RE: Bitconnect - Legit or Ponzi?
Most likely to me, they are a company who figured out the best strategy I have ever seen, to hype a certain product or service, and make its value increase exponentially.
This is also called gaining trust, it's the basic for any confidence scam.
By this I mean that they created a scarce token (BCC), which would grow in demand if people felt they needed to buy it, whatever the cost.
They created a platform that guarantees returns. Which sounds too good to be true, these are the first two elements of a scam: Gain trust/establish trust, make promises that you cannot keep.
They attracted clients with a reward that at first sight seemed as the holy grail, and they delivered what they promised.
This is a repeat: Made promises, established trust.
The point is this though, if they had discovered the holy grail, they must be scamming if they had not kept the holy grail for themselves and utilized it, for themselves, but instead saw a profit motive outside themselves utilizing the secret for themselves directly.
When people started investing and successfully receiving their profits, trust started to increase, attracting more new investors, and skyrocketing the price of the token.
Exactly, which is why it's probably a scam.
Here is where the genius part comes. They pay in terms of USD, so if you made an initial investment of $10,010, and bought 62,562.5 BCC at a price of 0.$16 and lent it, using the projected earnings calculator, you would have made around $19,279.26 as profit, plus the $10,010 principal.
If you were the real owner of those BCC, and simply held the coin without lending or trading it, your initial $10,010 investment would be worth $3,593,590. And that is what the owners have made, minus the insignificant amount they paid to their clients.
Yes, it's clearly a winning method for some, and they are fleecing people in that scenario.
The second, and for me less likely option, is that they started out with the intention to scam people, and found themselves with a tool that had the potential to make much more money by staying active than by running away.
Until they pull the plug, forgetting the most important part, when the smoke and mirror shows are over and people are left without any investments, Bernie Maddof.
Guaranteed returns and advertised as a pyramid affiliate program while combining that with a token which trades almost exclusively on their platform and because the trading bot that has yet to materialize is employed to deliver guaranteed return on investments on someone else's investments, and other things that have yet to materialize like the companies credentials ( who what where when) scream don't fall for the scam, 1$ or 100$, all it's doing is lending credibility to a system that supposedly delivers the holy grail.