Crypto — Scam and Fraud

What VARA is — and what a “Dubai licence” is not

Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority is a real supervisor — a footer that merely says “VARA” still needs the public register.

Ten thousand 24×24 portraits from 2017 still trade as status objects — floor price is not a free mint for strangers in chat.

A stranger who wants your coins off the exchange for a “cleanliness check” is not doing compliance — they are rearranging access.

Hashrate counts guesses per second — not how fast your payment arrives, and not a cloud-mining dashboard’s promise.

You can hold price exposure through a custodian — control of the coins still means control of the keys.

A printout of a private key is not a vault — and online “generators” have a long history of stealing the keys they create.

A crypto prop desk that sells paid challenges can be a business — or a fee machine with a dissolving paper trail.

Two products share a brand story; only one is a tradeable crypto token — and shutdown windows attract phishing.

Borrowing a famous exchange name, then freezing “profits” behind a fake regulator letter, is a well-worn script.

Researchers mapped hundreds of thousands of MMM-linked bitcoin transactions. The “help” buttons were still a pyramid.

Official bitcoin-reserve talk and family-linked tokens can sit in the same news week — they are not the same thing as a stranger’s deposit link.

Bookkeeping fair-value rules and cash-tax bills are different clocks — both get mis-sold in pitches.