I love how most of us know the basic rule: "Do not invest what you can't afford to lose," yet we still go ahead and wave it off, hoping that the dangerous side of that rule will never happen to us.
To be completely law abiding to this rule, I made up my mind never to involve myself in anything related to Ponzi schemes by investing my money, no matter how small the amount is or how huge the promised return may be. This decision has helped me avoid losing money on any platform until Wednesday of this week, which is already winding down.
In one of my WhatsApp groups, a guy introduced a platform where one could earn up to $10 by performing some basic tasks. And guess what? One needed to deposit $5 to be able to do that.
Hold on, this wasn't the usual type of platform created by scammers looking for people to defraud. The site is actually real, and the task was simply to help test some phases of the project they were building. So, it seemed very legitimate because the people who did it right in my presence got their money back within a few minutes.
Fortunately for me, I checked my Bybit wallet and saw that I had up to the required amount needed for the deposit. However, that was actually money I had already budgeted for something else. Since the platform seemed certain to return my money along with some profit once I completed the task, I decided to give it a shot.
I deposited the money, completed the tasks, and got the keys that were supposed to be sold so I could get my money back. However, when I sent the keys through the middleman to the vendor, the vendor went offline and started giving all sorts of irrelevant excuses for the delay.
Yoh! At that moment, I went mad and wished I could just disappear and suddenly appear at the location of the middleman, whom I've known for a while, although only on a virtual basis. The excuses he kept giving were so nonsensical, and the worst part of it all was that he had a habit of turning off his mobile data and never picking up calls either. At that point, I gave up on the money and accepted it as the consequence of crossing my own line by investing money I couldn't afford to lose.
Did I eventually get the money back? Yes, I did, and it felt like a miracle to me.
Thanks for reading.