Color Prediction Game: The Club Scam (Exposed)
The Club Scam (TCS)— Biggest Online Gambling Scam Exposed
TL;DR:
- Invitation from friends and family members or via Whatsapp
- Make a signup and collect personal and sensitive information
- Sharing predictions in 7:3 ratio to understand candidate potential and response to wins/losses to plan how to exit.
- Suggest other similar apps to cheat more in short span and start luring about referral bonuses.
- The succesfull prediction ratio would start changing the curves from 7:3 to 3:7 or even less to push you down.
- By the time you lost all your money, you’ll endup referring almost everyone in your network and you’ll no control on it anymore.
- If they felt you’re no longer useful, you’ll be blocked or you cannot withdraw your amount from the platform and you can’t even contact anyone.
- It’s a death trap, in simple.
Backstory
I’ve been invited by one of my sister to play this game as she was earning a substantial amount in the platform and wanted me to avail this opportunity to earn some pocket money.
I might be over confident about myself, but most of the times I can confirm whether something is legit or not with limited information such as the business model, payments, logics etc., (not always but mostly). I ignored it as it sounded suspicious for me and I also warned her about this in 2020.
After 2 months, a good friend of mine called me to tell the same opportunity, as he witnessed majority of his friends in the village earning good amount from the platform. I told him that this isn’t legit and it’s very suspicious I could see this is backed by Chinese group. He thought I’m overthinking and said give it a try, I had an other friend on call with me who gave it a try, and lost about 1000 INR.
I also checked whether any of the previous earners still making money from this app, but almost everyone endup in losses due to various reasons.
What is “The Club Scam”? and what is this application?
This is a gambling application where you can invest some amount and predict a color or combination of color. If the result is your selection, then you’ll be rewarded after deducting huge taxes (Not sure for whom they’re paying taxes as there was no tax information available on the platform).
Let’s say, you invested Rs.500 for a particular color or pattern and that’s the result, your gross profit would be Rs.500 and net profit would be Rs.300 (approx).
The following are the screenshots of the gambling applications.
How this went viral?
The founders/creators of this application targeted youth, college students and house wives to expand their business as these people are mostly looking for an opportunity to earn money in their free time. The referral amount is high, so people refer to as many as possible as they believe it’s a legit application.
The application got many referrals within few days and their userbase is being compounded everyday and these people have their name, phone number, email, bank details etc., which are considered as sensitive information.
If my friend is earning why can’t me? How they cheat?
There are few telegram channels and WhatsApp groups operated by the Internal Team of thsese gambling applications where they share predictions before 10–20 seconds and make you believe they’re trustworthy.
Initially they will start sharing predictions 7:3 ratio i.e, 7 correct and three wrong predictions. They even suggest you how much money to invest on each prediction to make you trust them.
Initally you will earn good amount (if you followed them), then you slowly start referring your friends because we want our friends also earn some money for their expenses, and this is the weakness they’ve targeted to exploit as many as possible.
Slowly the prediction ratio will be turned out to 3:7 and may be less as well. At that point of time, you might have lost all earnings and your hard-earned money. When you realize that you have lost money, this app would’ve reached many other’s because of you. This is the strategy that they are using to promote the application.
To explain how inhumane they’re, even if you lost lakhs of rupees, they still try to convince you to play more with additional money from other sources through other applications saying the previous application was renamed or rebranded. I’ve seen so many people trusting them again even after loosing the money. After authoring this article, I’ve been contacted by a person who trusted the same online friend and got cheated thrice for similar apps.
On a conclusion, they made you to trust them and they will make you invest high amount with wrong predictions and they will just go invisible. You will be with empty hands and an experience. There’ll be no one who’s going to get your money back.
Taxes/Commissions they charge?
- If you win a prediction they will charge 10% or more.
- If you want to withdraw the money that you’ve added they will charge Rs.30 (if it below 1500) and some other percentage if it’s above Rs.1500
Do they operate through any other domains?
As per my research and knowledge they’ve been operating through 1000+ domains as on 26th December 2020.
What are the domain names/websites that are involved in this this scam?
- Joey Union https://www.joeyunion.com
- Jony Clubs https://www.jonyclubs.com
- Lucky Bloc https://www.luckybloc.com
- Paduo Clubs https://www.paduoclubs.com
- Monle Mall https://www.monlemall.com
- Yells Clubs https://www.yellsclubs.com
- Fary Clubs https://www.faryclubs.com
- Cone Clubs https://www.coneclubs.com
- Tomis Clubs https://www.tomisclubs.com
- Bozer Clubs https://www.bozerclubs.com
- Heera Clubs http://www.heeraclubs.com
- Bonis Clubs http://www.bonisclubs.com
- Merry Clubs https://www.merryclubs.com
- Coem Clubs http://www.coemclubs.com
- Facdor Clubs https://facdorclubs.com
- Terion Clubs http://www.terionclubs.com
- Booe Clubs http://www.booeclubs.com
- Siller Clubs https://www.sillerclubs.com
- Vilio Clubs https://www.vilioclubs.com
- Quale Apps https://apps.quale-apps.com
- Yaves Clubs https://www.yavesclubs.com
- Fade Apple https://www.fadeapple.com/
- OK Bros https://okbros.in/
- Biote https://biote.in/
- Wide Broc https://www.widebroc.com/
- Bee Duck https://beeduck.com/
- GG Shop https://ggshop.in/
- Borga https://borga.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky01.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky02.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky03.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky04.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky05.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake] https://m.kgs01.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake] https://m.kgs02.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake] https://m.kgs03.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake] https://m.kgs04.in/
- Copyen https://copyen.com
- Apexe https://apexe.in/
- Casto Clubs https://www.castoclubs.com/
- Ramya Shop http://www.ramyashop.com/
- Fun Luck https://funluck.in/
- Plusrs https://plusrs.in/
- Toddapple https://www.toddapple.com/
- Bulls Online https://bullsonline.in/
- Nadal Web https://nadalweb.in/
- CAO Bet https://cao.bet/
- Play66 http://play66.in
- FA13888 http://fa13888.com
- Percy Fleur https://www.percyfleur.com
- Many more…
Earning money online is great, but not via gambling. Gambling is illegal in our country and this app is a much worse than a legit gambling application.
16 Reasons/Proofs to prove this is a Gambling Scam
Let’s start from simple analysis and common sense and then will move into technical information.
A) The website isn’t user friendly and it’s not even responsive. I mean they’ve designed it only for smartphones not for computers/laptops.
B) This is a gambling application where you predict colors. Gambling is illegal in India, unfortunately, there is no specific law that consider online gambling in India.
C) It’s neither a registered nor authorized company by any state/national government in this world. It doesn’t have a Privacy, TnC, Refund policy listed in their website. As far as I know any payment gateway would expect their merchants to have Privacy, TnC, Refund policies publicly listed on their website and this was a mandatory compliance by the government.
D) If this application is legitimate and genuine why’re they not using a single name (domain) to operate and rather using 1000+ domains and switching them from one to other. Isn’t this suspicious?
E) Who’s sharing the predictions in Telegram? aren’t they insiders of this Gambling Apps? Why initially most of them were correct later not? (I mean initially when you invested small amount the predictions were correct to make you trust them, later you‘ll get negative predictions mostly’
F) There is no contact information either to complain or for support. Every stupid company will have a contact page, why any of these applications don’t have that?
G) The domain names like quale-apps.com, faryclubs.com and most of their websites are registered recently, we called domain age which is very recent (so that they can scam quickly and reach more audience without being noticed because of name difference)
H) Privacy Protection is good for domains, but adding to the above reasons, it’s much more suspicious.
The above reasons are more than enough to judge this is a scam, but let’s check some more.
I) They’ve an android application that’s not available in play store? Do you know why? Playstore will not allow gambling/scamming apps in ther store.
J) Have you noticed their Payment Gateway oneasypay.com? It’s not common gateway that comapnies/individuals use in general. The reason is legitimate payment gateways will not support this kind of illegal/scamming/gambling applications who don’t even have a Refund Policy.
K) The application is built in China as we could see Chinese characters whenever we got some errors and some of the pages sourcecode.
L) Some of the great YouTube channels attempted to expose this scam a little early than me.
M) There is no option to de-activate or delete your account permanantly, which is important to avoid digital footprints.
N) Information Is Wealth: You’ve shared confidential information with them i.e, your name, mobile number, email address, bank details. They can simply sell this information to third parties or to an other scammer.
Latest Updates as on (13th August 2020)
O) As my article went viral and lot of people started sharing their feedback with me, I’m reaching out to police and sharing the evidences. Few websites have responded to my article by publishing a notice on their home page as mentioned below. Surprizingly one website is telling the other one stolen our memeber data. The other one telling we’re not scammers, we’re a registered company, without sharing any registration details.
https://biote.in/ has shared the below notice stating https://okbros.in/ have stolen their member’s data. And https://okbros.in/ are claiming that they’re not scammers. Whom to believe? I would say both are frauds, trust me this is a biggest scam in India.
P) Surprizingly they’ve changed their User Interface which looks like a genuine website but not. If you’re a old user, you can see the difference between old interface and new interface.
Latest updates (as on 16th August 2020)
I’ve named this scam as as “The Club Scam (TCS)”, so they’ve now started a different domain scamming which is Gold. From now onwards, I would like to refer this as “GoldStoreScam(GSS)”
Through readers support, I was able to identify 9 websites where they’re scamming people claiming Kalyan Jewellers.
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky01.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky02.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky03.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky04.in/
- Lucky Gold Store https://m.lucky05.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake] https://m.kgs01.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake] https://m.kgs02.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake]https://m.kgs03.in/
- Kalyan Jewellers [Fake]https://m.kgs04.in/
- Many more…
Kalyan Jewellers has already reported about this fake websites to the Cyber Crime Police and published a notice on their official websites like below.
I’ve tried to chat with the customer service in kg01.in. The agent name was Lucy. The scammers are stupids and didn’t even verify the spelling of “Jeweler”
The moment I posted the public notice, the agent disconnected the chat.
In this websites https://kg01.in their Customer Service chat is making an API Call to https://meiqia.com which is a Chinese Service.
LOL :), they’re modifying their websites, but still under construction.
Targeted users: College Students, Youth, House Wives & other Middle Class
Responsible Organizations who can take immediate actions
- Pasfar Technologies Private Limited (a.k.a Cash Free Technologies) please revoke payment gateway for all these gambling applications ASAP.
- Cloudfare, please have a detailed investigation on the above application and stop DNS services to all of them.
- NameSilo LLC, please take down all the above domains as they contain gambling content which was used to scam innocent people across the world, especially in India.
The content is hosted in Alibaba Cloud.
Estimated Scam Value
The estimated value of this scam is close to 1834 crores and still counting…
What you need to do?
- Tap on Wallet and tap on History/Historical Payments. Make a note/screenshot of the information available and keep it safe. Identify the transcation in your bank account and keep the reference number handy.
- Withdraw the available money in wallet (Ignore the money you lost).
- File a Complaint in your nearest police station with all the proofs that you’ve.
- Register a complaint in Cyber Crime Portal using this link https://cybercrime.gov.in/Webform/crmcondi.aspx
- Submit the Police Complaint Copies to the bank and Request Refund.
- As all the domain names are registered by NameSilo LLC, let’s report abuse to them either via email abuse@namesilo.com or by submitting the form using this link https://www.namesilo.com/report_abuse.php
- Stop spreading/referring this application/link with your friends.
- If you know any person who’s sharing answers/predictions note down their contact information.
- Most importantly, please report the URL that you’ve used in ICANN’s website by clicking here, so that they will take necessary actions.
- Consider reporting them in https://secure.nclforms.org/nficweb/OnlineComplaintForm.aspx
https://www.adrforum.com/arbitration/filing/home
https://adndrc.org/forms/c/udrp/1
My Suggestions
I) Never trust any website/person who offer’s easy money.
II) Always Check the Age of the Domain, Owner of the Domain, URL Reputation, URL Security, SSL Certificate and always read about the company, search for reviews, verify registration, confirm secured and legitimate payment gateways, Refund Policies etc.,
III) Never submit your bank information in any gambling/unnecessary applications.
IV) Search in Google, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia to see if there any scams happend earlier for the same/similar websites
V) Never invest blindly in Any Application that you’re not aware of, discuss with couple of friends to get an idea.
VI) Read online scam news frequently, so that you can identify scammers easily.
Responses from our Readers
I cannot refund the invested money, I can only educate you and help you in reporting this to your bank and police. In order to get this websites down, I want all of you to report these scammers ASAP.
Note: Nobody can stop this scammers except YOU. Yes, you can stop if you stop trusting these kind of people who offer easy money. Yes, you can stop these scams if you stop inviting/referring your friends. Yes, you can stop these scammers if you report them. Yes, you can stop these scammers if you don’t invest in them. Yes, you can stop these scammers if you share this with people in your network.
Conclusion
I hope I’ve shared what I wanted to share, now it’s your call to trust me or that applications. I don’t have the ability to stop the scammers completely or two create awareness for everyone. So start spreading this scams in your network and let’s stop innocents burning their hard earned money.
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Thanks for reading this article, have a nice day :) #StayHome #StaySafe
Jai Hindh !!
