Although I was ashamed and embarrassed about the fact that I got scammed, I thought I’d share the path that got me there. What turns my screws is that at the time of writing, this scam is still ongoing and I’m sure people are still falling for it or at least contemplating falling for it as we speak. If my story will prevent at least one person out there from making the same mistake in the future, then at least I can sleep knowing that my mistakes will have saved someone else.
I’ve heard people say this time and time again, that if you’re in the crypto space long enough, eventually you’re going to get scammed. I thought I was better than that. I read news voraciously, so I thought I heard all the stories — Elon Musk asking you to send crypto, Free NFT mints, and of course rug pulls. And I thought I knew all the “safety rules,” like don’t give out your seed phrase, or don’t respond to unsolicited DM’s in Discord. What I didn’t think about however, was getting rugged by a completely fake CeFi platform with multiple fake users.
When I say a fake CeFi platform, I’m not talking about Degen platforms (i.e., Celsius, Voyager) where they’re taking user funds to do degen plays. As I’ll go into detail later, I’m talking about entirely fake systems with fake supporters, fake users on reddit, fake user reviews, fake telegrams, fake customer service reps — the works.
The Backstory
If you’ve been following a lot of my other posts, I spend a great time yield hunting, especially for stablecoins and blue chips. As of late, my mission has become even more focused on yield farming as I am in a constant pursuit of finding as much of a diversified spread of where to put my cryptocurrencies while I’m waiting out the bear market. The scam platform in question, is setacco.com — a platform that boasts the best APY’s on stablecoins (at one point around 29% APY) and other bluechips.
I first heard of setacco.com on a Midas reddit, where a user Onyxxo brought it up as one of his primary investment strategies:
Not doing any further digging on Reddit, I did a google search instead where I found absolutely nothing. I read other responses to Onyxxo’s post on Setacco who also stated that they had never heard of Setacco either. However, a quick twitter search did reveal a twitter account that had nearly four thousand followers, and even a telegram group that had more than a thousand followers.
Curious, I decided to check on the site, and from a quick scan, everything looked legit — they had Trustpilot reviews, reported having thousands of users — so I decided to setup an account so that I could poke around a bit more.
Blinded by interest rates:
To be completely transparent, the interest rates completely turned the prefrontal cortex part of my brain off — upwards 20%+ on almost all stablecoins, no lockups, and of course opportunities to be able to earn even more if you locked up tokens for at least 30 days. At this point, I was just looking for reasons to convince myself that I had just found a goldmine. In hindsight what I should have done instead was to believe it was a scam first, until I had something clear and convincing to prove otherwise.
Still having some sense of due diligence left in my brain, I kept looking to notice that they did have a customer support tab, which I opened up to start asking some questions about the company including:
How is it that I’ve never heard of you guys?
[Paraphrased answer]: We haven’t been around that long, up until a short while ago we were only open to private investors and only recently opened up to the public.
How do you earn your yields?
[Paraphrased answer]: We use bots and AI strategies to gain our yields
Citing that I was a blogger (to give some reasoning for why I was being so nosy) before I got the chance to spit off some more questions, but the customer service rep told told me that I should e-mail support@setacco.com with all my questions in order to get them answered more in depth. He also told me that it was great that I was a blogger and that setacco would love to get reviewed, and offered that I try depositing a little to see how the platform worked first hand.
New to trading? Try crypto trading bots or copy trading
This was the hook that really got me. One of the things that I love absolutely most about the crypto space is exploring and trying out new things. Whether it’s figuring out how to bridge your $ETH to Arbitrum, or whether it’s learning about how validator nodes work — the most exciting thing about crypto is the fact that there are new things constantly coming out that are reinventing the way that we look at finance and networking in general. So when I was asked to try it out, I was enticed enough to try it out an explore without doing further due diligent research in the platform itself.
It was getting late my time and I already had around 0.015 $BTC in my OkCoin account, so I decided to send it over, and after it had posted (which was within minutes), I put it into one of their boosted 30-day vaults to earn roughly around 11% APY.
It wasn’t until the next morning when I actually started doing more digging into setacco when I started to find some troubling things…and then the hard truths started to appear:
Setacco’s site was a near carbon copy of coinloan.io’s, an actual legit site:
To make matters even more confusing, there’s even accusations of coinloan.io being the scammers on their own reddit page:
Although setacco.com has made some alterations over the website over the last month or so, there’s still things that still scream copy-and-paste job, including their company address, their European Financial License numbers, all their company information sites such as their privacy policy page and data protection links. And although they have updated it since, originally many of their links such as their trustpilot link (which now goes to a litany of different what-I-am-sure are fake reviews), only linked you back to setacco’s homepage. Needless to say, had I actually done more digging on their site or had I been familiar with coinloan.io, I would have (hopefully) been able to smell something fishy from further away.
Settaco’s (a.k.a. Onyxxocean’s) social media accounts
Doing a bit of a deeper dive into Setacco’s twitter account, I noticed several red flags.
- If you do a search of “Setacco twitter,” it’ll identify that the account is/was actually “onyxxocean”:
That name familiar? Well it is nearly identical to the same user Onyxxo that was peddling settacco on reddit. And doing a secondary search on reddit, you can tell that this guy was regularly schilling settacco, and schilling it hard:
But going back to setacco’s twitter, I started to notice that the account had a lot of retweets of different things going on in the crypto-space and tweets on supposed “partnerships, and only a handful of actual tweets that may resemble an actual legitimate platform tweeting things out.
Setacco’s telegram was also dubious as well too —even with more than a thousand followers, regular members of the group are not allowed to post anything to ask questions or to make comments. I tried to DM one of the admins, “Jack Yurg,” but of course never got a response.
Maintaining hopium that you haven’t been scammed
Waiting for my $BTC to supposedly unlock after 30-days, I saw all the flags, but I still hoped that maybe, just maybe I was wrong. Even though the site weirdly went down with a 404 error for a few days, even though more and more people were identifying the scam-like properties online, even though I was getting no responses from anyone related to setacco or their so-called customer service, even though real negative reviews exposing setacco were finally getting posted, I still thought that maybe I could get my funds out. When my 30-day unlock period came, I requested my withdrawal which immediately went into a “24-hour pending period.”
The next morning when I woke up, I tried to login only to find this:
My account had apparently been completely deleted from the platform, and of course there’s no way to access my funds. I’ve personally reached out to them through several different platforms, but to date I have not had any response.
Key Takeaways I’ve Learned
Scams are really elaborate: we’re not just talking copied websites, this scam has thousands of fake followers, multiple fake accounts tied with different users on different platforms talking about how great the platform was. Even on reddit, there were multiple scammers conversing one another making it seem like the platform was legit.
I’m very thankful I didn’t put in more: whatever amount I put into this, I would have lost. Was it probably calculated that the scammer(s) were just trying to get anything from me, no matter how little? Probably, but 7 months ago when I was starting out in the crypto-space, I was significantly more degen and I probably would have aped in a lot more than with just $400 dollars worth of $BTC.
Due diligence= more than just scratching the surface: All the research I did after depositing my funds should have been done beforehand. Had I spent even just a few more minutes doing more digging, I would have been that much more likely to have been dissuaded from just “trying it out with a small amount.”
Conclusion
I hope that you’re able to take away something from this article, and if you have stories about being scammed yourself, I’d be more than willing to hear about it in the comments below.
That being said, there are multiple ways to report fraud. If you or someone you know has been a victim of a scam, there are multiple ways to report it, including through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). I’d recommend that you make a report to all 4, and also be vocal online when you see these types of scams being solicited. If there had been more reviews (such as this one) exposing some of the irregularities of setacco that I could have easily googled, I would have been dissuaded that much more easily into taking the setacco gamble.
Thanks again for taking the time to read this, and if you haven’t already, be sure to follow me on twitter to get all my latest updates: https://twitter.com/CryptosWith
Disclaimer: None of the content within this article is meant to be financial advice. Please do your own research and/or contact a financial advisor to find what investments might be best for you.
