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Abstract

A fund trading solely cryptoassets, with a six-month lock-in period and a £10,000 minimum investment. I don’t recall what additional benefits, smaller spreads or more personalised service I was promised in return for a bigger investment, but by mid-June I had wired across £50k and was watching my daily returns on the website with avaricious interest.</p><p id="e9af">And there was still nothing to complain about. I had regular catch-up calls initiated by Raymond, and the returns being shown on the website were exceeding expectations. Intra-day I could see equity draw-downs, presumably while trades were open, but by the end of each day the figure had settled and the overall trend was inexorably upward. Life was golden!</p><p id="6a84">I don’t need to labour my gradual realisation that all was not well in CCX-land. The wheels came off the cart in roughly this order:</p><ul><li>Comments turned negative on TrustPilot, with a number of people asking whether others had tried withdrawing money recently</li><li>Phone calls became less frequent and more defensive</li><li>The website stopped functioning, the result of a supposed system upgrade to a new, shiny interface (which never materialised)</li><li>Emails started getting bounced and phone calls were unanswered</li></ul><p id="e988">Eventually I turned up at both of the offices in person. One was a complete fiction, a Regus shared workspace that they had never occupied, while the other had been rented as a “virtual” office, with supposedly no way of contacting the people behind it.</p><p id="b1ac">I contacted the police, who said all such matters should be reported to the Action Fraud line. Is this the same Action Fraud line which was recently outed by the newspapers because their agency workers spent all day laughing at the poor saps who had been duped out of their money? Yes, that Action Fraud line. I haven’t had an update from them in 14 months.</p><p id="4c3e">Next stop was the Financial Conduct Authority, the regulator for UK investment business. Their hands were a little tied, since CCX had never claimed to be conducting regulated business. But in October 2019, about a year after the CCX website disappeared, a warning about the firm appeared on the FCA scam warning page.</p><p id="48a0">A Facebook group was formed — Find CCX Capital, which is still plugging away. It seems I was one of dozens taken to the cleaner in this way. Again, they don’t appear to be making much headway 14 months later.</p><p id="0e0e">And yet, here’s the thing. This isn’t a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. There’s a trail of breadcrumbs, whole loaves even, which would lead directly to the perpetrators should any policeman care to follow them up:</p><ul><li>There is a <b>person</b> behind the domain name through which everything was conducted</li><li>There are <b>real people</b> behind all of the mobile phones a

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nd landlines which were used by CCX, should the telecomms companies choose to divulge them</li><li>There has to be a <b>beneficial owner</b> behind the Lloyds bank account in Chelmsford, Essex to which I wired my funds</li><li>There is a <b>real director</b> (and his address) behind the parent company registration at Companies House</li></ul><p id="32c2">All of this would be available to the appropriate authorities for the asking, but is denied to the general public (and me) in the name of data privacy.</p><p id="a7aa">Doubtless I could hire a dodgy private investigator, or give a generous commission to a debt collector to cut some corners, and they would assuredly make more progress than the police, Action Fraud, the FCA, the Facebook group and me put together.</p><p id="cd21">But it goes against the grain to pursue a path which is basically vigilante justice, and I retain <b>a shred of hope</b> that one of the agencies whose job it is to apprehend such villains gets around, finally, to doing their job.</p><p id="20cb">Sometimes I hate that optimistic soul inside of me!</p><p id="80ca"><i>Many thanks for reading!</i></p><p id="498b"><i>If you are a fan of financial folly in all its forms, there’s more, much more:</i></p><div id="0732" class="link-block"> <a href="https://readmedium.com/a-foray-into-some-very-foolish-futures-11c9f19bac99"> <div> <div> <h2>A Foray into Some Very foolish Futures</h2> <div><h3>Some people never learn</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*Z2djhU88KEjwh9YL)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div><div id="0ba9" class="link-block"> <a href="https://readmedium.com/the-magic-porridge-pot-92f78988a528"> <div> <div> <h2>The Magic Porridge Pot</h2> <div><h3>And why the Botfarm had to go</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*1WAhnyaAc2i5ATbV)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div><div id="3370" class="link-block"> <a href="https://readmedium.com/easy-money-b49e41630f9a"> <div> <div> <h2>Easy Money</h2> <div><h3>Roll up, roll up!</h3></div> <div><p>medium.com</p></div> </div> <div> <div style="background-image: url(https://miro.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:320/0*ie9ZWuL6JrbI3DBe)"></div> </div> </div> </a> </div></article></body>

I lost £50,000 to a Crypto Scam

And the police didn’t want to know

Photo by Clifford Photography on Unsplash

Being an optimist is the best! Always believing that life is on the up and up, and that any setbacks are just temporary dips in the grand scheme of things.

But everything good comes with a price. I am well-accustomed to forgiving myself for my own financial mistakes, as seen in previous posts on trading, gambling and other self-initiated harms to my wallet. What is proving harder is to get past the fact that there are people out there who will tell barefaced lies and construct convoluted schemes to redirect your money into funding their retirement plans, rather than your own!

First contact came via a cold call one day in early June 2018. That was a red flag to start with, which the seasoned patter of the guy at the other end was quick to neutralise. Raymond Jones (certainly not his real name) was smooth and educated, and totally unphased when I asked him immediately about compliance with investment regulations. He directed me to a real Companies House entry for their parent company, Alexander Growth Capital and TrustPilot reviews for CCX Capital, the trading name of the firm.

The CCX part, standing for CryptoCurrency Exchange, was the reason why I wouldn’t find an entry for them in the UK Regulator’s list of authorised firms. He asserted what I already knew, that pure crypto firms were not at that time regulated in the UK.

So far, so good. Over the next few days, their credibility was established in many other ways:

The know your customer and anti-money-laundering procedures were stringent, requiring upload of photo ids and utility bills (just like a proper firm and unlike any other fly-by-night outfit I had encountered)
The returns shown on the website and in the brochures were impressive, but believable, in that they showed an overall uptrend but incorporated plenty of losing days for verisimilitude
It wasn’t a one-man band. I spoke to at least four different people claiming to be Sales (Raymond), Desk Assistant, Finance Controller and even Head of Compliance
Official-seeming contractual documentation, outlining commitments of both parties, was distributed via Docusign
The trading company was physically located in Trafalgar Square (per contract) and the parent company over in Mayfair (per Companies House).

The proposition was simple. A fund trading solely cryptoassets, with a six-month lock-in period and a £10,000 minimum investment. I don’t recall what additional benefits, smaller spreads or more personalised service I was promised in return for a bigger investment, but by mid-June I had wired across £50k and was watching my daily returns on the website with avaricious interest.

And there was still nothing to complain about. I had regular catch-up calls initiated by Raymond, and the returns being shown on the website were exceeding expectations. Intra-day I could see equity draw-downs, presumably while trades were open, but by the end of each day the figure had settled and the overall trend was inexorably upward. Life was golden!

I don’t need to labour my gradual realisation that all was not well in CCX-land. The wheels came off the cart in roughly this order:

Comments turned negative on TrustPilot, with a number of people asking whether others had tried withdrawing money recently
Phone calls became less frequent and more defensive
The website stopped functioning, the result of a supposed system upgrade to a new, shiny interface (which never materialised)
Emails started getting bounced and phone calls were unanswered

Eventually I turned up at both of the offices in person. One was a complete fiction, a Regus shared workspace that they had never occupied, while the other had been rented as a “virtual” office, with supposedly no way of contacting the people behind it.

I contacted the police, who said all such matters should be reported to the Action Fraud line. Is this the same Action Fraud line which was recently outed by the newspapers because their agency workers spent all day laughing at the poor saps who had been duped out of their money? Yes, that Action Fraud line. I haven’t had an update from them in 14 months.

Next stop was the Financial Conduct Authority, the regulator for UK investment business. Their hands were a little tied, since CCX had never claimed to be conducting regulated business. But in October 2019, about a year after the CCX website disappeared, a warning about the firm appeared on the FCA scam warning page.

A Facebook group was formed — Find CCX Capital, which is still plugging away. It seems I was one of dozens taken to the cleaner in this way. Again, they don’t appear to be making much headway 14 months later.

And yet, here’s the thing. This isn’t a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. There’s a trail of breadcrumbs, whole loaves even, which would lead directly to the perpetrators should any policeman care to follow them up:

There is a person behind the domain name through which everything was conducted
There are real people behind all of the mobile phones and landlines which were used by CCX, should the telecomms companies choose to divulge them
There has to be a beneficial owner behind the Lloyds bank account in Chelmsford, Essex to which I wired my funds
There is a real director (and his address) behind the parent company registration at Companies House

All of this would be available to the appropriate authorities for the asking, but is denied to the general public (and me) in the name of data privacy.

Doubtless I could hire a dodgy private investigator, or give a generous commission to a debt collector to cut some corners, and they would assuredly make more progress than the police, Action Fraud, the FCA, the Facebook group and me put together.

But it goes against the grain to pursue a path which is basically vigilante justice, and I retain a shred of hope that one of the agencies whose job it is to apprehend such villains gets around, finally, to doing their job.

Sometimes I hate that optimistic soul inside of me!

Many thanks for reading!

If you are a fan of financial folly in all its forms, there’s more, much more: