Yet another cryptocurrency scam: DeLaval Investment & Online Trader
Whilst we’re at it, also: VTC Investment, TaeInvest, Forex Cash, Forcastbet, TradxFx, Cryptoflipp, Perfect Blue Signals and literally hundreds more, because of the many random scam URLs I get sent, this one stood out as interesting as it is part of cryptocurrency scam factory, churning out numerous fake websites with the aim to steal as much money as possible.
It is important to note straight away that there is a real, legitimate company called DeLaval that has nothing to do with this scam. Many cryptocurrency scams’ first theft is the name and logo from a real company, hoping that by Googling the name victims will be reassured. DeLaval produces farm equipment for dairy farm. Scammers would have you believe that they now have a side business in cryptocurrency mining.
By now, if you’ve recognised a handful of cryptocurrency scam or a hundred, you’ll know some of the tell-tale signs, such as unrealistic promises such as:
Plus, of course this amazing oportunity came to be via a random person on Telegram. They even have videos and a “whitepaper”, so somebody has put some effort into this.
But what got my interest is this at the top of the home page:
Note “Online Trade”. That’s not right. (Nor is the Bitcoin lamp with “your text here” which you can purchase here.) So, I googled this sentence:
958 results! What’s happening here?
On the internet it is common to purchase website templates. It is very quick and easy to produce a website by copying and pasting your text into a template, make a few changes to how the site looks, use a few different templates. And very quickly and easily a scammer can have hundreds of websites online. This is casting a wide net, perhaps hoping to catch a few victims per website.
What I do not know (but would like to) is who is running this. Is it one scammer or a group (which seems more likely), or are these individual scammers buying a pre-made scam website from the dark web, just changing the bitcoin address to be their own?
One of the sites that used to have this text is ForexCash but look at that text as it now reads:
They have exited the scam, stolen some money and then people started asking questions and they claimed some unavoidable event has led to all the money being lost, so goodbye. Their victims will never hear from them again. In an exit the cause varies from a price crash, hack, audit, technology bugs, etc… The real reason is always that is was a scam and the victims’ bitcoin is safely in the scammers wallets or cashed out at an exchange.
Website Age
Most scams will have fake reviews claiming that they have been with the company for a long time. Typically the website is actually quite new, as these websites are disposable and have a high turnover. As expected, the Delaval Investment scam website is actually under 3 months old.
Bitcoin Blockchain Analysis
Like most of these scams, registering with a fake email address is easy so it is possible to find a deposit address for the scam. I have used the Bitquery IDE to get the transactions for this scam. The deposit address is bc1qac3tdmfd2uaevw6lfep93ldaaxeygqy0gauz9p and in total has recieved 3.9 BTC.
In short: they have stolen several thousand dollars from victims and whilst some of that gets hard to trace there are 22 transfers to Binance where the bitcoin is sold (wallet address 1Lj7bidUGKF1WEdpZ4xLzdSiDkNTkMmSTi). There is no evidence of any payouts to victims to keep the scam going for longer and no evidence at all that it is a legitimate company with the large amount of investment they claim to have.
The latest transaction was on day of writing, Sept 15th, for $500 which suggest that the DeLaval Investment scam is still running and finding victims.
Fake Certificate
No scam would be complete without a fake certificate. So the scam Delaval Investment has a fake FINRA certificate. Note the random dot above the name, where it looks like they failed to properly remove a previous name.
You can search for companies on the Finra register here: BrokerCheck
So, to conclude, and maximise search engines: DeLaval Investment is a cryptocurrency scam, stealing bitcoin.
