Zerodha CEO and billionaire Nithin Kamath on Wednesday narrated how a friend lost Rs 5 lakh after he responded to a part-time job offer on WhatsApp that offered big bucks for relatively easy work. The lesson learned from the incident, Kamath said, was that "there is no easy way to earn a lot of money quickly".
"Someone I know got scammed and lost money," the Zerodha boss shared in a lengthy Twitter thread. "It started with a response to a part-time job offer on WhatsApp. The first few tasks were about leaving fake reviews for resorts and restaurants in random places like Peru. About Rs 30,000 was transferred to the bank for the tasks completed."
"A Telegram group was created with others who claimed to do these tasks," Kamath added. "The next task for the group was to trade on a mock crypto platform, following a bunch of rules. Profits generated were allowed to be withdrawn, even without transferring any real money."
The crypto platform, however, wasn't Bitcoin or Ethereum, but random crypto tokens whose prices fraudsters could easily manipulate, and the people in the Telegram group were then asked to transfer real money to generate higher returns. "Others in the group claiming to transfer nudged my friend to do so as well," Nithin Kamath said. "I guess the risk didn't seem much since the money transferred was the Rs 30,000 earned through the platform. But greed took over, and more money was transferred, probably due to peer pressure from others in the group who claimed to have made large transfers and profits."
Kamath's friend then tried to withdraw but couldn't and was told that a certain number of traders was required. The fear of being unable to withdraw the money took over, and more money was added to trade. "This amounted to Rs 5 lakh, a large amount for any person," he said.
It was then that the friend finally opened up to the spouse, who almost immediately realised it was a fraud and reached out to the police for help.
"The account seemed like a real crypto account, with account balance, ledger, P&L, etc. But it was all fake; everything on it was manipulated, including the telegram group. The crypto price movements were also manipulated to generate profits and sow greed at the start," the Zerodha CEO said.
Stressing the role of spreading awareness, he added the police shared many cases—even well-educated people borrowing tens of lakhs and losing it in such scams. "Everyone is a target, and we need to create awareness. The important thing to remember is that there is no easy way to make a lot of money quickly," Kamath said.
Read more: Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath reveals how he built the company from scratch
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