Comment by bdndndndbve
4 months ago
I wonder if people who are "invested" in cryptocurrency are more susceptible to these kind of scams. There's a strong aspect of FOMO in getting people to buy imaginary internet money, and also in getting them to panic and fumble said internet money.
One of the reasons I stay away from it is that, at least in recent years, every scam that I see taking place involves crypto. I have a lot of acquaintances and I can almost draw a line at this stage: the higher the "shadyness" of the person, the more they are invested or talking about crypto. I am yet, even tho I owned, to have had the need to use crypto in my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly life.
It is very easy to destroy lives with it as we can see in this case, and, making it harder to do so will work against the vary nature of this tech. This is a tough nut to crack but I think the space will remain filled with predators constantly baiting prey into the system with the promise of a big reward.
"You can't undo a transaction" is a core feature of crypto. This is hilarious, because in actual payment networks, it literally only benefits scammers.
Every consumer ever has at one point or another wanted or needed to reverse a transaction. Chargebacks are a FEATURE of credit cards.
You know how in old crime fiction there was often an episode with "bearer's bonds" where up top they define bearers bonds as "this just belongs to whoever holds it, so be very careful" and you just know they're going to get stolen immediately?
That's how I feel about crypto.
Reversibility is great for consumers who are sending money in exchange for products and services. It can be a nightmare for people who receive the money and are providing the products and services.
And it isn't just businesses who carry this risk. If a business was depending on a large inflow to make payroll, and that inflow gets reversed, the people who are expecting payment for their labor also are subject to a payment reversal.
There's definitely a lot of benefits to reversibility, but it has very real costs and tradeoffs.
While "Nigerian spam" scams profit off simple-minded gullible people, cryptocurrency scams profit off sophisticated gullible people.
Traditional banks and the financial industry are generally sub-optimal, but at least if you are scammed, they will do their best to either recover your money or return you whole.
To have this safety, money and finances have to be centralized, regulated, and governed, all of which crypto doesn't have and doesn't want.
> they will do their best to either recover your money or return you whole.
And if they don't, the courts can force them to do it and give you some extra money for the trouble.
No they won't. If you bank transfer money to a scammer, the bank won't refund you, nor can they recover it. If you give a scammer your bank access credentials, they also won't refund you because you broke the TOS.
Not true in the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy94vz4zd7zo
1 reply →
They may well block the transaction before it's made, for cases like this.
I wonder if it is just harder to give away several million dollars of government currency without being able to recover it? This is only an interesting story because it is so much money and because they are able to narrow the suspects down to a small group.
Cryptocurrencies are like speedrunning the discovery of why finance is regulated, though, that is certainly true.
I think you’re saying the same thing from the other side: it’s definitely true that it’s harder to get or transfer large amounts of real money because the system has layers of protection due to past fraud, but those fraud protections also mean that most people can’t get the kind of paper profits which lure people to cryptocurrencies. This gives scammers the appealing target of a self-selected group of financially unsophisticated people who have chosen a system designed to make large scale theft easy and safe.
It's obviously going to be much much more difficult to steal $450K from an actual bank account and get clean away - you're going to need a lot more proof of identity than a google login. From that POV, owning a lot of cryptocurrency is painting a target on your back.
How do they identify their marks? A random firefighter seems like an odd target.
Could just be people talking about crypto on social media directly saying that they own some. Would not be too hard to find accounts where you can clearly identify the person behind the twitter handle, facebook profile, instragram account or whatever talking about that online. We're only hearing about people who happened to lose a huge amount of money but lots of people probably fell for this scam and lost money on the scale of $100 or $1000.
1 reply →
I found this video, titled 'To Catch a Scammer: How a real-life criminal steals your bitcoin' pretty informative. An employee is able to go into detail on how scammers find their marks: https://youtu.be/pskUt4ZjM4M
The video linked in the article by Junseth also goes over some of this.
100%. It's been that way forever too. I've caught numerous people setting up mining crap, it's everywhere and anyone that shouldn't be trusted but is probably will be a vector.