UPDATED 23:24 EST / NOVEMBER 01 2015

NEWS

Warning: Miners Center Bitcoin to fiat currency premium payment service is a scam

If an offer is too good to be true it usually is, and in the case of a new Bitcoin offering it screams scam from the rooftops.

Called Miners Center, the site offers to buy Bitcoin at a 10 percent premium as part of the push the company describes as acquiring enough Bitcoin in reserve to operate a fully fledged Bitcoin exchange.

The company is pumping its offering via multiple press releases where it claims among other spurious things that they “have taken bold action in the direction of digital currency, as they do not only see it being in a sweet spot, but they also believe it will deliver according to Bitcoin believers’ expectations in the near future,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

“By the end of Q4, Miners Center will have opened ten small Bitcoin exchange offices throughout the globe: three of them in the USA, two in Canada, two in Australia, one in the UK, one in Germany and one in Hungary,” the press release claims, before laughingly all but admitting that these are nothing more than shallow words by adding “Although the company has planned everything in detail, specific information related to the exact location of the exchange offices and their operational means will be revealed at their actual launching, which will be handled by the company with proper PR and marketing exposure.”

Scam alert

There are already reports emerging that everything about the company is a scam, complete with non-working telephone number, emails that bounce, but more importantly the use of fraudulent fiat currency payments via PayPal for those who attempt to use the service.

According to Satoshinews one user decided to sell 0.2 Bitcoin to Miners Center to check if the service was actually legitimate but subsequently received a payment from an account not registered to the company itself, with the actual PayPal account holder eventually getting in touch to say that the transfer was fraudulent and the money being refunded.

A user of popular Bitcoin forum Bitcointalk had the same experience, having sent 1.5 Bitcoin to the service to be paid by a PayPal payment that was subsequently reversed.

We did a quick check of the registration details and other publicly available information for the company and it confirms what others are saying: everything points to scammers trying to hide their true identities while running the scam through press releases on serious sites in an attempt to appear to be a legitimate service.

It probably goes without saying, but if you’re thinking about trying to take up Miners Center’s 10 percent Bitcoin to fiat currency offer simply don’t unless you don’t care about losing good Bitcoin to what is clearly a scam.

Image credit: 23905174@N00/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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