NorthStart Exchange (northstart.top) Review

Today we are posting a scam review of the NorthStart Exchange found at NorthStart.top.

Recently, on October 5, 2022, a complaint has been filed on the Better Business Bureau Scam Tracker, according to which the victim was scammed out of $30,000. Here’s the full complaint:

I was invited by a group chat over WhatsApp through a Bitcoin group and they were trying to explain how investing in the loss of Bitcoin or the gain of Bitcoin can still gain you money. I was told to create a crypto.com account and then make an account with Northstart.top for trading account. My initial investment was $25,000 and it grew up to 69,000 and it locked up into the account in which I can’t retrieve it and they want a $7,000 fee to get my own money back and when I went to make payments on it they still made excuses to not give it to me. entities will not answer phones. police report filed. omitting my personal information. Fraud chain with many people involved. Credit Union and Bank from evolve also reported to. The fraud team had multiple numbers all leading to nobody answering.

If the person who filed this complaint is reading this review, make sure to contact us for help with retrieving your funds. For all others who may be contemplating opening an account with the NorthStart Exchange, make sure to read this review first!

What is NorthStart Exchange?

The NorthStart exchange, currently found on northstart.top, is a cryptocurrency exchange that is said to be the “Best exchange for new crypto investors,” offering users a “One-step covert to crypto,” a cryptocurrency staking service, and 24/7 customer service.

Our first impression when visiting northstart.top however is that this is a very unprofessional website. It is not mobile responsive and there are spelling and typing mistakes and links that make no sense.

The first thing we tried is contacting support, but we received no response.

They claim to be User-friendly, offering a tutorial and process guidance, resassuring you that “We know how you feel on the first time investment.”

They claim to offer an iOS and Android app, however we were no able to find these apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

The first serious red flag we encounted is their NorthStart Pool staking service, which claims to have the “highest annual yield rate to 20% with daily interest.” So they’re definitely promising something that seems too good to be true.

Their about us page says:

Unicorn cryptocurrency exchange is headquartered in Singapore. In addition, there are three major operation centers in the United States, South Korea and Hong Kong. The service range is broad and the market radiates all over the world.

Where did Unicorn cryptocurrency exchange came from? We thought this is a North Start review. Keep reading…

NorthStart Exchange Scam Review

There’s no information about who is behind the company, a registered address, LinkedIn profiles, and not even an email address. No verifiable information whatsoever can be found regarding the people behind this website.

They go on claiming that “the main members of the team come from well-known enterprises such as Google, Amazon and Alibaba” and that they “graduated from Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, University of Hong Kong, Seoul University and Tsinghua University.”

With such presitigous team members we would expect a better designed website!

They then say that “Bvkcoin is headquartered in Singapore and holds a dual financial license. The platform is stable for a long time and venture capital is guaranteed.”

Confused? We are too!

What’s Unicorn cryptocurrency exchange?

The privacy policy mentions the domain Unicorn.com, however Unicorn.com seems to belong to a Czech IT company.

In the terms agreements document we find the following:

1.2 “Unicorn”: The domain name is www.ihuobi.vip, Unicorn Global digital assets Co., Ltd. provides digital currency investment and financial management services for digital currency players through this online trading platform. Hereinafter in this agreement, “Unicorn” refers to both the comprehensive digital asset trading service platform (www.ihuobi.vip) and Unicorn Global digital assets Co., Ltd..

Also:

15.1 Any dispute between the user and Unicorn due to the performance of this agreement shall be resolved through friendly negotiation. If the negotiation fails, either party has the right to submit the dispute to the Beijing Arbitration Commission for arbitration in accordance with the arbitration rules of the Association.

This suggests the owners of the platform may be located in China, perhaps in Beijing.

Let’s take a look at some domain information now.

The domain ihuobi.vip mentioned in the Terms agreement is not active.

And what is Bvkcoin mentioned in the About us page?

Bvkcoin.com is also not active, and we found bvkex.com, a site indexed in Google (but not active) with the same title. From the Google search snippet (“Has been serving. Global cryptocurrency leader. $381,717,528. 24-hour trading volume. Register. Computer. APP. English. BVKcoin.”), it appears this also was a cryptocurreny exchange page.

We were able to find a YouTube video exposing BVKcoin as a scam cryptocurrency exchange.

And there’s also a TDMock mentioned to which the copyright of the website belongs.

Tdmock.com is not active however we found some indication that it used to be a scam site.

Thus, the only active domain that is associated with North Start Exchange seems to be northstart.top.

It was registered on August 4, 2022, so less than 3 months ago, for one year. The owners’ information are hidden by a privacy service.

Not only is this a very new site as of October 2022, but it also has a 0 authority score, it is not linked to from any site except from spam comments, and according to SimilarWeb its global rank is 19,755,216. (431,029 is Hong Kong.)

The person who wrote the complaint we opened the article with also mentioned another name for this company: Polaris Investment Group. Who are they?

Apparently, there’s a Panama City company by this name, but we don’t know if there’s any conneciton between this entity and the North Start Exchange.

Since this site is rather new, it’s not surprising that we did not find any NorthStart Exchange scam reviews on Google. And there are no positive reviews either.

Northstart.top Review Conclusion

Even though we did not find sufficient evidence that NorthStart Exchange is a scam, we’re pretty certain they are.

First of all, the site is unprofessional and sloppily constructed, full of errors and typographical mistakes. It refers to various websites and companies that do not seem to exist.

More alarmingally, there is also no contact information or information regarding the owners of the website. Not even an email address. The contact us page however works. We have received a reply to the “Hi” we sent, however when we inquired if they have any comment regarding the accusation we found on the BBB site, their reply was:

Hello, we have verified that you only paid 3K commissions, and the remaining 4K commissions have not been paid yet. You need to pay all commissions before you can withdraw funds from your account.

We then asked: “Do you have an address? Email address? Telephone number? Any contact information?” But they did not reply.

We believe that the way this scam operates is that they contact people via social media and persuade them to invest with this cryptocurrency exchange. The portfolio then appears to be profitable, enticing the victim to invest more funds. Then, when the victim tries to withdraw, they charge them with fees, to squeeze more money out of them. The original investment, we believe, will not be returned to the customer.

Update (December 11, 2022): We just discovered a new complaint was reported to the Better Business Bureau on October 5, 2022 by a person who claims to have lost $30,000 on Northstart.top through Crypto.com. He mentions a phone number he was contacted from: +1 (207) 955-6551 and writes:

I was invited by a group chat over WhatsApp through a Bitcoin group and they were trying to explain how investing in the loss of Bitcoin or the gain of Bitcoin can still gain you money. I was told to create a crypto.com account and then make an account with Northstart.top for trading account. My initial investment was $25,000 and it grew up to 69,000 and it locked up into the account in which I can’t retrieve it and they want a $7,000 fee to get my own money back and when I went to make payments on it they still made excuses to not give it to me. entities will not answer phones. police report filed. omitting my personal information. Fraud chain with many people involved. Credit Union and Bank from evolve also reported to. The fraud team had multiple numbers all leading to nobody answering.

Our conclusion therefore is that there’s a high likelyhood that NorthStart Exchange (northstart.top) is a SCAM cryptocurrency exchange! We recommend that you stay away from them.

Please let us now if you have any first-hand information regarding North Start Exchange. Please leave a reply below this review or contact us privately. We can help you recover any money lost to this and other cryptocurrency scams.