Names we've checked.
Sources you can read.

The most famous Ponzi of the last cycle. BitConnect promised a "volatility trading bot" with returns of roughly 1% per day, paid early users with later users' deposits through its BCC token, and collapsed in January 2018 after regulators in multiple US states issued cease-and-desist orders. Promoter Glenn Arcaro personally took at least $24 million and settled with the SEC; founder Satish Kumbhani was indicted by a US grand jury.

Marketed as the "Bitcoin killer", OneCoin had no blockchain at all — a spreadsheet wearing a coin's costume. It ran as a multi-level marketing pyramid across 175 countries while founder Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled "Cryptoqueen", took in an estimated €4 billion. She disappeared in October 2017, was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 2022, and remains at large. Co-founder Sebastian Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison.

A mobile "interest-bearing wallet" that promised 10–30% annual returns and paid out in its own token. At its peak it held hundreds of thousands of bitcoin and ethereum from more than two million members, making it the largest known crypto Ponzi of its era. Withdrawals froze in June 2019 and the operators fled with the funds; Chinese courts sentenced 27 members to prison in 2022, with sentences up to 11 years.

"The first decentralized smart contract" was a classic pyramid wearing code as camouflage. Members bought slots in X3 and X4 recruiting matrices, and payouts came entirely from new members' buy-ins — over $340 million from millions of retail investors across Ethereum, Tron and Binance Smart Chain. The SEC charged eleven promoters in August 2022, and the US Department of Justice indicted the four founders the same week.

A South African "bitcoin mirror-trading club" that claimed to copy professional traders' strategies automatically. In reality there was no meaningful trading: the CFTC alleged CEO Cornelius Johannes Steynberg accepted at least 29,421 bitcoin — roughly $1.7 billion at the time — from more than 23,000 members in an unregistered commodity pool. MTI collapsed in 2020; Steynberg was arrested in Brazil in 2022, and the case remains one of the largest bitcoin frauds ever charged by the CFTC.

A "play-to-earn" token riding the Netflix show's name in November 2021. The token rose thousands of percent in a week — and holders discovered they could buy but not sell, thanks to a hardcoded anti-dump mechanism. The developers cashed out roughly $3.3 million from the liquidity pool and vanished, sending the token down 99.99%. A textbook rug pull: hype, lock-up, drain, gone.

An NFT project with serious backing hype that raised roughly $60 million in a token sale on October 28, 2021 — and within about 19 hours, the entire raise had moved out of the project's treasury. There was never a product, a whitepaper was thin, and the anonymous team disappeared. Chainalysis called it the second-biggest rug pull of 2021. Every NFT minted was for a collection that would never exist.

Not one site but a hydra: bitcoinloophole.com and hundreds of clones (Bitcoin Evolution, Immediate Edge, Bitcoin Era and friends) that promise guaranteed profits from "AI trading bots", fake celebrity endorsements including deepfaked videos, and a $250 "deposit" that disappears into unregulated brokers. The UK's FCA maintains a warning list of these unauthorised firms and the CFTC has issued standing alerts about fraudulent digital-asset trading platforms. New domains appear weekly — the brand is the scam, the URL is disposable.

After Ledger's customer database leaked in 2020, victims received phishing emails and SMS pointing to cloned "Ledger Live" download pages and fake hardware-wallet stores; parallel waves copy Trezor, MetaMask and Trust Wallet. The same machinery powers the endless "celebrity giveaway" livestreams that promise to double any deposit. Domains rotate faster than any static list can track — which is exactly why we check names against live reports and why you should verify the exact domain before typing a seed phrase anywhere. The FTC's phishing guidance explains the playbook.