If something sounds too good to be true, it often is. Such was the case with the now-shuttered TRON mining site, freetrx.cc. It's been more than two weeks and the site still isn't back up, with no posts on social media or any other communication. Looks like my earlier suspicions were right.

However, I'm only annoyed, not distraught. Why? I didn't play with my money. I had earned ~$15 or so through FireFaucet.Win. I had made my peace with it by refusing to do any more surveys and instead just letting videos autoplay over on Cheddar.TV, then redeeming the cheese for ACP, and then eventually redeeming that for TRON.

Everything was going well. I had mined enough to reach the second-highest tier, so my mining rate was set to deliver ~$100 a month. I managed this by just waiting and letting the TRON accumulate, and sending in whatever faucet money I could. Then, boom. Lights out. One week passed, then two. Apparently the devs had pulled the plug and run off with all the accumulated TRON.

I have to admit that I never quite figured out how that site could be profitable for the devs. How could I get 50 TRX just to start? You mean I can double my mining rate every month by just letting the money ride? It didn't quite add up. I guess that it wasn't supposed to.

What could I have done better, other than trust the iron laws of crypto? The scam detector sites themselves were filled with barely intelligible copy/paste negative reviews, so why would I trust them? Even TrustPilot was filled with copy/paste form spam. Hilariously, some of the reviews on these sites were themselves scams, advertising scuzzy crypto recovery services (yeah, right)!

Oh well. This misadventure reinforces two iron laws of crypto: one, don't play with your own money; if you do, don't play with anything you can't afford to lose. Two, if the tokenomics don't make sense, someone is making money at your expense.