I am asked to complete my withdrawal transaction with COT fee of 1200 dollars

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Iselobhor Hamilton Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/117921 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. I was marketed by a lady online on some investment packages in bitcoin. ($200 to become $2500 in one week of trade). I indicated interest in this. She took me to a trading website to sign up. I deposited $200 at the start. After trading for 2 days with earnings, they called me to upgrade the account with $450 which I did. They then traded for 1 week and the account balance became $6786. I requested to withdraw $6000 from my account and they told me to bring a COT fee of $1200 to complete my withdrawal. Please help me do a background check on them. Are they real or fake? Check the registration of the company if it is real. The marketer told me the company will pay her from the COT fee.

External answer — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: gnasher729 Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/131412 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. You lost $650 to scammers. It is your choice whether you want to increase your loss to $1850 or not. Your $6,000 gains do not exist, and you will never get them. If it wasn’t a scam, and there was $6,000 that you earned, and for some unimaginable reason there was a $1200 fee, any honest place would just send you $4,800. PS. You got $650 worth of education about scammers for your money. If that experience stops you from giving more money to the next scammer, then it is money well spent.