The Global Web of Crypto Scams and Its Impact on Nepalis Abroad

In early 2022, I sat down with Ramesh (name changed for privacy), who came to Nepal from Dubai during his holidays. He is a young emigrant man working in Dubai having a stable job in sales at a major company. He’d left Nepal a few years earlier to chase the same dream of better pay, steady work, and a chance to support his family back home. He made decent money, more than he could ever hope to earn back in Nepal. Every month, a portion of his paycheck was sent back to his family of monthly expenses and loan payments. It was all going according to plan. Until, one day, someone introduced him to an app that promised he could double his money.

“It didn’t seem fake,” he said, looking down. “Everyone around me was doing it.” The platform seemed like a good mobile at to him at first. Easy to use, no ID needed, no crypto knowledge required. It worked like a game with a small ball spun on screen, landed in a random spot, and showed a number. If the number matched your pick, you won.

He said, “It looked like a lottery mixed with a casino but the way it was designed, it felt like winning was easy”. He was cautious though, at least in the beginning with his first $5 and then $10. Within minutes, he was able to double it, and even withdraw the profit. He did it again with $20 and got back $25. At first, he was just curious and gradually became confident when he’d withdrawn $70 to $80 in profit.”I thought it was real. I had no idea how it worked technically. But I saw the money come in, and that was enough.”  

He wasn’t alone though. His colleagues, his friends, people from his building were also using it. They shared screenshots of their earnings on WhatsApp and encouraged each other to bag more profits. The app put a limit to how much one can earn in a day to portray security and trust, and that made them more confident. Some of them had even made group chats to keep this as a secret and only tell people they trust. In the middle of a crypto boom and a global lockdown, and with time to spare and dreams to chase, this looked like the next big thing to them that should be kept secret.

This went on for almost two weeks letting them earn almost $250. And then one morning, the app was gone. When the app disappeared, Ramesh didn’t panic at first. He knew that sometimes servers go down so he figured it would come back in a few hours. It didn’t. Days passed, then two weeks. The app never returned. The money was gone. “I waited, kept checking. I didn’t want to believe it,” he told me. “Even when it stopped working, I thought they’d fix it and I’d get my money back.”

He had lost over $1500, almost a bit more than a full month’s salary. His friends had lost similar amounts. For some, it was worse. They had borrowed money, pooled resources, even skipped remittances that month hoping to “multiply” the funds.

The scam followed a pattern now common in crypto circles. In tech spaces, it’s called a confidence game where a system is designed to gain your trust just enough to make you ignore the red flags. Here’s how it worked:

1. Low Stakes Entry: The app allowed users to deposit as little as $5 which made it feel harmless. They felt it’s worth the trial.
2. Early Payouts: The first few investments always “won,” and the app let users withdraw funds. This was intentional to create a sense of proof and built confidence.
3. Community Momentum: Once users saw their own success, they told others. The word spread secretly but strongly, offline, online, across WhatsApp groups, and through Nepali networks in the Gulf.
4. Gradual Investment: People didn’t dump all their money in at once but rather built up to it over weeks. That is what made the loss so devastating. It came after repeated small wins.
5. Sudden Exit: The entire platform shut down without notice, contact or trace.

Albeit seeming obvious from the outside, the game didn’t really do anything meaningful, there was no real market behind it, no trading logic, no blockchain, no staking. It was just an interface with random visuals, fake mechanics, made to feel like a casino. But when you’re inside it, you’re surrounded by friends also making money, watching the balance rise, hearing stories of people doubling their money in a day made victims like Ramesh feels real.

“This is the part that hurts,” Ramesh admitted. “It wasn’t even that smart of a scam. But I didn’t stop. Greed took over”. He wasn’t wrong. The technical side of the app was a joke. If he has asked any developer or a mildly technical person, they could have spotted the scam in seconds. When I asked Ramesh what he would do differently, he didn’t hesitate and said that he probably would not have listened at the moment. And that’s the hard truth. The scam didn’t need to be as sophisticated to people who just needed to feel its real at the moment. The fear of missing out (FOMO) also played a big role.

What makes these cons so effective is the psychology, the illusion of control, the excitement of small wins and the validation from peers. When money starts coming in, even if it is just a little, our critical thinking often takes a back seat. But there are ways to protect ourselves. Especially essential to those living and working abroad, far from home, under pressure to make every dirham, ringgit, or won count.

1. Do Not Go It Alone: If you don’t understand something—ask. There’s no shame in consulting a technically minded friend, especially someone in IT, finance, or crypto. Scammers thrive in silence. Talking about these things can break the pattern.
2. Watch the Red Flags: Any platform that promises guaranteed returns, with no transparency about how it works and overtly relies on word-of-mouth should be held with extreme caution.
3. Community Can Be a Shield Or a Trap: In migrant communities, especially where people are far from their families and rely on each other for emotional and financial support, trust spreads fast. That’s a beautiful thing but also risky. A scam that gets into a WhatsApp group or a shared room can take down everyone at once. Groupthink can be deadly. So it is important to encourage healthy skepticism by normalizing asking tough questions.
4. Remember the Cost: Ramesh didn’t just lose $1500 but from another angle lost a month of remittances, medical bills, loan payment and emergency funds.
5. Learn, and Move On: For victims like Ramesh and countless others, the experience became a painful lesson. So it’s always be to ask an expert.
   

Summary

The crypto world is full of promise, but it’s also full of traps. And for Nepalis abroad who work long hours, send money home, dream of a better future, the risks are even higher. We should look out to get access to real opportunities, not schemes with heavenly dreams that is promised to you with zero effort. So let’s share these stories. Let’s ask questions. Let’s make it normal to say, “I don’t understand this, can you help me figure it out?” That simple sentence might be the thing that saves your hard-earned money.