All that glitters

For years now as we scrolled on Facebook, we must have come across PandoraBiz or its owner at some time sounding very serious and making different claims of earning well through Crypto Trading.

Be it regulators, the media and ordinary people we took it at face value and probably presumed it must be a legitimate business in a new area.

However, over the years many people who paid the money and went for the program felt they did not get their money’s worth and were misled.

It had to take a brave whistleblower in the form of Kezang Choden who exposed the reality of the whole program.

A closer look now shows very troubling signs in this program that claims to teach its members ‘crypto trading’ and also give an opportunity to ‘earn’ crypto currency.

Many of its former members say the videos never really taught them trading and instead of earning crypto they lost the money they put in.

The whole program is very dubious and really benefits only the person or company running it by getting the fees and also the fat commissions for referring Bhutanese to shady Crypto websites.

In the past, Bhutanese fell for obvious Ponzi schemes with entire Dzongkhags getting sucked in.

This ran in parallel with more sophisticated Pyramid and affiliate based schemes like QNet, Puth, Enagic Water and more especially in urban areas.

The new trend now seems to be Crypto.

The news of Bhutan mining Bitcoins and even using it for national aims was widely known and it seems that PandoraBiz capitalized on that hype. The company and its owner were clearly told not to conduct such a business in the past and was even fined, but they kept at it.

It is time that regulators now take more comprehensive action with follow up monitoring.

Bhutanese seem to be inherently suspectible to scams or dubious schemes of various kinds.

There is a need to strengthen financial literacy and awareness and nip such things early in the bud.

“Beware of courses that claim you will become a billionaire if you purchase them.”
 Inu