Coinslush and Crypto Shanty scams

Coinslush and Crypto Shanty are quite freshly baked scams. They don't seem to be popular at the moment and hopefully they never will be.

I wouldn't even know about these schemes had I not decided to join a Telegram channel of Wiseling scam to observe what's happening there. Wiseling has already been covered by other scam busters and it's rather irrelevant to this post, but to put it short it is a scam (you can read more about Wiseling from the links at the end of this blog post). Wiseling doesn't seem to have any relation to Coinslush and Crypto Shanty. However, while minding my own business in the TG channel of Wiseling someone approached me there and started subtly chatting to me about Coinslush.

This person was doing the thing many scammers do nowadays, fishing from the waters of Lake Gullibility – social media channels of scams swarming of people desperately searching a way to become rich with a minimum effort.

This presumably fake person, "Matteo Hendrik", presented himself as an investor of Coinslush. He was surprisingly persistent although I didn't make any effort to pretend that I was a gullible victim to be. Instead I was asking him awkward questions about Coinslush which also questioned his own trustworthiness as an "investor". You can read almost the whole conversation I had with "Matteo" from the screenshots below. He had also some profile pics but I don't present them here because they were most likely stolen to create his fake identity.

I thought he had already given up after I took this screenshot of the conversation. However, he did come back for a short while still trying to convince me. Failing to do that he deleted the whole conversation and ran away.

Before deleting the conversation Matteo explained that he had started investing in Coinslush in 2019. He didn't seem to mind that the domain coinslush.com was registered not until in December 2020. I haven't found any evidence that this Matteo Hendrik exists so I presume that he – the person behind the fake identity – is somehow involved in the scam.

The website

Needless to say Coinslush cannot stand a closer inspection. The website itself might look convincing enough to lure gullible people who think that donating money to a random company online is a good idea. However, the site offers plenty of red flags which should be more than enough to warn people from investing in to this.

First of all, the bottom part of the landing page has a table showing "last 10 deposits" and "last 10 withdrawals". The contents of those tables are scripted to show bogus information and they even change every time one reloads the page. The numbers in the middle are of course fake as well.

Fake, fake, fake.

Coinslush boasts about having a registered company in the UK, F2POOL UK Limited. According to Companies House F2POOL UK ltd is going to be dissolved soon. The company had a registered office address at: South Quay Building, 180 Marsh Wall, London, United Kingdom, E14 9SH. The sole director of the company is Paul Barrett. I couldn't manage to find more information about Barrett, because the website of Coinslush has no picture of him nor any information. In fact there is no information about him or any other people behind the scheme.

I also happened to find another address from the website, possibly due a mistake of the person setting up the webpages. This address is 139 Crownhill Road, Plymouth, England, PL5 3SS. The address leads to an apartment (a duplex house) and might have been for another shell company used prior to F2POOL UK Ltd. The website's support section has also a map directing to the old address. I guess at some point they decided to upgrade the shell company and its location but forgot to update all addresses from the website.

The website contains also a news section. There's only one news item titled "Test news" revealing information of another shell company Coinslush Ltd with a registry number #12709338. I couldn't find any registered company named Coinslush Ltd but the registry number leads to another company named Crypto Shanty. Not to anyone's surprise but Crypto Shanty has a very similar website to the one of Coinslush. Also Coin Shanty Ltd is on its way to be dissolved soon.

"Test News" – and another shell company mentioned

I managed to also find the following domains having clear connections to Coinslush/Crypto Shanty:

cryptoshanty.uno (available online)

cryptoshanty.biz (only Google cache version available)

octavemining.com (apparently was an active scam once)

cryptoshanty.com (more about this site below)

- And these were only the ones which could be easily tracked down.

The Google cache shows a poorly designed website of cryptoshanty.com revealing the identity of Dr. Alison Franklin, the sole director of Crypto Shanty Ltd. Below is a screencap:

Surprisingly she actually does exist. I first thought that this was a fake identity with a stolen picture but she turns out to be a real doctor in the UK. I'll try to contact her next week and ask her some questions.

Modern scams

All those examples above show how scammers nowadays operate. Creating websites for scams is easy, doesn't cost much money nor time and there are always millions of gullible people online. The Internet makes it possible to vanish into thin air after mission has been accomplished. Using fake identities and shell companies keeps the criminals safe and cryptocurrency makes even the money flow untraceable.

I have also seen some scams even advertising themselves on YouTube (for example: BunnyToken, MinerOne, MoneyBackHero, Recyclix). These scams were created by scammers who were actually investing into marketing these schemes, and I must say that their investments truly paid off handsomely.

Below is an example of marketing material of Recyclix scam.

The old saying is still valid but I would like to enhance it a bit: if something on the Internet seems too good to be true it most certainly is.

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