New Zealand Police investigate allegedly fraudulent crypto platform Quwiex

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

👋 Want to work with us? Cryp­toSlate is hir­ing for a hand­ful of positions!

The Auck­land City Finan­cial Crime Unit is inves­ti­gat­ing Quwiex Lim­it­ed, a self-pro­claimed cryp­to plat­form, after mul­ti­ple reports from vic­tims that the plat­form is a scam, accord­ing to an RNZ report.

Quwiex registered in New Zealand with false information

Sus­pi­cions about the plat­form began to rise in April when it first sus­pend­ed with­drawals because it want­ed to upgrade its web­site. How­ev­er, the web­site was deac­ti­vat­ed on the day the upgrade was completed.

This means that all investors’ funds dis­ap­peared with the deactivation. 

Police inves­ti­ga­tion into Quwiex revealed that the plat­form had reg­is­tered in New Zealand in Sep­tem­ber 2021, but it appears that all of the infor­ma­tion used for its reg­is­tra­tions were false.

Speak­ing on the issue, Detec­tive Sergeant James Rob­son said, 

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the iden­ti­ty doc­u­ments are fake, and there is no con­nec­tion to the address sup­plied. No actu­al links to New Zealand have been able to be iden­ti­fied, which means those involved in this scam are based off­shore. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as the peo­ple behind these scam­mers are based off­shore, the like­li­hood of recov­er­ing their loss­es is quite low.”

Notably, New Zealand’s Finan­cial Mar­kets Author­i­ty had issued a warn­ing about the com­pa­ny in April, say­ing that Quwiex was not a reg­is­tered finan­cial ser­vice provider in the coun­try and that the firm was

“Mak­ing state­ments regard­ing the returns an investor would receive from the finan­cial ser­vice offered, that appear to be false and mis­lead­ing and/or unsubstantiated.”

As of press time, there is no infor­ma­tion on how much investors lost to the scam.

Scams hinder crypto adoption

One of the chal­lenges hin­der­ing the mass adop­tion of the cryp­to indus­try is the preva­lence of scam activ­i­ties that have led to the loss of trust and mil­lions for the industry.

A com­mon prac­tice is to promise high yield invest­ment returns to unsus­pect­ing investors. Ear­ly investors in the scheme often get paid, there­by encour­ag­ing oth­ers to join, but in the long run, the scheme usu­al­ly ends with the scam­mers dis­ap­pear­ing with their investors’ funds.

The US Com­modi­ties and Futures Trad­ing Com­mis­sion recent­ly charged two indi­vid­u­als over their involve­ment in a $44 mil­lion Ponzi dig­i­tal assets invest­ments fraud.

Mean­while, cryp­to adop­tion in New Zealand is still low com­pared to oth­er coun­tries. Accord­ing to a Finder’s report, there has been a decrease in the num­ber of cryp­tocur­ren­cy investors in the coun­try between Jan­u­ary and April of this year.

Source link

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *