Have Those Behind Defi100 Crypto Project Scammed Investment $32 Million?

DeFi100, a cryptocurrency project, allegedly scammed investors of $32 million (roughly Rs. 233 crore) according to reports and tweets. However, the project has now issued a denial of the claims, although some doubt apparently remains. The reports of people behind the project running away with the money started circulating after a rather distasteful message appeared on their website on Sunday. “We scammed you guys, and you can't do **** about it,” read the message on the DeFi100 website. Since then, DeFi100has clarified that their website was hacked and the hackers had put the message, which has been taken down now.

Like Bitcoin (price in India), Dogecoin (price in India), and Ether (price in India), among others, DeFi100 is a cryptocurrency. However, it's much lesser-known than the other popular digital assets. At the time of writing, the website was still down. “Oops, looks like the page is lost. This is not a fault, just an accident that was not intentional,” is what it says now.

Speculation about a scam started with a tweet this weekend:

On Sunday, the crypto project, on its official Twitter handle said they had not exited as was suspected. "Firstly, total supply of D100 at present is less than 4 million tokens. At the beginning of the project, total supply was 2.5 million tokens. Secondly, D100 was never a yield farming protocol, which was holding investors funds with TVL over 32 million," it said in a tweet.

"Thirdly, total tokens sold during IDO were 750,000 at $0.80 per token. These facts are available in public for checking their authenticity. The rumours of stealing $32 million are absolutely false and baseless," it added in the subsequent tweet. "We reiterate it again that we have not made any exit."

While the creators of DeFi100 have clarified they have not scammed the investors, one can't really say anything until the website is once again up. According to a report on Coindesk, the value of D100, DeFi100's native token, has plunged 25 per cent in the last 24 hours to $0.08 (roughly Rs. 6).

Reports of DeFi100 creators scamming their investors came days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the principal law enforcement agency of the United States, reported that it had received a record 1 million complaints related to online scams and investment frauds in the last 14 months.

It took the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) seven years to log its first million complaints, but the most recent million just took 14 months, the agency said. On May 15, 2021, the IC3 reached the 6-million complaint mark. The IC3, besides supporting the Bureau in law enforcement, collects and reports data in an annual report and educates the public by sharing notices about new scams or an increase in certain type of crimes.

And just last Monday, it came to light that scammers impersonating Elon Musk stole over $2 million (roughly Rs. 14.63 crore) in cryptocurrency since October last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a US consumer protection body, reported.

The FTC's new data also shows that nearly 7,000 people have been defrauded since October 2020, reporting losses in bogus cryptocurrency investments, adding up to over $80 million (roughly Rs. 585.43 crore). These scams, it says, can happen in many ways and they are “full of fake promises and fake guarantees”.