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Recently, our Intel team was contacted by a Nigerian in the UAE who said he was scammed by purchasing a fake crypto arbitrage bot, below is his story.
"I, just like every young man out there, hooked up on the digital craze surrounding cryptocurrency. I have been constantly looking up the web to learn more and grow my versatility in being a crypto trader. I hook up daily on all new information out there on how to get familiar with the exchanges, the wallets, what assets to hold all in a bid to be financially empowered.
However, some wicked folks out there are trying to prey on peoples positivity on crypto trading. Unlike forex which has less volatility and requires a lot of skills and expertise to make gains, crypto gives good gains from just holding assets many times.
Then I encounter a YouTube video under the initial channel name of "Silvia Collins" proposing the sale of a good robot that allows a marginal profit on arbitrage trading. I am quite analytical of too good to be true schemes, having been a banker in Nigeria before moving to the UAE. But this video tutorial on YouTube was absolutely well crafted with a reasonable profit margin of 3-10% gain on every trade signal which looked very logical.
This scammer went further to create fake video comments of successful persons with audio comments on her Telegram channel. The scam even gets more sophisticated with the creation of a website directing you to a Coinbase commerce page to make a payment of $100.
She said it's a mobile application with programmed robot signals for profitable arbitrage trading. Arbitrage trading is simply buying a crypto asset from an exchange at a lower price and selling at another exchange at a higher price. It gets more complicated when you can also gain from delay in price adjustment within pairs in an exchange, which I believed the app used a complex algorithm to solve.
Anyways, oh my God I felt this is quite legit. Although my banking instincts had some red flags, eg the website testimony were people names and pictures who don't exist in real life or Facebook. I tried to find out more on the web via Trustpilot for independent review yet I couldn't find any.
I chatted with the admin to make enquiries but wasn't budging on saying much and was very official. He said, if interested, I should proceed for my good and if not should stay put without making any effort to entice me.
I still tried asking why she not allowing free comments on the Instagram channel and she said to avoid people spamming others. I was just lost on any sort of double confirmation of a real users experience. Well, I gave it a plunge and added up together some of my crypto assets which wasn't much to make up $100 and did the payment.
At first, the app wasn't downloadable directly from the Coinbase link. She required I send a screenshot of my payment and instead sent me the app via my telegram chat. I wondered why then create a website to automate the process when you are sending it manually.
I sent a confirmation to her and that was it. She stopped responding to my chat when the app wasn't functioning as advertised. Then all my red flags of no YouTube comments except those approved by her and also no Telegram chat comment by members except for the admin.
I felt sad realizing I was scammed because I had made efforts for over a week to get more information and didn't get it.
So I felt pained and created a counter video to every video she had on YouTube reviewing her claims as fake. And I was glad that within a few hours of my YouTube post someone made a comment thanking me that she was asking God for a sign if this arbitrage robot was real or not. Many more people commented afterwards. A few were too late to be rescued.
However, I am glad that I am able to save a few from this Nigerian scammer. It tarnishes our image as a country and should be stopped. Find the links below to the fake YouTube channel below named Arbit bot, the channel was initially called "Silvia Collins". But because of my counter video on YouTube she/he revised it to "Arbit Bot" how I made 23btc with arbitrage BOT.
Thinking about it, 23 BTC is a lot of money for the kind of young voice I heard in the video. Well, be warned. Don't fall for it."
In order to confirm his claims, we went over to the YouTube channel of Arbit Bot.
The profile says the channel was created in 2001, has about 2800+ subscribers, and is located in the United stated. Clicking the video tab, we found only four videos, with the oldest being just about two months.
The obvious question is how come a channel that has been in existence since 2017 has videos that are just two months old? In our victim’s statement, he claimed the channel was under the name of “Silvia Collins” when he met it. Doing a search on bing using the email omosilvia44@gmail.com from the channel, under the video tab, reveals a cache of videos that still has the previous channel name. This proved that he was correct that the previous name of the channel was “Silvia Collins.”
Moving on, watching one of the videos on the channel titled “MADE 23 BITCOIN ARBITRAGE TRADING USING THE BOT LIVE".
Navigating to the URL abithome.com.ng, we find that it is offline. Doing a Google search with the email omosilvia44@gmail.com, we find that it is listed on the contact section of another website arbitbot.com.ng
Seeing as there were two websites connected with the same email, we decided to check both websites on Trustpilot, an online review aggregation website. The comments of the reviews confirmed our suspicion that after our victim released his warning video about abithome.com.ng, the scammer(s) went ahead to ditch the website and get a new domain name.
Here’s a link to the reviews for www.abithome.com.ng and here is a screenshot of a review:
A more recent review points out that the website has been changed.
We then decided to check the new domain, www.arbitbit.com.ng to see what we could find. The first thing we noticed was the grammatical errors on the site, “lose” was misspelt as “loss” and “achievement” was misspelt as “archievement”
For someone claiming to be a student, these are quite unforgivable mistakes, meaning we have a strong reason to doubt the claim on this blurb.
Seeing that there was a button on the website to get the bot, we decided to see how it functioned. Trying it out, we found out that it was connected to Coinbase, a crypto fintech that provides a service that enables anyone to collect payment via crypto with a WooCommerce plugin. Simulating a payment, we were able to find an email address associated with the entity collecting payment.
Using an OSINT tool, we were able to establish that this email was used to open this LinkedIn profile.
Also, doing a search using just the username from the email, “boykesstar" revealed a Pinterest account.
From the start, we could deduce that this scam involves more than a single person and at least two people. We have the lady doing the voice-over for the videos (we think Silvia Omo/Collins is an alias) and the dude collecting the payments, there could be others involved as well.
Finally, there are certain learning points we can take away from this scam.
Firstly, be skeptical about reviews from untrusted sources. We’ve increasingly seen scammers setting up Google accounts to post fake reviews on play store, YouTube comments, and elsewhere on the internet.
Secondly, due diligence cannot be overemphasized. Before you make any payment, make sure you do thorough research. Search the internet using the contacts given, visit trusted review websites. Take time to consider the offer, does it sound too good to be true, if you have even the slightest tinge of doubt, do not proceed.
Then seek advice from those more knowledgeable than yourself. Only proceed if you’re sure you’ve conscientiously done all you can.
