First reported:
2018-06-14
Fraud description:
This fraud involves someone (an individual stating to be a representative of a company or an individual claiming to be an investment consultant or advisor) that is offering you support in trading and/or placing an order using Safello’s platform as a part of the investment opportunity. This person might offer you help to set up a wallet and might control your computer to show how a wallet is created and how a transaction at Safello will be processed. The person might offer you support in recovering money that you might have lost before (if you were scammed in the past). Then he/she might claim that in order to proceed you should pay the service fee in advance which might be paid in cryptocurrency as your first cryptocurrency purchase order.
The fraudster might ask you not to reveal this information to Safello as we do not allow any third-party support in trading. By approving our Terms of Service (point 2) you confirm that you as a customer warrant that you are the beneficial owner of funds, customer account, and cryptocurrency wallet address.
This means that you can only sell and purchase cryptocurrency using your own personal funds, customer account/cryptocurrency wallet address and you warrant to not conduct any transactions on behalf of someone else.
In the next steps of this fraud, after placing buy orders at Safello, the fraudster is controlling your funds and usually stops responding to you.
There are cases where BankIDs are hijacked and bank accounts emptied if you allow someone to access your computer via a screen sharing tool, or where a request for BankID confirmation or stolen personal information is used to take out loans in a fraud victim's name.
At Safello we do not allow any third parties to support customers in placing/initiating orders and we do not allow any support with trading. However, in the case of social engineering, we notice cases of fraud attempts. Each case is reviewed and we follow internal compliance procedures and take appropriate security measures to educate the customer and to stop similar fraud attempts.
How to prevent this kind of fraud from happening:
In order to place an order at Safello you do not need any third-party support. All the basic information about how to place a buy Bitcoin order is available on our site https://safello.com/bitcoin/buy/. If you have any additional questions you may always contact our Support.
Never allow any third-party companies (individuals) to take control of your computer or take control of your funds. Always report any suspicious activities to law enforcement authorities.