After stringing investors along with baloney about SMS providers, COTP has finally acknowledged its collapse.
Well, sort of. Earlier today COTP informed investors they were screwed with a “hackers!” exit-scam.
COTP began lying to investors on or around May 13th. Withdrawals were disabled and the excuse trotted out was TRON blockchain congestion.
When it became apparent congestion issues were non-existent at the time, COTP stalled for time with SMS errors.
In a nutshell, investors were told there were problems with the provider. In actuality COTP just delayed SMS verifications sent out, past the implemented expiry time.
These verification codes were required for anyone to cash out, so in effect COTP withdrawals remained disabled.
This excuse dragged out till earlier today, when COTP informed investors of a conveniently timed hacking attempt.
At 23:05 US time on May 22nd, we were attacked by an illegal network and received a ransom email from an unknown hacker.
The attack resulted in the loss of user data and the platform is no longer functioning properly.
This is your typical MLM Ponzi exit-scam.
We immediately commissioned a major network security provider to thoroughly analyze the problems caused by this attack, and data recovery work has already begun.
Recovery is expected to take 3 to 5 weeks.
And then after “3 to 5 weeks” something else comes up or, if COTP’s website is still even around at that point, the “recovery process” will blow out to months with radio silence.
The take-away for investors is the COTP Ponzi scheme has collapsed. Your money’s gone and you’re not getting anything back.
COTP surfaced earlier this year as a daily returns MLM crypto Ponzi. Despite its website only being registered late last year, COTP investors ran around claiming the Ponzi scheme had been around since 2019.
Initially fronted by an actor and stock photo executives, COTP qualified as a Boris CEO Ponzi but wasn’t run by Russians.
COTP was a south-east Asia group of scammers trying their hand at Boris CEO fraud. The same backend platform was used to launch multiple clone Ponzis, most of which have also collapsed (before I could get around to reviewing any of them).
I suspect COTP was run by Chinese scammers, possibly operating from and/or with ties to Singapore.
Whether they go on to compete with the Russians in the actor CEO MLM Ponzi niche remains to be seen.
I’m not sure if it’s permanently down already, but at time of publication COTP’s website was non-responsive.
SimilarWeb ranks top sources of traffic to COTP’s website as the US (38%), Colombia (9%), the UK (5%), Australia (4%) and Nigeria (4%).
Pending unlikely regulatory action, COTP investor losses are unknown.
COTP investors were required to provide photo ID to initiate withdrawal requests. In addition to financial losses, identity theft is another potential fallout of COTP’s collapse.