Rushing to buy ‘virtual shoes’ for thousands of dollars to make money: Warning of traps

Many people are willing to spend a few tens of millions, even billions of dong to buy a pair of virtual shoes, virtual money will then try to run to reach a draw and then make a profit. The investment is real, but they get virtual shoes. Many experts believe that investing in this game contains many risks. Because this is a new form of multi-level transformation combining virtual money investment and running.

Running is making money

On a forum of students in the North, Le Thuy’s account has a status line that attracts a lot of interest from members: “Recruiting runners (both healthy and have money). Conditions: Having running skills; running at a speed of 8-12km/h; run at a fixed time of 18h; running daily and long term; running about 20km/day (can form a team of 5-7 people to relay). Bonus 1 million VND/day, receive money weekly (1 week/time)…“.

Le Ngoc Bang (Student of Water Resources University), is one of the people who often runs rentals for people in need. On the forum, Bang is quite a “hot” person because of his very good physical strength, ensuring the requirements of his employer. By saying: “Running is my passion, no matter rain or shine, I run about 15km every afternoon. Since knowing about this rental service, I have received several leads. I also don’t care what they hire to run, I heard it’s playing coins. All I care about is the money they hire me“.

According to Bang, some of my friends, after running for a while, decided to buy virtual shoes for self-run, even borrowed to buy more rental running shoes to make money faster and more. “Many of my friends don’t rent anymore, they see a lot of profit, so they went back to ask their parents for money, even borrowed everywhere to buy themselves these virtual shoes. At first, I saw that they also made money, and their lives were much better. I don’t dare because I don’t see anything for sure, moreover, I don’t understand the nature, so I don’t dare to risk it, so I just hire it.”, Bang added.

According to our research, this is actually a new multi-level form combining virtual money investment and running. Players have to download the app to their phones and order virtual shoes up to 20 million VND. After placing an order to buy shoes, players are promised to pay a handsome amount, which can be up to 30 USD / day. The special thing is, the shoes that participants buy back are a virtual pair of shoes, but the money bought is real. The more shoes a player invests, the more money a player will earn.

However, the amount of money participants receive is only virtual currency called GST. This virtual money will be transferred to the app’s wallet, then forwarded again to the wallet of the Binance exchange, from where players can receive real money from the global electronic exchange (Binance). This is a walking project to make money, the admin token of this game is listed by Crypto Binance exchange, so the information about this game is known to most people who trade coins through Binance since the beginning of March.

To buy shoes in Stepn, players must deposit real money into Binance to convert into USDT or other stable coins (called stablecoins) and then buy SOL-Solana coins and load them into Solana wallet in Stepn app to buy shoes . Stepn works like a normal running app. Just move at the specified speed, after 1 minute, the investor will be deducted 0.2 energy and then add the coin.

Mr. Le Phong, a jogging participant shared: “The time I bought shoes near the end of March, then 1 pair of shoes cost about 10-12 SOL, such price difference is due to different shoe indexes, this index affects making money“.

Thus, the price of each pair of shoes at that time was about 800-960 USD (equivalent to 20 million VND). With owning 1 pair of shoes, every day, stepn gives the user 2 energy, every 6 hours, 0.5 mana is restored. With these 2 energy, a pair of shoes can earn 10-12 gst (game token to exchange for money or to upgrade). When Phong first started playing, the price of the token was 3.3 USD, so he could earn from 33-36 USD per day. It takes about 40 days to get your investment back.

However, by the beginning of April, because the game attracted many participants, the number of players increased rapidly, the participants were more than the number of shoes on the market, so the price of gst increased sharply, sometimes reaching nearly 8.5 USD/gst. Due to the sharp increase in prices, after only 15 days, Mr. Phong refunded the money to buy shoes and saved money to buy new shoes. “As of now, the price of gst starts to decrease, to about 4 USD/gst, with owning 6 pairs of shoes, I am currently earning about 4 million/day, running every day profit that day. The price of virtual shoes on the market is still very hot, the cheapest pair of shoes still costs about 1,100 USD and the most expensive up to 120,000 USD.“, said Phong.

Because each account’s energy store is limited depending on the number of shoes, after the player is full but not running, the player can waste energy and lose money. Because of this, players have to work hard to run despite being busy, rainy and windy. In addition, in the telegram group of stepn players, many people also shared that they had to run at 12pm due to busy all day or application maintenance. A player named Gin Bá also regularly shares his running schedule with everyone, he owns up to…30 pairs of shoes in his account and has about 20 energy, Gin Bá’s main running shoes are quality shoes. rare, currently priced at approximately… 1 billion dong.

Beware of bitter fruit

As a participant in investing in this form, Mr. Nguyen Dinh Quan (Quoc Oai, Hanoi) said, in addition to the investment reason, it also gives him motivation 4-5 times a week to go out to the street to jog. “For exercisers, motivation to maintain regular practice is very important. However, I don’t understand this investment very well, nor am I sure of anything. All I know is “run and make money”“, said Quan.

According to Mr. Dinh Van Hop (Hanoi), actually inviting to recruit runners as in the ads on some student forums is recruiting people to “run for hire” for one or a few individuals. Or roughly, they are investing a lot of money to own many “shoes” at the same time and need someone to run for them.

Many players have responded that when participating, players cannot check who made this game, how their moral character is. Especially, participating in this risk game is not recognized by law, so when the system crashes, the player is the one to bear the consequences.

This is not the first time this form of “running out of money” has appeared. When you have spent several tens of millions of dong to buy a pair of shoes that are not of real value, players will try to run to breakeven and then make a profit, but to make a profit, players will have to continue to “pump” money for app to earn more profit. According to many experts, StepN is very easy to enter the path of Axie Infinity.

It is the later players who will “lose” and even be the object that will generate revenue for the previous players. Not to mention, many people also think that StepN is still an NFT game in essence, and investing is always risky. So, if you are a runner, like sports with a bit of fun, you can completely try StepN, but if you consider this a game to invest in, consider and be careful before. when deciding.

Dr. Truong Tuan Anh (economic expert, Institute of Strategy Economy Vietnam) shared: “As the number of pedestrians earning tokens grows exponentially, the project will likely launch the token for sale. There will be buyers and sellers, and money will flow in very quickly. Then how many coins does the project owner behind this have? They can “withdraw the bridge”, take all the money and automatically become super rich while not creating any initial value both in terms of technology and tokenomy. So far, there are a lot of money walking-type projects, but all of them are garbage“.

Nguyen Van Toan (financial expert) said that, from an investment perspective, StepN is still a financial game with many potential risks. StepN operates according to the trend, so when investing, users need to prepare psychologically for the risk of loss. In particular, this economic model is considered unstable if not upgraded.

Meanwhile Wu Blockchain, blockchain industry analyst and exclusive mining news update Bitcoin in China shared: “If a game has more people making money than spending, it’s still multilevel in the end. The money earned by the previous players comes from the people who put in later. The project will be stable when users are willing to use the platform even if they are at a loss. In other words, a well-balanced model must have a larger number of spending users than investing customers“.