Review of Bitpays.biz: Ponzi Scheme Returns over 350% Per Hour

What would you say if a website told you it could make you rich in just a few hours? Would you believe it?

The answer from any sane person would obviously be no. Anything short of winning the lottery would not make you rich in hours. But that, however, is the claim made by bitpays.biz, an HYIP or Ponzi scheme that went online just four days ago.

Read on as we cut through the egregious statements made by this obvious scam website.

350% per hour

While most recent examples we’ve seen of cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme’s making claims that are obviously not sustainable, Bitpays makes claims that are simply out of this world. When you open its main page, the site claims that you can make 1050% profit in just three hours.

So how do they claim to produce such unbelievably high returns?

According to the website, they are able to do this by "careful preparation and fruitful work of experts in the field of Bitcoin mining, highly profitable trade in crypto currencies and online marketing." That's it. No lasers, no coin mixing, no Bitconnect type lending, no artificial sapphires, no storage unit renting, just plain old boring mining and online marketing.

Furthur, the site claims: “Your deposit is working on an ongoing basis, and makes profit every hour with the ability to withdraw profit. Your deposit be tenfold within 3 hours upto 100 days.”

Last time when we reviewed another similar scam site, BITCY.BIZ, we introduced a few criteriathat can be used to determine when a site is a potential scam. Let's go over those now for Bitpays.biz.

1. Unrealistic Returns

While others scam sites offer 40% or 50% per week or month, Bitpays.biz goes completely off the deep end with its ridiculous offer of 1000%+ gains in just hours.

The system is split up into eight different primary tiers which go from 0.42% per hour through to a completely ridiculous 84% per hour. Above this is two VIP tiers, where the fabled 350% per hour is promised.

Let’s run some numbers and see what the results would be.

Tier one has a maximum deposit of 0.5 BTC, so let's assume that's our deposit size. At the end of just 60 minutes, our deposit would grow to 0.521 BTC. At hour two, 0.542882 BTC. At hour ten, we would already be at 0.75 BTC. At the end of just one day, we would have 1.34 BTC.

At today's prices, that means going from $6500 to $1742 in just 24 hours, meaning we nearly tripled our deposit. This is of course assuming that it's compounding hourly. If we assume that it's a flat 0.42% of the base deposit, then we would see 1.004 BTC after a single day, 1.5 BTC the day after, and so on..

Now let's consider the highest tier. 84% per hour, a maximum deposit of 20 BTC, for 12 hours. Assuming it compounds hourly, you would end up with 30119.2304 BTC ($391 million). If it does not compound, and is instead a flat 84% of the base, we would have a total of 221.6 BTC ($2.88 million), or more than 10 times the original deposit.

2. Affiliate marketing

This Bitpays.biz site offers the standard affiliate marketing in its attempt to spread as quickly and as disease-like as possible before everything collapses and the site disappears.

3. "Guaranteed" profits

While Bitpays.biz doesn’t use the exact phrase “guaranteed profit“, in its FAQ section, one of the questions asks can I lose money, and it says no, there is no risk of losing money, which is just another way of saying guaranteed profits.

4. Deposit locks

Each tier at Bitpays.biz has a different lockdown time which is similar to other scam sites of the sort. Lockdown periods for most people are going to be at least 50 days. With the 50-day tier requiring half a bitcoin minimum. In order to get the shortest lockdown time of just 12 hours, one would need to deposit a minimum of 15 bitcoin, which at today’s rate is approximately $200,000.

5. Anonymous operators

It comes as no surprise that whoever is operating the Bitpays is remaining completely anonymous. Although the site claims to be registered in Canada, there is no evidence to suggest this is true, or that a registration would have any consequence for investors in the event that something goes wrong.

On the website about us page, all we have is two rambling paragraphs that do not give any indication of who is running the site. The contact page merely gives a contact form and an email address with the same domain as the website.

6. The inevitable collapse

What’s interesting in this case is that we’ve managed to see the Ponzi scheme appear before it’s even one week old. Typically, these Ponzi scheme’s last for somewhere between 3 and 12 months before they go off-line. The exception being the obvious BitConnect, which has been operating for more than 12 months and despite various legal threats, appears to still be operating.

Again, since the Bitpays is so new it will probably continue operating for at least a few more months before it collapses.

Don't be a victim

As with all of these Ponzi scheme websites, they all work on the same principle. That being, cashing in on peoples greed, and lack of understanding of how finance really works.

Additionally, since those who invested in bitcoin the last few years have seen true and genuine gains in the thousands of percent in a year, those new to cryptocurrency may not understand where those gains came from, and therefore may be more susceptible to falling for a scam such as this one.

When it comes to dealing with cryptocurrency, we need to be even more careful than usual because in the end there is no single government or police force that can protect us in the event that we are scammed out of cryptocurrency through the internet from an anonymous source.

It’s important to stay vigilant and be able to recognize a Ponzi scheme when you see one.