My relation with "Digital Trade Assets" started in February 2021 when a man by the name Mark Wilson reached out to me on Facebook from one of the stock trading groups I was a member of. Mark told me about "copy trading" whereby I would be able to copy his professional cryptocurrency trades, then he and the copy trading platform would earn a percentage based commission.
I was very skeptical at first, but after looking over Mark's Facebook profile and determining it was not a fake, and being assured that there was no subscription fee or minimum investment requirements, I decided to give it a try. Mark sent me a signup link to digitaltradeassets.com and I deposited $25 of Bitcoin to get started. After I made my initial deposit, he then told me that I needed to have at least $100 for it to work (so much for "no minimum investment requirement") so I deposited $100 more BTC. Then Mark said that I need to have $200 in my Digital Trade Assets account for it to make any significant amount of profit. This would turn out to be a persistent nagging over the next few months, where he would keep asking several times per week if I had added more funds to my Digital Trade Assets portfolio and asking how much my account balance was.
I started to become even more skeptical when I saw the unrealistic gains from my supposed copy trades, making 20% or more on a nearly daily basis and I thought this was simply too good to be true. After I had already put more than $500 of BTC into my account, I looked more into the ownership of digitaltradeassets.com and found that the "DIGITAL ASSETS MANAGEMENT LTD" company was "dissolved on 17 June 2014" and according to the website's own registration link, said it was registered to a virtual office:
Third Floor, 207 Regent Street, London United Kingdom, W1B 3HH
Using lookup.icann.org I found that the domain digitaltradeassets.com was registered to:
Kalkofnsvegur 2, Reykjavik, Capital Region, 101, IS
Further investigation would reveal that this same mailing address was used to register several other shady "crypto investment" sites, almost all of which had scam complaints levied against them.
I tried to withdraw my funds from Digital Trade Assets only to find that I was unable to withdraw anything! When I brought this concern up to Mark, he assured me that I had agreed to a 3 month trading session when I signed up, so my funds could not be withdrawn because they were locked up in active trades.
Despite all of these red flags, I still held on to hope that perhaps this was a legit deal and I would be able to get my investment plus profits at the end of the 3 months. I thought that the fact that Mark Wilson continued to stay in personal contact with me was enough assurance that this could be a genuine thing.
More red flags started to come up...
Mark's Facebook page suddenly disappeared and he could no longer be seen on Messenger. I reached out to him on WhatsApp and he claimed that his Facebook was allegedly hacked. (More than likely, he was banned for scamming.)
In late April, the digitaltradeassets.com website essentially disappeared, displaying a message that it still displays as of the writing of this post:
Mark alleged that this was just the site "being upgraded" although it was most likely the domain host suspending service due to the fraudulent activity being conducted on the site. Eventually, after over a week without a website, Mark said the upgrade was complete and the website came back as digitaltradeasset.com
Needless to say, I refused to deposit funds to my account a few weeks before the site went dark, despite Mark hounding me constantly to keep adding funds and trying to persuade me with statements like "You could have $100k at the end of this trading session." He also kept relentlessly asking me to get referrals to sign up, but I refused to rope anyone else into this suspected con.
Finally the day came when I was told the trading session had ended and I could terminate my contract and withdraw my funds. This turned out to be a long process drawn out over the next couple of weeks, as I was told I needed to synchronize my withdrawal wallet, for which I had to ask for and subsequently wait for an email from Digital Trade Assets support with instructions. The guide instructed me to create a BlueWallet and then "Use Ian Coleman’s BIP39 tool to generate the wallet fund auto-remittal synchronization root key, https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/ " inputting the 12 word mnemonic recovery phrase from BlueWallet to generate a "BIP32 ROOT KEY." In other words, I was taking the access code to my Bitcoin wallet and entering it into an unknown encryption tool to then be used as the withdrawal address on digitaltradeasset.com
I was able to successfully withdraw two small test withdrawals for $15 and $20 on June 18th 2021 and I had great hope that this "too good to be true" investment was actually going to pay off. I then attempted to withdraw the $31,315 balance remaining in my Digital Trade Assets account and waited...
After several days of trying to communicate with DTA Support (they were always slow to respond, like 24+ hour response time) to see if there were any other way to withdraw my funds, I was finally told that there is an option where I could pay Coinbase a transfer fee of 0.144 BTC (~$4,000) and then they would handle the withdrawal. DTA Support sent me the following document supposedly sent to them from Coinbase's COO:
I thought I ought to try one more thing before settling on my conclusion of having been scammed... I reached out to Coinbase support to ask if the funds transfer agreement allegedly approved and signed by Coinbase's Chief Operating Officer, Emilie Choi, was a genuine document. I was quickly responded to with "It appears that you've been the target of [fraud]" from Coinbase Support.
June 23rd, I let my righteous indignation fuel a flurry of formal complaints on every possible platform. I registered complaints on every scam reporting site, with the FTC, IC3, and the BBB. I even sent a fraud report complaint to the domain host. I never heard back from any of them, but just yesterday, July 25th, Mark Wilson messaged me on WhatsApp:
"Becareful you just ignoring the process and calling the platform scam, do not attract a punishable action, I don't want anything that would affect my account, I have a lot of other investors"
Well, Mark if you're reading this, I've already lost everything to this scam of a program you roped me into. I put thousands of dollars of my hard-earned money into Digital Trade Assets because you told me to and now I will never see that money again. You've given me no choice but to call you out for the scamming conman you are. You have no "other investors," only other victims; poor people like me who put their misguided trust in you and you've taken advantage of them for your own gain. I hope the "punishable action" comes in the form of handcuffs and lawsuits for you and your crooked friends, along with restitution payments for all your victims.
And Mark, if you want me to recant my scam allegations, please send 0.30 BTC to 3P1M5zitY4XVpAfvz3SvKJ9A717v72JF4e
😉
TL;DR: Is Digital Trade Assets a scam? Yes. It absolutely is!
