Accused Indian Bitcoin Mining Scam involving GainBitcoin and MCAP
During the recent surge in bitcoin prices in 2015, Gainbitcoin, a bitcoin cloud mining company was launched by Amit Bhardwaj(Founder of GBMiners) in India. GainBitcoin promised to deliver 1.8x times the investment within 18 months by providing 10% returns every month. It was similar to all other cloud mining ponzi schemes like Hashocean and GAWMiners that failed after some time.
Rise in popularity of GainBitcoin
With the rise in prices of Bitcoin, Bitcoin news coverage across India increased. Several people saw bitcoin as a way to make quick money. GainBitcoin took advantage of this opportunity and started organising Bitcoin information seminars across different cities of India.
GainBitcoin used these seminars to explain bitcoin mining as a highly profitable way of earning income and sold their contracts to the attendees. They then introduced a referral system which operates like a MLM offering sales commissions on every contract sold.
Introduction Of BitcoinGrowthFund
In May 2017, they introduced BitcoinGrowthFund which issued a token called MCAP on Ethereum network. They sold this token for $4 per token. According to their whitepaper, there are total 100 million token available. BitcoinGrowthFund website states that they raised a total of $19 Million which means they sold 5-6 Million MCAP(including discount period). But according to the block explorer, they still had 99,702,800 MCAP until june 25th,2017.
Despite so many red signals in this ICO, the price of MCAP hasnt crashed. Since no one really has MCAP, the price cannot crash until they unveil their final plan.
GainBitcoin to MCAP swap
Following the MCAP ICO, GainBitcoin announced the shut down of their mining contract program. To reimburse the customers of GainBitcoin, they have announced that they will start paying out users in MCAP instead of Bitcoin.
This is where it gets interesting. MCAP virtually had no value. To give it some value, they held an artificial ICO and showed $19 Million investment to give it some value.
They can pay users in MCAP since they already have loads of MCAP. Since the users are going to get paid 100% of their investment according to the market price,they wont complain. After everyone is payed out, the price of MCAP is surely going to tank which will leave many users with heaps of MCAP which they didnt even buy.
Conclusion
Since India has no regulations regarding bitcoin, it is going to be really difficult to take legal action against Gainbitcoin. All in all, once this scam starts coming out, it will leave a really bad reputation around bitcoin in India where adoption is on its peak right now.
What do you think about this scam? Have you invested in Gainbitcoin? Let us know in the comments.
Source: https://inc42.com/buzz/amit-bhardwaj-bitcoin/
Yes.. i have invested in Gainbitcoin and feeling the same..
We have been duped in name of MCAP.
Now our money is gone.
and i know lots of people who has invested explicitly in MCAP and still they are positive for MCAP.
All the best to all those guys.
YES, THE VALUE OF MCAP IS ERODING VERY FAST AND WE DONOT HAVE ANY OPTION.
The newest twist in this tale is the new ponzi website GB21. Those who failed to withdraw their MCAP in time are now being handed out GB money, with a conversion factor of 1 mcap= 0.6 USD (not their claimed price of 20 USD that MCAP was actually worth as per them). And that GB money is non withdrawable. You have to buy one more contract with GB money in the new website.
Whoever is reading this, please refrain from investing in any mining schemes. It’s a fraud. I know many others other than myself who have been duped.
Also if there is a group or a forum taking legal action against Amit Bharadwaj or GB miners or Gainbitcoin or GB21, please post here.