Public Realm
Descriptions: A California victim reports being approached on Facebook by an individual named “Anjali” who appeared to have mutual friends with the victim. After moving the conversation over to WhatsApp, Anjali introduced the idea of investing in crypto and offered to teach the victim on how to set up an account and trade. Anjali instructed the victim to set up an account on a crypto asset exchange to purchase $5,000 in Ethereum, and then transfer funds over to the a trading platform, publicrealm.pro. Anjali then told the victim there a “big makert day” was coming, and convinced the victim to invest an additional $133,000. Following the trade, the victim was led to believe they had made $40,000. However, when the victim attempted to withdraw their funds, the platform said that their account was frozen. The victim contacted the platform’s customer care, which instructed them to deposit 20% of the account balance ($35,000) in order to unfreeze the funds. However, after depositing the funds, customer care claimed the victim’s funds had been stolen by a hacker. The victim posted online about their troubles on what they believed was a legitimate community support page of the crypto asset exchange where they had purchased their crypto assets to transfer to the platform, and was approached “Csilla”, who claimed to work for the exchange and offered to help the victim recover their funds. Csilla instructed the victim to send the additional funds to another wallet address, Csilla then took $10,000, calling it a” “gas fee”. The victim has not recovered any of their funds and the website is no longer operational. The victim reported sending funds to the following wallet addresses: 0xC834a7EF0337F939219Ea1B05f2248DE7d809aB4 0xD80afd661c2835dd04AeaA7ADB39526eB287569E 0xA7a5855B1b62b22c55da59724d85cbac7F3ce3d7
Potential signs of a scam, exercise extreme caution.
