 'https' is the secured version. There are other like 'mailto' and 'ftp'.

What you need to do is to look out for the domain name. For example, to sign into DBS internet banking, you go to the sign-in page, check the URL which shows :

https://internet-banking.dbs.com.sg/IB/Welcome

The domain name shows 'dbs.com.sg' so it's a valid DBS site.

For this Forbes article, the domain name is 'netlify.app'. It is definitely not an authentic Forbes article.

Fact check the image:

Googles provide for a reverse image check. Googles will show all similar images that have been posted. You can then see where and when it has been posted and trace to the origin.

To do this, go to www.images.google.com. The familiar google search page will show:

There is a difference with the usual google search page. The Google logo has an attachment "images" and there is a camera icon in the search bar. There are 2 ways to do the search.

1. Drag the image into the search bar.
2. Copy the address or URL or the image and past it on the search bar. To obtain the image address, right click the image and select the option "copy image address". Go to the google image search bar and click the camera icon. A dialog box will open. Simply paste the image address and click search.

For Chrome browser users, the easiest way to do reverse image search is to go to the image, right click and select the option "Search Google for image".

I tried to do a reverse image search on this Yuanpay image but nothing original came up. The same 'news' is copied mindlessly by silly blogs and miscellaneous sites. No other serious news media carried the article. So either this is the one and only original image or it has been doctored. If an image is doctored, its digital dna changes and google would not be able to pick up the originals. My guess is the image is doctored because it looked like a media event, in which case the same image would have been carried by many news sites. So I did additional detective work and finally saw this image in www.sbs.com.au, an Aussie news site.

This is not Liu Kun of the Ministry of Finance talking cryptocurrency, but China's Commerce Ministry spokesman, Gao Feng in July 2018 talking about a "fierce counterstrike" if Trump adds more tariff to the trade negotiations.

Other give-aways:

At the Forbes article page, all the "Forbes" sub-menus link to the same Yuanpay page. A clear sign this is fake. No other authentication required.

The smart thing about the article is the date. It is not text but there is a script running which shows the current system date when the page is opened. The viewer thinks it is the latest news. All the other websites that copied this article show dates sometime May 2020.

.
Praemonitus, praemunitus - To be forewarned is to be forearmed. 

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