Social media is currently flooded with schemes for making money quickly in the comfort of your own home. A lot are about investing opportunities, also in cryptocurrencies. So how much money can actually be made though these schemes and their related sites, and is the reward as significant as the risk?
A significant part of the target market is young people struggling to get by. To reach a larger audience, platforms like YouTube will advertise a luxurious lifestyle with flashy cars, big houses and wads of money to lure people in.
The City of London Police recently issued a warning against “investment fraud.” The online page says that “a total of 39 per cent of all victims of investment fraud are between the ages of 20-39 years old”.
Rising East spoke to a victim of one of these get-rich-quick schemes, Jameel Samad, 21, from Greenwich. He told us he had, “tried multiple methods of making money” after “struggling to manage” his finances at university.
Then he found a trading course advertised on his friend’s Instagram page. “To join it was a payment of £250 then £150 a month as a subscription. I saw this as an opportunity to make some easy money without committing to a job.”
After the initial payment Jameel found out the courses were available online for free and that what he was really being sold was the “community” of other people who had also paid out. He was then informed that another way he could make money would be through the commission he would earn by getting other people to join the website. “I had become involved in a pyramid scheme, where I’d become the bottom layer.”
The trading course Jameel was signed to then offered him more incentives. They claimed that if he signed up two people his membership would be free of charge and those new innocent members would pay Samad a commission of £100 a month.
In the end, Jameel decided to leave the scheme. He told Rising East: “I didn’t enjoy the immorality of how it affected other people; but in the end, I ended up right back where I started, with £250 less.”
His advice for those thinking of signing up to an investing scheme is: Do your research first, and to be “wary of those selling that lifestyle.”
