7 ms·

Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

59 points by joegaebel 6y ago

coldpie 6y ago
So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
- KMnO4 6y ago
  Don't forget anonymous payments. Lots of vendors selling legally questionable (or illegal) things only take cryptocurrencies. I see that as a huge boon for these industries, who would otherwise have to figure out credit card processing, bank transfers, or being repeatedly shut down by Paypal/Venmo/etc.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    Not anonymous (mainstream creeptocurrencies are traceable by design!) but censorship resistant. Yes, this is the ONLY use case for the buttcoins. The problem is that for every successful weed and nudes sale there's a million ransomware attacks, scam calls, and absolutely fraudulent "investments".
    - Passthepeas 6y ago
      completely false, privacy coins command billions of dollars in market cap, Monero alone is currently worth 2.2 billion and will likely continue to grow.
- zeroxfe 6y ago
  The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Sounds like magic the gathering card econ. Which is super fun! But personally, I definitely don't consider specing into Embercleave a meaningful societal mover
    - jand 6y ago
      Funny detail: Magic the gathering hits very close to home by accident. One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".
      - SkyMarshal 6y ago
        Yeah, it was previously a Magic The Gathering exchange, and then converted to a Bitcoin exchange. They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.
        ptd 6y ago
        Wasn’t it an inside job? Or Arles the heavily speculated?
        jandrese 6y ago
        Nobody knows for sure, but the postmortem suggests that it might have been straight up incompetence. However, it's certainly possible to consider that the "incompetence" was on purpose to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo
    - arcadeparade 6y ago
      "defi" is an interesting concept that gained a lot of traction over the summer. Over $10 billion in crypto assets has been deposited in various protocols such as Aave which is like a decentralised bank operating on ethereum.
- crumbshot 6y ago
  Not quite, it still has one positive use case: buying drugs (and other similarly prohibited items) off the dark web. And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
- seibelj 6y ago
  BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
  - coldpie 6y ago
    Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.
    - leppr 6y ago
      It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it. Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
      - floatboth 6y ago
        It's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.
        aeternum 6y ago
        Still more efficient than the alternatives. USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it. Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
      - 6y ago
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > cryptocurrency is dead, right? No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero. It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity. There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    You're implying that there are zero use cases for public cryptocurrencies other than as collectibles. This couldn't be further from the truth. There's a thriving decentralized finance ecosystem on Ethereum with more than 10B in value locked away. DeFi is an application that's only made possible because of the existence of an open public smart contract protocol. You're being very disingenuous.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptica 6y ago
  I was a Bitcoin skeptic for years so I understand this point of view. This point of view makes sense if you assume that the financial system works properly which is what the vast majority of people still assume. The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run. Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    You seem to be confusing two things - system working and system being un-exploitable. Example - it's pretty easy to shoplift in any of the retail shops. In fact, shoplifting happens all the time. Still, nobody would claim retail model doesn't work because people would just come and shoplift everything and nobody would pay and the retailer would go bust. What actually happens is that vast majority of people do not shoplift, and the retail system works and produces massive profits. > but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable Advantage, but also disadvantage. If a bank cheats you, you have options to complain to regulators, to the police, to the FBI, to you Congress representative finally. It won't work in all cases, but it's an option that's available to you. If a crypto scammer cheats you, well, nobody is accountable. For some people, it's a big issue, because it greatly increases the friction in transactions.
    - cryptica 6y ago
      This is not true because the bank does cheat me. Has been cheating me for a decade but the police won't do anything about it. If I try to sue the Reserve Bank, the judge will dismiss my case without even hearing the evidence. Also, politicians never answer my emails and I did try. I must be living on a different planet.
- trident1000 6y ago
  Theres people who use it for certain things, like PornHub just started accepting BTC payments. But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Wait, that sounds like fraud. The CEO of a company had the company he runs buy into a limited asset he also owns... Gg society, the fact that we're talking this up like it's a good thing means most of us deserve to be poor af
    - trident1000 6y ago
      Sounds a little dramatic (especially since 50 million isnt moving the price single handedly). Also stock buybacks are essentially the same thing (if you were to call it a conflict of interest) and almost every company in existence does that.
      - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
        You just talked about Twitter buying BTC as important news showing it's viability though... It's mostly a popularity/buzz game. Also yeah, stock buybacks were illegal up until 1982 and since there legalization we've seen large trades in companies from R&D spending towards buyback spending...
        trident1000 6y ago
        I mentioned several noteworthy people and institutions making an investment to demonstrate a trend. "its mostly a popularity/buzz game" yeah thats how value networks work. From gold to cash to facebook.
- pjkundert 6y ago
  As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wmf 6y ago
    The first time I sent a wire from US to Canada it bounced because I didn't include the street address of the branch where the recipient account was located. The mind boggles.
    - smsm42 6y ago
      I was always wondering - virtually all money being electronic now, what the heck they are doing with all those branch addresses? I don't even have "branch address" - my account is just numbers, and if I need some live human service, I just walk into any random branch and they are happy to help me.
      - wmf 6y ago
        I sure hope there's not a server in the back of each branch holding account state... (Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)
        bleepblorp 6y ago
        While I doubt there's a server in each branch managing account balances, there's is some kind of branch-related weirdness involved in bank account management at some banks. With some banks, if you open a bank account at a branch in one time zone but later move to another time zone, your transactions will still be processed according to the business hours where the account was opened. I know someone who is in this situation and they can't make transactions for several hours towards the end of the day (after midnight in the originating branch's timezone) because their bank's online banking front end can't agree with the bank's backend system about what day it is.
- cryptica 6y ago
  The idea that the financial system works seems to be a contradiction when you consider that cryptocurrencies (which exist within that system) have been performing extremely well for over a decade. If scams can thrive so well in our system (to the point of becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars), then how do we know that the biggest corporations are not scams too? How do we know they're not all empty shells? Their earnings (P/E ratios) are very low... And on top of that, I would question the source and legitimacy of these modest earnings. What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'. EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
- jMyles 6y ago
  One data point: we're launching the NuCypher Ursula service on ethereum mainnet tonight at UTC midnight. So, quite far from dead in some people's minds. :-)
- thom 6y ago
  Yes but the _appetite_ for these scams is seemingly infinite, so crypto seems far from dead.
- smsm42 6y ago
  It's not dead, but it's not mainstream either. It's a bit like quidditch - there are a bunch of people interested in it, and they have their own ecosystem, but don't expect the Olympic Committee to be calling anytime soon. OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
- miguelmota 6y ago
  Far from dead. It's been growing rapidly, particularly the decentralized finance (defi) space. Number of transactions has been steadily going up in Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
  - dr-detroit 6y ago
    As far as a way to remain untraceable (organized crime) or untaxable (the elites) the main use cases for crypto have moved on particularly to things (like designer handbags) that actually accrue value over time and/or are not numbered and tracked publicly.
- Shared404 6y ago
  Newegg at least still accepts it. I believe Humble does as well, but I don't know that.
jwcrux 6y ago
This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time. We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam. [0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo
- aeternum 6y ago
  It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies. All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
  - spurdoman77 6y ago
    Maybe Jack is running the scam as a hobby and doesnt want to kill nice side hobby to stack sats.
pg_bot 6y ago
This has been going on for quite some time, and I would be embarrassed if I were a part of Twitter's engineering team. From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.
- avian 6y ago
  It's not just Twitter. Fake SpaceX "live" streams with a couple thousand viewers regularly pop-up in my YouTube recommendations. They're peddling the same kind of crypto scams.
  - extrapickles 6y ago
    What they typically do is takeover an existing YouTube channel, rename/brand it so it shows up in all of the people who subscribed to the channels feeds. It’s even more maddening that there is no way to report that a YouTube channel has been compromised, there are only report options for inappropriate content of various sorts.
aokiji 6y ago
Loving the army of shills attacking the use of crypto. I wonder if the changes that were imposed on Jack Dorsey's (and his ability to stay in the board of) Twitter were just aimed at subverting the propagation of crypto. The central banking mafia runs deep.
fortran77 6y ago
Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?
- shoes_for_thee 6y ago
  I am also puzzled about the intersection of people savvy enough to own bitcoin and dumb enough to think musk is gonna give them free money.
  - nkrisc 6y ago
    Considering the conversations I overheard about "crypto" in 2018, I'm not entirely surprised. There's a lot of gullible people who bought Bitcoin or Ethereum expecting to get rich.
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  Because it's almost plausible? He's an eccentric billionaire known for his erratic behavior. Maybe one day he really does decide to shower the masses with a paltry (for him) $100k of Bitcoin. "It's weird and tech-y, just like him!"
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    It's just a slight update on the Bill Gates chain-letter emails from the 90s.
- wmf 6y ago
  Are these scams hitting "crypto people" or noobs who buy some BTC just to get in on the scam? The gift card scams aren't targeting existing gift cards; they tell people to go out and buy gift cards.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bigbubba 6y ago
  People who are desperate are easier to scam because they 'want to believe.' They're looking for miracles because they think that's all they could hope for. I think it's less a matter of crypto people being gullible and more a matter of desperate people being gullible and consequently becoming crypto people. Organized religions often target the same demographic for the same reason. Born-again preachers love reaching out to broken junkies and alcoholics.
smsm42 6y ago
So the new thing is that hacking bluecheck account basically gets official Twitter stamp of approval on anything on that twitter account. And since display name and bio can be easily changed, basically the only think bluecheck is confirming is that the handle at one time belonged to a real person. And if somebody chooses a "witty" handle which does not identify the person clearly, you won't even know which one.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sat_nam 6y ago
I observed something similar that began earlier this year. I wrote about it on the Tenable blog. They impersonate many of the people following Trump and engaging with his tweets, irrespective of party affiliation. https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-giveaways-impersonate-followers-of-political-and-other-notable https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-givea...
- joegaebel 6y ago
  Wow, amazing. I had no idea it was so prevalent. Thanks for writing this up!
benvineyard 6y ago
I'm seeing an increase in Youtube scams as well where 5k bitcoins are "given away". The video and content look very legit and casual content browsers are easily susceptible.
1MachineElf 6y ago
I didn't realize this was still going on. Saw one of these posts in like 2017 under the handle @elonmvsk. Sad it's still happening.
vmception 6y ago
Welcome to 2 years ago. Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years. Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone. Any theories? One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.
hooper2019 6y ago
Can the victims of scam get their money back? Yes, if you have fallen victim to scam from an unregulated investment platform or any scam at ll then are eligible to recover what was stolen from you and this can only happen if this is reported to the right people. With the right approach and with evidence, you will get what you lost back. Those behind these unregulated platforms will likely want to sell the idea that what happened to your investment was an unfortunate occurrence when in reality what happened was theft via elaborate means. If you are a victim or you know any one who is a victim of these occurrences, you should know there are people who can help you. Simply search (corecrypto tech-cryptocurrency recovery) on google just the way it is in that bracket. It is never too late if you have the right information, your sanity can be restored.

59 points by joegaebel 6y ago

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

KMnO4 6y ago
Don't forget anonymous payments. Lots of vendors selling legally questionable (or illegal) things only take cryptocurrencies. I see that as a huge boon for these industries, who would otherwise have to figure out credit card processing, bank transfers, or being repeatedly shut down by Paypal/Venmo/etc.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Not anonymous (mainstream creeptocurrencies are traceable by design!) but censorship resistant. Yes, this is the ONLY use case for the buttcoins. The problem is that for every successful weed and nudes sale there's a million ransomware attacks, scam calls, and absolutely fraudulent "investments".
  - Passthepeas 6y ago
    completely false, privacy coins command billions of dollars in market cap, Monero alone is currently worth 2.2 billion and will likely continue to grow.
zeroxfe 6y ago
The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Sounds like magic the gathering card econ. Which is super fun! But personally, I definitely don't consider specing into Embercleave a meaningful societal mover
  - jand 6y ago
    Funny detail: Magic the gathering hits very close to home by accident. One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".
    - SkyMarshal 6y ago
      Yeah, it was previously a Magic The Gathering exchange, and then converted to a Bitcoin exchange. They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.
      - ptd 6y ago
        Wasn’t it an inside job? Or Arles the heavily speculated?
        jandrese 6y ago
        Nobody knows for sure, but the postmortem suggests that it might have been straight up incompetence. However, it's certainly possible to consider that the "incompetence" was on purpose to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo
  - arcadeparade 6y ago
    "defi" is an interesting concept that gained a lot of traction over the summer. Over $10 billion in crypto assets has been deposited in various protocols such as Aave which is like a decentralised bank operating on ethereum.
crumbshot 6y ago
Not quite, it still has one positive use case: buying drugs (and other similarly prohibited items) off the dark web. And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
seibelj 6y ago
BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
- coldpie 6y ago
  Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.
  - leppr 6y ago
    It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services. Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it. Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      It's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.
      - aeternum 6y ago
        Still more efficient than the alternatives. USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it. Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
    - 6y ago
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> cryptocurrency is dead, right? No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero. It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity. There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  You're implying that there are zero use cases for public cryptocurrencies other than as collectibles. This couldn't be further from the truth. There's a thriving decentralized finance ecosystem on Ethereum with more than 10B in value locked away. DeFi is an application that's only made possible because of the existence of an open public smart contract protocol. You're being very disingenuous.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cryptica 6y ago
I was a Bitcoin skeptic for years so I understand this point of view. This point of view makes sense if you assume that the financial system works properly which is what the vast majority of people still assume. The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run. Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
- smsm42 6y ago
  You seem to be confusing two things - system working and system being un-exploitable. Example - it's pretty easy to shoplift in any of the retail shops. In fact, shoplifting happens all the time. Still, nobody would claim retail model doesn't work because people would just come and shoplift everything and nobody would pay and the retailer would go bust. What actually happens is that vast majority of people do not shoplift, and the retail system works and produces massive profits. > but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable Advantage, but also disadvantage. If a bank cheats you, you have options to complain to regulators, to the police, to the FBI, to you Congress representative finally. It won't work in all cases, but it's an option that's available to you. If a crypto scammer cheats you, well, nobody is accountable. For some people, it's a big issue, because it greatly increases the friction in transactions.
  - cryptica 6y ago
    This is not true because the bank does cheat me. Has been cheating me for a decade but the police won't do anything about it. If I try to sue the Reserve Bank, the judge will dismiss my case without even hearing the evidence. Also, politicians never answer my emails and I did try. I must be living on a different planet.
trident1000 6y ago
Theres people who use it for certain things, like PornHub just started accepting BTC payments. But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Wait, that sounds like fraud. The CEO of a company had the company he runs buy into a limited asset he also owns... Gg society, the fact that we're talking this up like it's a good thing means most of us deserve to be poor af
  - trident1000 6y ago
    Sounds a little dramatic (especially since 50 million isnt moving the price single handedly). Also stock buybacks are essentially the same thing (if you were to call it a conflict of interest) and almost every company in existence does that.
    - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
      You just talked about Twitter buying BTC as important news showing it's viability though... It's mostly a popularity/buzz game. Also yeah, stock buybacks were illegal up until 1982 and since there legalization we've seen large trades in companies from R&D spending towards buyback spending...
      - trident1000 6y ago
        I mentioned several noteworthy people and institutions making an investment to demonstrate a trend. "its mostly a popularity/buzz game" yeah thats how value networks work. From gold to cash to facebook.
pjkundert 6y ago
As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 6y ago
  The first time I sent a wire from US to Canada it bounced because I didn't include the street address of the branch where the recipient account was located. The mind boggles.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    I was always wondering - virtually all money being electronic now, what the heck they are doing with all those branch addresses? I don't even have "branch address" - my account is just numbers, and if I need some live human service, I just walk into any random branch and they are happy to help me.
    - wmf 6y ago
      I sure hope there's not a server in the back of each branch holding account state... (Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)
      - bleepblorp 6y ago
        While I doubt there's a server in each branch managing account balances, there's is some kind of branch-related weirdness involved in bank account management at some banks. With some banks, if you open a bank account at a branch in one time zone but later move to another time zone, your transactions will still be processed according to the business hours where the account was opened. I know someone who is in this situation and they can't make transactions for several hours towards the end of the day (after midnight in the originating branch's timezone) because their bank's online banking front end can't agree with the bank's backend system about what day it is.
cryptica 6y ago
The idea that the financial system works seems to be a contradiction when you consider that cryptocurrencies (which exist within that system) have been performing extremely well for over a decade. If scams can thrive so well in our system (to the point of becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars), then how do we know that the biggest corporations are not scams too? How do we know they're not all empty shells? Their earnings (P/E ratios) are very low... And on top of that, I would question the source and legitimacy of these modest earnings. What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'. EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
jMyles 6y ago
One data point: we're launching the NuCypher Ursula service on ethereum mainnet tonight at UTC midnight. So, quite far from dead in some people's minds. :-)
thom 6y ago
Yes but the _appetite_ for these scams is seemingly infinite, so crypto seems far from dead.
smsm42 6y ago
It's not dead, but it's not mainstream either. It's a bit like quidditch - there are a bunch of people interested in it, and they have their own ecosystem, but don't expect the Olympic Committee to be calling anytime soon. OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
miguelmota 6y ago
Far from dead. It's been growing rapidly, particularly the decentralized finance (defi) space. Number of transactions has been steadily going up in Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
- dr-detroit 6y ago
  As far as a way to remain untraceable (organized crime) or untaxable (the elites) the main use cases for crypto have moved on particularly to things (like designer handbags) that actually accrue value over time and/or are not numbered and tracked publicly.
Shared404 6y ago
Newegg at least still accepts it. I believe Humble does as well, but I don't know that.

jwcrux 6y ago

This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time. We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam. [0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.pdf https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots.... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo

aeternum 6y ago
It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies. All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  Maybe Jack is running the scam as a hobby and doesnt want to kill nice side hobby to stack sats.

pg_bot 6y ago

This has been going on for quite some time, and I would be embarrassed if I were a part of Twitter's engineering team. From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.

avian 6y ago
It's not just Twitter. Fake SpaceX "live" streams with a couple thousand viewers regularly pop-up in my YouTube recommendations. They're peddling the same kind of crypto scams.
- extrapickles 6y ago
  What they typically do is takeover an existing YouTube channel, rename/brand it so it shows up in all of the people who subscribed to the channels feeds. It’s even more maddening that there is no way to report that a YouTube channel has been compromised, there are only report options for inappropriate content of various sorts.

aokiji 6y ago

Loving the army of shills attacking the use of crypto. I wonder if the changes that were imposed on Jack Dorsey's (and his ability to stay in the board of) Twitter were just aimed at subverting the propagation of crypto. The central banking mafia runs deep.

fortran77 6y ago

Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?

shoes_for_thee 6y ago
I am also puzzled about the intersection of people savvy enough to own bitcoin and dumb enough to think musk is gonna give them free money.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  Considering the conversations I overheard about "crypto" in 2018, I'm not entirely surprised. There's a lot of gullible people who bought Bitcoin or Ethereum expecting to get rich.
Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
Because it's almost plausible? He's an eccentric billionaire known for his erratic behavior. Maybe one day he really does decide to shower the masses with a paltry (for him) $100k of Bitcoin. "It's weird and tech-y, just like him!"
- roywiggins 6y ago
  It's just a slight update on the Bill Gates chain-letter emails from the 90s.
wmf 6y ago
Are these scams hitting "crypto people" or noobs who buy some BTC just to get in on the scam? The gift card scams aren't targeting existing gift cards; they tell people to go out and buy gift cards.
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bigbubba 6y ago
People who are desperate are easier to scam because they 'want to believe.' They're looking for miracles because they think that's all they could hope for. I think it's less a matter of crypto people being gullible and more a matter of desperate people being gullible and consequently becoming crypto people. Organized religions often target the same demographic for the same reason. Born-again preachers love reaching out to broken junkies and alcoholics.

smsm42 6y ago

So the new thing is that hacking bluecheck account basically gets official Twitter stamp of approval on anything on that twitter account. And since display name and bio can be easily changed, basically the only think bluecheck is confirming is that the handle at one time belonged to a real person. And if somebody chooses a "witty" handle which does not identify the person clearly, you won't even know which one.

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sat_nam 6y ago

I observed something similar that began earlier this year. I wrote about it on the Tenable blog. They impersonate many of the people following Trump and engaging with his tweets, irrespective of party affiliation. https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-giveaways-impersonate-followers-of-political-and-other-notable https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-givea...

joegaebel 6y ago
Wow, amazing. I had no idea it was so prevalent. Thanks for writing this up!

benvineyard 6y ago

I'm seeing an increase in Youtube scams as well where 5k bitcoins are "given away". The video and content look very legit and casual content browsers are easily susceptible.

1MachineElf 6y ago

I didn't realize this was still going on. Saw one of these posts in like 2017 under the handle @elonmvsk. Sad it's still happening.

vmception 6y ago

Welcome to 2 years ago. Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years. Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone. Any theories? One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.

hooper2019 6y ago

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