I trusted a “safe” crypto fund and nearly wiped out my savings

I want to share what happened to me last year because if even one person avoids it, it will be worth the embarrassment of writing this.

I had been in crypto for less than a year and mostly just held Bitcoin and Ethereum. A guy I knew from a business networking group kept talking about this “low risk” crypto fund he used. He showed me screenshots of his account growing every month and described it like a professional managed portfolio, not day trading. I was curious but cautious, so I asked a lot of questions.

The fund was presented as a private managed account service. They said they had a team trading futures, arbitrage and spot positions on several exchanges. The return they kept repeating was around 8 to 10 percent per month, which now sounds crazy, but at the time I convinced myself it was possible in crypto.

The fund manager added me on Telegram, sent voice messages, and even did a short video call. That part really lowered my guard. My brain kept saying “scammers do not bother with video calls” which is obviously wrong, but it felt reassuring in the moment. He walked me through a simple agreement in PDF form and told me to send USDT to a specific address so they could “allocate it inside their trading system”.

I started with 3,000 dollars. They sent me a small weekly report with my “new balance” and I could see that it was going up. After two months the reports showed more than 3,600 dollars. At that point I did the stupid thing. I sent more. I added another 7,000 dollars, basically most of my liquid savings.

Right after that, things slowly changed. The weekly reports were still arriving, but when I asked to withdraw a portion, I was told they needed to “queue” the withdrawal due to exposure limits. Then there was a story about a temporary exchange issue. Then the fund manager stopped answering quickly and began responding with short generic messages.

One Monday I woke up and the website was gone. The login page did not load. The Telegram profile photo disappeared. My messages remained unread. Later that week I found other victims in a Reddit thread describing exactly the same pattern with the same “fund”.

Looking back, the red flags are obvious. Guaranteed monthly returns. No verifiable company registration. No third party custodian. All funds sent straight to a personal wallet address instead of an exchange account in my own name.

If you are reading this and someone offers to “manage” your crypto for you with fixed monthly returns, please treat it as guilty until proven otherwise. Real investing is messy, returns are uneven, and you should never be forced to send funds to a wallet you do not control. I learned that lesson in a very expensive way.