Today we are looking at https://www.economywatch.com/ primarily because of their reviews of Bitcoin Trader and their attempts to associate it with Elon Musk.
Follow the money? We intend to...
Now we review a lot of these review sites and so we spot the signs pretty quickly, that this is not a review site at all, but a fake review site jockeying with its competitors over boiler room scam affiliates fees. Now why do we say this? Well let's have a look at the evidence.
Point one is that the recommendations make no sense. If you are an advice site then you have to be sure that you do not give out bad advice. Bad advice is a recommendation to a person that then loses them money, it is not going to get you a lot of traffic. So the only reason you would risk this is take a huge affiliate fee for hooking victims up with boiler room scams. A good way to spot these sites is that scammers cover the website in small print and disclaimers explaining that they are not liable for any links on your page, and that users should do their own research before trading.
In other words, they have this written at the bottom of every page: REGULATION & HIGH RISK INVESTMENT WARNING: Trading Forex, CFDs and Cryptocurrencies is highly speculative, carries a level of risk and may not be suitable for all investors. You may lose some or all of your invested capital, therefore you should not speculate with capital that you cannot afford to lose. The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing your capital is at risk. Please note that we do receive advertising fees for directing users to open an account with the brokers/advertisers and/or for driving traffic to the advertiser website.
Sure enough, the above text is taken from economywatch.com. They are scammers.
Point two is that we only need to go to the investing list to see which services they recommend:
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Now they start out with Investment Management and bonds and stocks and how to buy shares in various territories, and all of that may be fine, but their idea of advice appears to be just an affiliate link in the hope that you click the link and make them their fee. They offer no advice on processes or what any suitable tactics or strategies may be. This, though, is fine and nothing to be too concerned about.
Their link to buying Amazon stock appears to be a link to eToro and that is fine. There is nothing wrong with using eToro to buy shares in Amazon. Economywatch.com do not appear to be pushing the Amazon Stock scam we have been seeing recently.
Now further down the list we begin to encounter far more disturbing suggestions. The Bitcoin Equaliser is actually a Bitcoin scam we haven't even seen before, and we've seen hundreds. They do not even seem to have an affiliate fee system as the link takes you straight through to https://bitcoinequaliser.org/ so are they running the Bitcoin Equaliser page? We will fill in their form just to see who we receive some communication from:
Well it does not appear to be working at the moment, but they may be blocking our email address as we use it to sign into all of these scams. Either way this website at Bitcoin Equaliser is the same as Bitcoin Rush so we know instantly that it is a scam:
You can see the domain names at the top showing that the Bitcoin Equaliser is the live site, whilst the Bitcoin Rush site is one we have downloaded to raise awareness for when they rebrand (again...).
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We can see virtually ever scam we know of in this list, these people really are quite amazingly greedy; perhaps they should've become traders themselves.
Immediate Edge, Quantum AI, Yuan Pay Group, Crypto Engine, The News Spy, Bitcoin System, Oil Profit - it really is quite astonishing what some people will do for money.
So let's take a look at how these scammers get their money:
Firstly you are taken to the page of the scam, in this case we will choose Oil Profit:
So we click the link, now that we have read that Oil Profit is expected to be one of the fasted growing money making tools today, and we are taken to another server at https://mars.satellitestem.xyz/l/[string] where the string being sent is: {"typ":"JWT","alg":"HS256"}{"iat":1631649346,"nbf":1631649346,"exp":1631660146,"data":{"landerName":"mp_oil-profit_v3","ipAddress":"x.x.x.x","box":"1a4fc781babb850b124a9aeea6fb99cd"}} in base64 code.
This website have their own scammer server that pretends to be nothing when you just browse to the root:
But when you arrive with their string:
This practice is to try and stop Google and other search engines scanning their site and to stop people discovering it unless they are following links from a certain scam. In other words, it is to make sure that only traffic that has been subject to the lies on the previous scammer pages see this page, and that only the traffic likely to sign-up aver arrive here. This means that they can use this site again at another URL and nobody will realise it has been online before. Well, unless they go around deliberately following scammer links like we do that is.
This is another server that many of the economywatch.com scam links point to, and which is undoubtedly run by economywatch.com. We can see that various other scams are run from there:
the News Spy
Quantum AI
Immediate Edge
Elite Trading
Point Three
So it comes as no surprise that this site is run by Finixio, as it is run in exactly the same way as InsideBitcoins.com and InsideBitcoins.com share the same scammer server:
And actually even link to the EconomyWatch.com site for certain scams:
Now finixio are allegedly based in London and so we will be pointing the authorities in their direction to hopefully prevent them defrauding any more people in the UK. According to the EconomyWatch.com about page:
EconomyWatch.com parent company is Finixio Ltd, an online media company based in London, UK the registration number is 11705811. Address: St Magnus House, 3 Lower Thames Street, London, ECR3 6HE. [email protected]
From what we can see searching for text from their articles, they buy in articles from other authors:
We will contact the author of some of the articles and find out if they know who they are providing articles for, and associating their names with.
As the economywatch.com website gains credibility through it's various scams, we will continue to inform Google of their methods in the hope that action will be taken:
If we take a look at Economy Watch staff we can see that they certainly do come from a wide variety of places. Here is Peter Knight:
He looks remarkably like many other people on-line like Yessenia from a health website:
This is almost certainly a stock photo and does not represent a real person in either case.