MetaMask<\/a> wallet. This is easily done because \u201cEthereum is an open platform, and anyone can create any coin they want, like USDTx in place of USDT,\u201d Rad stresses. To be sure, one should check the smart contract \u2014 don\u2019t trust, verify.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\nOpenSea offers on an NFT listed for 121.95 ETH \u2014 note the currency! Screenshot by Elias Ahonen<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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A variant of this has been seen on NFT marketplace OpenSea, where buyers can bid in Ether or stablecoins USDC or Dai, both of which are worth $1 each. As the Dai symbol can be mistaken for that of Ether\u2019s, an inexperienced or tired user might accept a bid of 79 Dai on their 80-ETH NFT, only to realize too late that they are down by a quarter of a million dollars. While it can be argued whether such a transaction is a scam in the legal sense since there is no direct misrepresentation, those making such offers in bad faith are surely bankrupt in terms of morality.<\/span><\/p>\nTransfer recall scam<\/h4>\n A transfer recall scam works by way of chargebacks, where a dishonest buyer of a cryptocurrency sends funds to the seller, receives cryptocurrency, and goes on to file a fraudulent complaint with their bank or payment provider, alleging that they themselves have fallen victim to a scam.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cSome banks immediately return the money,\u201d Rad says. \u201cThis is actually one of the most difficult types of scams to follow up on\u201d because neither banks nor the police are likely to understand much about cryptocurrency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cLet\u2019s say this case goes to court \u2014 you will end up having to pay the government to hire a specialist to make sure that you transferred cryptocurrency to that guy. It is very difficult unless you have powerful lawyers and are willing to spend a lot of money,\u201d Rad describes.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Wallet import scam<\/h4>\n A wallet import scam happens when a seller of cryptocurrency says that they cannot send directly to the buyer\u2019s wallet by way of a public address but insists that the Bitcoin must be imported. \u201cThey import a watch-only address to your wallet,\u201d Rad says, referring to a setting that allows the wallet to mirror an address it does not control.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\u201cIf you are not experienced, you will open your wallet and think, \u2018Ooh, I have 100 Bitcoins here in my wallet,\u2019 and you will hand over the cash, but later on, when you try to sell the Bitcoins, you understand that the coins are not transferable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nIn order to pull off this scam successfully, the scammer must generally know which Bitcoin wallet the unwitting buyer is using. \u201cYou should never tell anyone what wallet you\u2019re using. It\u2019s none of their business. If the cryptocurrency is sent correctly, it will be received correctly,\u201d Rad warns, using the analogy that you do not need to know whether someone is using an iPhone or Nokia in order to call them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOf course, you should never allow anyone to see your seed phrases or private keys or hand them your wallet for any reason, he adds.<\/span><\/p>\nIn addition to avoiding scams, Rad recommends that anyone conducting OTC trades should take care to obtain and verify the identity of the other party and, regardless of regulations, sign an agreement stating that they have exchanged cryptocurrency and fiat with each other.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The workings of an OTC desk Now in his mid-20s, Rad was born to a Middle Eastern family and grew up in Dubai, UAE. In 2012, he enrolled in an electrical engineering program at the American University of Sharjah, just north of Dubai. After studying in Sharjah for three years, he was not entirely satisfied with his prospects and dreamed of moving to America, receiving acceptances to continue his electrical engineering studies at both Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin. Despite what would appear to be a solid opportunity, Rad felt a deeper call to start a business back home in the UAE and decided not to move to the United States. He decided to drop out, as he saw no future in engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cI wanted to get into the technology business, but I didn\u2019t know what to start with,\u201d Rad recalls. It was around then that he heard Bitcoin and blockchain being discussed in his friend circles. \u201cI got curious, so I independently went on to learn about this technology \u2014 blockchain and decentralization,\u201d he explains.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThere was no example in this region that I could follow \u2014 all the blockchain entrepreneurs were in China and the USA. There was no one here who was doing blockchain entrepreneurship.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSoon he found an opportunity: There was money to be made by brokering Bitcoin deals. Rad started to seek out contacts who were interested in buying or selling cryptocurrency and connecting them. \u201cA lot of them were non-serious, and a lot of them were scammers,\u201d he recalls, adding that filtering serious traders from time-wasters was a drain. Introducing himself as a broker and getting business through word of mouth, he also used online platforms like LocalBitcoins to find business. Often, he would pass referral fees to those introducing new clients.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\u201cIt took five months until I made my first deal. For five months, I kept encountering non-serious people and scammers \u2014 a lot of scammers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nRad explains that the margins on OTC transactions were higher in the early days, with 2%\u20133% being common in 2016 and 2017. \u201cNow, there are more competitors in the market,\u201d and rates have gone down, while volume has risen. Exact percentages change constantly according to market demand, but \u201cthe golden number is half a percent\u201d for high-volume deals, while lower-volume retail traders can expect to pay double or triple. While he describes $1-million and $2-million transactions as common, \u201canything over $1 million is considered high volume,\u201d Rad says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Business was informal at first, and Rad came up with the Crypto Desk name in 2018. The company received a crypto trading license in early 2021, which he says makes the business easier and safer \u201cbecause we can work in a regulated space instead of a gray one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nMore than margins have changed since the early days. \u201cAt the moment, most deals on the OTC market are in USDT,\u201d Amin states, which is a departure from the past when most people looked to buy or sell specific quantities of Bitcoin. USDT is easy to exchange into any cryptocurrency on both centralized and decentralized exchanges or back into fiat. While USDC and Dai appear to be held in higher regard in DeFi and NFT circles, \u201cmost people who use USDT are not so familiar with blockchain, and are afraid to change to another stablecoin,\u201d Rad admits. USDT was the first stablecoin, after all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\nJourney\u2019s scribe Elias Ahonen visits Crypto Desk in Dubai\u2019s downtown and just happens to have a copy of his book <\/em>Blockland on hand!<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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As Crypto Desk deals only in UAE dirhams, whose exchange rate has been pegged at 3.6725 dirhams to the U.S. dollar since 1997, exchanging USD stablecoins and AED is a relatively straightforward process with little exchange risk.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cMy daily turnover is $4 million\u2013$5 million, but that comes from several different transactions,\u201d Rad clarifies, adding that all of his clients are based in the UAE. He explains that there is a natural balance to the business, with UAE locals tending to be buyers looking to allocate money into the crypto sphere, while those from abroad are most often looking to sell cryptocurrency \u201cin order to purchase real estate, cars, and pay their living expense in the UAE,\u201d Rad explains.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\u201cIn my opinion, the UAE will be the center of blockchain in the world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nIn the future, Rad foresees his localized model thriving around the world. Though the market is now controlled largely by big players, Rad believes that \u201clocal exchanges have better knowledge of the local market\u2019s needs and regulations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSo, what about the mythical buyer who is looking for $100 million in cryptocurrency?<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cThey exist. I can facilitate up to $30 million per day, but I don\u2019t find them,\u201d he says, adding that $4 million\u2013$6 million is the maximum he regularly sees from any single client. When a large order comes in, it falls onto Rad to figure out if the deal is real, a process he says takes only two or three minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cWhen I see them, I understand: Are they a $100-million person or not?\u201d Rad says with marked confidence. For him, conversation is a better marker of seriousness than appearance. \u201cMost scammers have branded items, and most serious people try to keep a low profile,\u201d he concludes.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aminhossein \u201cAmin\u201d Rad runs an over-the-counter trading desk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Searching for a business after dropping out of university, he started to style himself as a Bitcoin broker in 2016. Starting with his first deal after five months of wading through scammers and tire-kickers, Rad went on to found Crypto Desk, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[40],"tags":[7048,2995,7047,68,62,2382,69,3599,2255,162,193],"class_list":["post-13178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-market-analysis","tag-amin","tag-beware","tag-clever","tag-cointelegraph","tag-crypto","tag-dubai","tag-magazine","tag-otc","tag-rad","tag-scams","tag-trader"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/magazine-Amin-Rad-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13180,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13178\/revisions\/13180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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