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German man loses 400k GBP about $500k in Twitter Bitcoin scam

38 points by hamiltonians 6y ago

hamiltonians 6y ago
Assuming you have a defective moral compass, is there any reason to not run this scam. Easiest $ ever. Twitter nor law enforcement can do anything. The same guys doing it over and over. You can run this scam and make an easy $50-200k with some twitter posts and then use the $ to pay off the mortgage or student loans, or take a cruise, buy a luxury car or whatever. no one would know if you mix the coins before cashing them out, not that law enforcement actually cares.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- viraptor 6y ago
  > no one would know if you mix the coins before cashing them out There's lots of other ways you can fail. First how you obtain the large enough account to announce the scam. Then how you move the money to mixers. Then how you withdraw it. And likely a few steps in between. Also you can fail by telling someone about your scam - this happens a lot - many court cases have fun conversation records where the accused bragged to undercover police officers.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  I think to do it effectively you probably need to break a few laws, like using a stolen account of and kind to reach a large enough audience that will trust you. So that's a reason not to, unless you're already in deep.
- cyral 6y ago
  Published just today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/i-was-a-teenage-twitter-hacker-graham-ivan-clark-gets-3-year-sentence/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/i-was-a-teenage-... Granted this case was much more high profile though.
  - kristofferR 6y ago
    Pretty amazing that they only managed to net so little BTC (~20 BTC), considering the millions of people who were exposed to the scam.
- GFischer 6y ago
  Well, the people in the article (Whale Alert, the ones that gave BBC the article) absolutely traced the bitcoins that were cashed out, but as you mentioned, law enforcement did nothing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jussij 6y ago
> There was a timer counting down, and the website promised participants that they could double their money. It is amazing how people fall for these scams. They seem to forget the time tested truth which is "if it sounds too good to be true then it ain't".
- kingkongjaffa 6y ago
  Avg person today is frankly stupid about many areas of modern life. Our education systems no longer equip people to handle the modern world.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Scams have been going longer then you have been alive. It's not a modern failure of education.
  - bhaak 6y ago
    I don't think that's a problem of the modern world. It just wasn't as easy previously to learn about all the stupid things people did. But note that the person in question has studied and works at a marketing position in the IT industry. Not sure if he qualifies for "average". All kinds of people can be stupid at times.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  They've already bought into crypto which, for many, is just "free money".
- reader_mode 6y ago
  Sounds like he already had 10 BTC, he probably got sold on "investing in BTC", price jumped since he got in so when you're riding high on easy wins why wouldn't another one come just as easily - sounds like easy come easy go to me. I'm ambivalent about the tech, economics, environmental impact, but what ticks me off about BTC and crypto is the proselytizing idiots that it attracts - it's the modern day Jehovah's Witnesses. I rented an office recently and there was a bunch of "bitcoin investment strategists" in the space next to me, and this one guy in particular trying to sell me on the idea that we should get into blockchain development because that's going to be the future of everything ... You could sum the guy up as mouth breeding idiot on first impression and that didn't change as he kept talking. Really typical for the crowd IMO.
paulgb 6y ago
> Sebastian double-checked the verification logo next to Elon Musk's name, and then tried to decide whether to send five or 10 Bitcoin. This is a vulnerability in Twitter's verification policy that Twitter refuses to fix. Originally, verification was supposed to mean "this person is who they say they are". But once an account is verified, you can change the name/profile picture to someone else. So hackers get access to minor verified accounts, change the profile to match Elon, and then they have a "verified" Elon Musk account to scam with. Twitter could fix this tomorrow by requiring that verification be tied to the name you got verified with, and if you do need to change your name you go through an (expedited) re-verification process. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask considering what "verification" is supposed to mean, and what (as evidenced by this article) users of the site take it to mean.
- melomal 6y ago
  For about $1000 you can get Instagram and Facebook verified accounts so I imagine Twitter is even cheaper/easier to do so.
  - candiodari 6y ago
    Since the problem here is that twitter got hacked, this would not have helped at all. The bitcoin scam messages were sent on the "real" account.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  This won't solve it because a lot of scams rely on victim's greed,as was the case for the German in this story. This is no different from a scam I saw a few years ago,where some German tourist kept pouring money on a three cup game despite his wife's attempts to stop it. It took him less than 5 minutes to leave nearly €500. It's always the same: you think you are about to get something for nothing. I very much doubt there's a fix for it.
  - John23832 6y ago
    The article says that he checked for a check to verify that it was Elon running the account. Sure, greed motivates people, but in this case greed would not have motivated him to continue if he saw that the account was not verified and not Elon’s. If anything the check provided him with the confidence to continue more than anything else.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
If he thinks he feels bad today he's gonna hate how he feels later.
andy_ppp 6y ago
I don’t understand how you can be tech savvy enough to send and (not?) receive Bitcoin but stupid enough to fall for this... EDIT: Thinking about it, it's technically difficult see the difference between Bitcoin (which will continue to be worth more) and other get rich quick schemes that may not have the same chance of success and directly being conned for money by people.
- swiley 6y ago
  Hosted wallets make it almost as easy as using email.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewingram 6y ago
  I wonder if the meteoric rise if Bitcoin, and similar recent things like what's going on with /r/wallstreetbets, is causing people's defences to lower with regards to what it a realistic return on investment, so these kind of things don't trigger the alarm bells so much.
- GFischer 6y ago
  Elon is the perfect person to hack, he's always doing bizarre stuff, so if I'd fall for anyone, it would be for this one. And the type that got rich off BitCoin are way bigger risk-takers than average - I was offered to "get in" on BitCoin at 1000 dollars and I thought it too risky, my former coworker who did and got rich is very much an adrenaline junkie (but didn't fall for this scam fortunately).
theonlyklas 6y ago
More people need to play Old School RuneScape and fall for money doubling scams so they know to avoid them in real life.
nceqs3 6y ago
This is a problem across all social media. The number of Instagram/Twitter scams you come across every day is astounding. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the social media companies want the increased user engagement metrics from the bots.
bb123 6y ago
This is a terrible scam, but I am astonished by the frivolity with which people would move life-changing amounts of money into something with absolutely no due diligence. When I took on a financial advisor I verified their identity with the govt regulator, verified their written bank details over the phone, and then verified those details with my bank before I even considered sending a single penny. Even then I sent a small test amount, and waited for a written receipt before sending anything more. To dump 500 grand into something you heard about 10 minutes ago on Twitter seems beyond ridiculous to me. This is an amazing example of the old adage “a fool and his money are easily parted”.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Some years ago there used to be this very popular scam in my country: you get a call from an alleged police officer,who explains that your daughter/son/cousin/whatever made a huge car accident and is about to go to jail unless it's 'resolved' with some money. So many people got swindled for absurd amounts of money. However one case stuck most in my memory: the police got called by a woman who was about to fall for such scam. Fast forward to the end and the journalist asks to tell what happened. So she gets a call from someone, saying her son is arrested for drink driving and causing an accident. He needs money for this to go away. The woman goes to the neighbor to borough the money and the neighbor seeing her in distress,asks for more details. Finally she tells the woman: you haven't got a son...
- londons_explore 6y ago
  > with absolutely no due diligence But due diligence was done here - the blue check mark was checked. The user checked other people were seeing success with this. The user probably double and triple checked the bitcoin address he was sending to. He probably looked for the padlock symbol on the site he was getting the details of the scam from. He might have checked his computer for viruses and been using a hardware wallet with a really long password. He just checked all the wrong things.
  - bb123 6y ago
    All of those things are a good start but it is five hundred thousand dollars. It’s obviously a huge amount of money for someone like this. Why wouldn’t you check with your bank or a solicitor or the financial services regulator in your country before undertaking such a large transaction? The blue check mark just means they’re a celebrity, immediately dumping your life savings into something because the meme man told you to is a pretty foolish thing to do...
boyadjian 6y ago
I never understand, why people who already have money, want to have more. Personally, I keep my money at the bank, for days when I will have to spend it (Buying things, going on holidays, etc)
- lm28469 6y ago
  The bank is gambling it for you, some people prefer gambling it themselves
  - mcosta 6y ago
    The bank is gambling it for you, in the same sense taking a road trip is a life gamble.
    - lm28469 6y ago
      Hm no, they're literally investing it and you get the 0.x% they're willing to let you touch
  - gizmo686 6y ago
    The bank is FDIC insured. If the bank loses your money and FDIC cannot make you whole, you would be in a serious problem even if you had a pile of cash, as that is basically a 'the entire USD economic system has collapsed' scenario.
    - lm28469 6y ago
      Well yes, but if you invest your own money without going through banks at least you have some choice in where it goes (oil companies, weapon companies, sustainable funds, &c.) and you get to cash out all the benefits (or loss) I'll take my 7%+ average over the last 100 years vs the "insured" 0.5% my bank proposes me (which doesn't even pay for what my bank charges me monthly)
      - gizmo686 6y ago
rdevsrex 6y ago
I'll stick to physical gold, thank you very much.
- tatref 6y ago
  If you send me 1kg of gold, I'll send back double the amount!
dr-detroit 6y ago
saying "twitter bitcoin scam" is triply redundant
lm28469 6y ago
> the website promised participants that they could double their money. I fell for that, once, when I was 8, with virtual money, playing an online game. How can an adult be this gullible...
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  Environments in which children can get scammed safely in have been increasingly becoming rarer because people are too soft.
- NewLogic 6y ago
  To think how many scams have been prevented because the target played Runescape or WoW
nkrisc 6y ago
> It also does sound quite plausible that someone like Elon Musk, a big supporter of cryptocurrency, would give away Bitcoin. Really? Most m(b)illionaires, however eccentric, typically don't go around doing the equivalent of throwing money from rooftops, especially not by means of blurry Times New Roman text on a GIF directing you to some .info website.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  And of they did, why require that you first send them money? This is the most absurd scam to ever succeed.
mihaifm 6y ago
> 10 Bitcoin were transferred and then cashed out anonymously a few days later. Genuinely interested how the coins were cashed out anonymously. Pretty much all exchanges require KYC these days, and Bitcoin addresses can be tracked and blacklisted if the right processes are put in place, in theory at least.
- hayd 6y ago
  That probably just means it was moved to another BTC address.
- lawrenceong 6y ago
  hi @mihaifm -- it could simply be a wallet address that one can forward the coins to I believe?
- DocTomoe 6y ago
  You use them to buy stuff on the darknet and resell. Classic money laundering.
- throwawayffffas 6y ago
  There are shady services that will convert bitcoin to monero with no questions asked.
- theonlyklas 6y ago
  It could have taken time for the BTC from his wallet to be marked as tainted. Once that happens, the person who buys the 10BTC is bag holding. I wonder what happens if it's an exchange holding tainted BTC, though. Will it be excluded from the supply indefinitely?
viraptor 6y ago
> The 42-year-old says he first invested $40,000 in Bitcoin in 2017, and quickly made his money back as the value of the coins rose on the open market. He cashed out and got his initial money back, but then watched excitedly over the years as the 10 coins grew to be worth nearly 500,000 euros. Fortunately this sounds like he didn't lose anything, just never realised extra gains. I know it's slightly nitpicking, but losing your actual $500k and losing $500k unrealised gains from a gamble is a massive difference. Especially if you already withdrew the original investment.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Right. This guy was happy when the unregulated Wild West made him a fortune for doing no work, but started crying for regulation when he was on the bad side of a trade.
- WA 6y ago
  No. This is a common way to think about it, but it's wrong imho. Because that money is real and it buys you real stuff. If you have that money one day and it is gone the next, you effectively lost that money. It doesn't matter where it came from. Think about it: You inherit $500k. You lose it through a scam or a bet or gambling. Do you think it doesn't matter? I mean, you didn't earn that money yourself, right? There are no paper losses and no "unrealized gains". It's your money and if it's gone, it's gone. Doesn't matter how you earned it.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    I agree with you, he lost real money. But I also agree with the other poster: it's hard to feel bad for him gambling away money that he got by gambling to begin with.
  - ImprobableTruth 6y ago
    But it's not real money, it's an asset! I think you have a wrong understanding of what unrealized gains are. It's not about whether you earned it yourself - it's about whether it's liquid cash or just an asset. Only once you sell your asset do you realize your gains.
Grustaf 6y ago
How can someone be smart enough to earn that kind of money, but stupid enough to fall for this hilariously obvious scam?
- _jal 6y ago
  The first part of this assumes having money is some sort of proxy measure for intelligence. It is not.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    It definitely is. The correlation between money and intelligence is very high.
    - thatguyagain 6y ago
      Yeah, it is super clever to inherit money, or be born in the right place at the right time, or not being abused by alcoholic parents turning you chronically depressed, etc, etc. Please..
      - Grustaf 6y ago
        Just because the correlation isn't 100% doesn't mean it's 0.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    There is also an assumption that if you are "intelligent" then you are intelligent at everything - this has not being my experience of knowing some really smart people. In fact, I actually that to do something really stupid requires a high degree of intelligence - largely down to sheer hubris.
- satysin 6y ago
  That is all I could think when reading the article yesterday. I can understand some people such as older and less tech savvy people getting caught up in scams but an otherwise intelligent early 40s person working in the IT industry?! I just don't understand how he fell for it. I guess the only answer is greed overrode his better judgement.
tirpen 6y ago
Wow, It's sure is a nice feature that Bitcoin doesn't have any way to dispute charges and that it's mostly anonymous. This article is yet another amazing illustration of why that's definitely two features you want from something that's intended to be used as a currency.
- celticninja 6y ago
  cash is used as currency and would meet the criteria you listed.
- shawnz 6y ago
  You obviously don't want that in every situation, only some situations. Would you make an argument like "Wow, it's sure a nice feature that [full disk encryption software] doesn't have any way to reset lost passwords" on an article about someone losing their life's work due to misunderstanding the consequences of full disk encryption?
thejackgoode 6y ago
Reminds me of some phrase I read from a scammer: "At some point, it's their own fault". There's something interesting to it. As if we as a society allow (or condemn less) preying on the "weak" and uninformed
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  The guy only lost money he made in BTC speculation. He's not an innocent victim, just a little predator fish who got bit by a bigger fish.
dan-robertson 6y ago
It seems the bitcoins went up 10x since he bought them. It would be really tragic if he still has to pay capital gains tax on the 450k of gains.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  He has as much in losses in his latest "investment". Now if the authorities suspect he is running a tax evasion scam...
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    It’s not super obvious to me. If I bought some shares in some company and they went up 10x, I don’t think I could get out of the tax by gifting them to someone else (though maybe I could get out of it if I gifted them to a charity). Taxes can be a bit weird with investments in general. eg if you invest in a mutual fund that reinvests dividends, you only pay tax when you realise gains, whereas if you invested in an equivalent mutual fund that didn’t reinvest dividends but reinvested them yourself, you would be liable for tax on the dividends before reinvesting them which means less compounding. Obviously this all massively depends on local laws and weird specifics.
- cyberpunk 6y ago
  In Germany profits from crypto speculation are not taxable if you have held the coins for two years. At least, according to my accountant a year or so ago, may have changed since..
pwinnski 6y ago
I believe that he's "normally not the biggest idiot in the whole world," but that's a belief I'm holding despite the available evidence. 1. Why would anyone give away free bitcoin in large amounts? Seriously, why? That should already have been an end to this. 2. If the screenshot is representative, it is clearly "@JoshyMcB" tweeting, not @elonmusk. It should take much more than an icon and a not-quite-matching display name to suggest it's the same person, and a tweet from @JoshyMcB[0] later the same day makes it clear he was hacked. There are more differences than similarities in that screenshot. 3. He got this part right: "I was greedy that night and it made me blind." 0. https://twitter.com/JoshyMcB/status/1363724497375825927 https://twitter.com/JoshyMcB/status/1363724497375825927
vdddv 6y ago
you can't cheat an honest man
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Thia is not true. GoFundMe is daily proof of that.
zenon 6y ago
Everyone does stupid things sometimes. Maybe from tiredness, inattentiveness, excessive emotional influence, drugs, whatever. Maybe there's just a small chance at any point in time that a brain will malfunction slightly and direct a stupid action. Even intelligent people, who know intellectually that things that sound too god to be true usually aren't, and that greed can make you do dumb things, are not exempt from this. By presenting themselves to zillions of people, these scammers ensure that they will catch at least some people who happen to not be thinking correctly at the moment. People who will fall for the scam, and then slap their foreheads 15 minutes later wondering what the hell they were thinking.
iso1631 6y ago
Why would you believe it? Sure, some scames are complicated - credit swaps, sub prime mortagges, etc, I can see why people fall for that. Sometimes you're relying n a greater fool, sometimes you're relying on unlikely events (horse winning etc), because you value the potential reward more than the risk. All of that's rational - hell even buying a lottery ticket is rational for many people. But in all those areas I can see why the other person is involved and what they're getting. My risk/reward ratio is different to theirs. I go into a greater-fool situation and yes, I expect that I'll find a greater fool, the person selling me the $whatever doesn't. I could buy a Tesla and think that they will take over the entire planet's energy grid. I can see why someone is selling me a TSLA share at $800 (they don't think tesla is worth that much), that's reasonable. I could even see a transaction where I give my email address to "Elon" and he sends me money, because he's a gajillionaire and doesn't value it, but does value email addresses, or maybe a transaction where I make or share a DOGE meme and he likes it, so gives me money instead of a "like". But what possible reason would there be for me to send Elon Musk money and him to send it back? Why would he do this? Why not just send me the money for sharing a DOGE meme or something? Or just send it for being the first person to click his link?
system16 6y ago
It's awful that this guy was scammed, but I am really having difficulty wrapping my head around it. Presumably he follows Elon on Twitter, and would see these scam fake Elon replies/accounts have been trolling his Twitter feed for years. I guess seeing the blue verify check and FOMO at doubling his holdings made him throw caution to the wind.
aequitas 6y ago
Since this man is German, he lost euro's, not pounds or dollars. Or more accurately, bitcoin.
tjpnz 6y ago
I'm not on Twitter much but I've seen plenty of livestreams coming up in my YouTube feed. What I find striking about some of them is just how creative the scammers have gotten and the production values involved. During the last Starship launch there were several fake livestreams purporting to be from SpaceX. They had custom graphics and gauges and were all soliciting Bitcoin in order to "fill the tank" ahead of launch. There were literally hundreds of people on some of them and it's unlikely they were all bots. What's particularly brazen about these schemes is that the normal reporting mechanisms don't work. When YouTube looks into it hours later the damage has already been done.
isthisreality 6y ago
This would be a good way to launder Bitcoin to yourself without paying taxes on it. Could that be what this is?

38 points by hamiltonians 6y ago

Assuming you have a defective moral compass, is there any reason to not run this scam. Easiest $ ever. Twitter nor law enforcement can do anything. The same guys doing it over and over. You can run this scam and make an easy $50-200k with some twitter posts and then use the $ to pay off the mortgage or student loans, or take a cruise, buy a luxury car or whatever. no one would know if you mix the coins before cashing them out, not that law enforcement actually cares.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
viraptor 6y ago
> no one would know if you mix the coins before cashing them out There's lots of other ways you can fail. First how you obtain the large enough account to announce the scam. Then how you move the money to mixers. Then how you withdraw it. And likely a few steps in between. Also you can fail by telling someone about your scam - this happens a lot - many court cases have fun conversation records where the accused bragged to undercover police officers.
nkrisc 6y ago
I think to do it effectively you probably need to break a few laws, like using a stolen account of and kind to reach a large enough audience that will trust you. So that's a reason not to, unless you're already in deep.
cyral 6y ago
Published just today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/i-was-a-teenage-twitter-hacker-graham-ivan-clark-gets-3-year-sentence/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/i-was-a-teenage-... Granted this case was much more high profile though.
- kristofferR 6y ago
  Pretty amazing that they only managed to net so little BTC (~20 BTC), considering the millions of people who were exposed to the scam.
GFischer 6y ago
Well, the people in the article (Whale Alert, the ones that gave BBC the article) absolutely traced the bitcoins that were cashed out, but as you mentioned, law enforcement did nothing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jussij 6y ago

> There was a timer counting down, and the website promised participants that they could double their money. It is amazing how people fall for these scams. They seem to forget the time tested truth which is "if it sounds too good to be true then it ain't".

kingkongjaffa 6y ago
Avg person today is frankly stupid about many areas of modern life. Our education systems no longer equip people to handle the modern world.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Scams have been going longer then you have been alive. It's not a modern failure of education.
- bhaak 6y ago
  I don't think that's a problem of the modern world. It just wasn't as easy previously to learn about all the stupid things people did. But note that the person in question has studied and works at a marketing position in the IT industry. Not sure if he qualifies for "average". All kinds of people can be stupid at times.
globular-toast 6y ago
They've already bought into crypto which, for many, is just "free money".
reader_mode 6y ago
Sounds like he already had 10 BTC, he probably got sold on "investing in BTC", price jumped since he got in so when you're riding high on easy wins why wouldn't another one come just as easily - sounds like easy come easy go to me. I'm ambivalent about the tech, economics, environmental impact, but what ticks me off about BTC and crypto is the proselytizing idiots that it attracts - it's the modern day Jehovah's Witnesses. I rented an office recently and there was a bunch of "bitcoin investment strategists" in the space next to me, and this one guy in particular trying to sell me on the idea that we should get into blockchain development because that's going to be the future of everything ... You could sum the guy up as mouth breeding idiot on first impression and that didn't change as he kept talking. Really typical for the crowd IMO.

paulgb 6y ago

> Sebastian double-checked the verification logo next to Elon Musk's name, and then tried to decide whether to send five or 10 Bitcoin. This is a vulnerability in Twitter's verification policy that Twitter refuses to fix. Originally, verification was supposed to mean "this person is who they say they are". But once an account is verified, you can change the name/profile picture to someone else. So hackers get access to minor verified accounts, change the profile to match Elon, and then they have a "verified" Elon Musk account to scam with. Twitter could fix this tomorrow by requiring that verification be tied to the name you got verified with, and if you do need to change your name you go through an (expedited) re-verification process. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask considering what "verification" is supposed to mean, and what (as evidenced by this article) users of the site take it to mean.

melomal 6y ago
For about $1000 you can get Instagram and Facebook verified accounts so I imagine Twitter is even cheaper/easier to do so.
- candiodari 6y ago
  Since the problem here is that twitter got hacked, this would not have helped at all. The bitcoin scam messages were sent on the "real" account.
cosmodisk 6y ago
This won't solve it because a lot of scams rely on victim's greed,as was the case for the German in this story. This is no different from a scam I saw a few years ago,where some German tourist kept pouring money on a three cup game despite his wife's attempts to stop it. It took him less than 5 minutes to leave nearly €500. It's always the same: you think you are about to get something for nothing. I very much doubt there's a fix for it.
- John23832 6y ago
  The article says that he checked for a check to verify that it was Elon running the account. Sure, greed motivates people, but in this case greed would not have motivated him to continue if he saw that the account was not verified and not Elon’s. If anything the check provided him with the confidence to continue more than anything else.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

If he thinks he feels bad today he's gonna hate how he feels later.

andy_ppp 6y ago

I don’t understand how you can be tech savvy enough to send and (not?) receive Bitcoin but stupid enough to fall for this... EDIT: Thinking about it, it's technically difficult see the difference between Bitcoin (which will continue to be worth more) and other get rich quick schemes that may not have the same chance of success and directly being conned for money by people.

swiley 6y ago
Hosted wallets make it almost as easy as using email.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andrewingram 6y ago
I wonder if the meteoric rise if Bitcoin, and similar recent things like what's going on with /r/wallstreetbets, is causing people's defences to lower with regards to what it a realistic return on investment, so these kind of things don't trigger the alarm bells so much.
GFischer 6y ago
Elon is the perfect person to hack, he's always doing bizarre stuff, so if I'd fall for anyone, it would be for this one. And the type that got rich off BitCoin are way bigger risk-takers than average - I was offered to "get in" on BitCoin at 1000 dollars and I thought it too risky, my former coworker who did and got rich is very much an adrenaline junkie (but didn't fall for this scam fortunately).

theonlyklas 6y ago

More people need to play Old School RuneScape and fall for money doubling scams so they know to avoid them in real life.

nceqs3 6y ago

This is a problem across all social media. The number of Instagram/Twitter scams you come across every day is astounding. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the social media companies want the increased user engagement metrics from the bots.

bb123 6y ago

This is a terrible scam, but I am astonished by the frivolity with which people would move life-changing amounts of money into something with absolutely no due diligence. When I took on a financial advisor I verified their identity with the govt regulator, verified their written bank details over the phone, and then verified those details with my bank before I even considered sending a single penny. Even then I sent a small test amount, and waited for a written receipt before sending anything more. To dump 500 grand into something you heard about 10 minutes ago on Twitter seems beyond ridiculous to me. This is an amazing example of the old adage “a fool and his money are easily parted”.

cosmodisk 6y ago
Some years ago there used to be this very popular scam in my country: you get a call from an alleged police officer,who explains that your daughter/son/cousin/whatever made a huge car accident and is about to go to jail unless it's 'resolved' with some money. So many people got swindled for absurd amounts of money. However one case stuck most in my memory: the police got called by a woman who was about to fall for such scam. Fast forward to the end and the journalist asks to tell what happened. So she gets a call from someone, saying her son is arrested for drink driving and causing an accident. He needs money for this to go away. The woman goes to the neighbor to borough the money and the neighbor seeing her in distress,asks for more details. Finally she tells the woman: you haven't got a son...
londons_explore 6y ago
> with absolutely no due diligence But due diligence was done here - the blue check mark was checked. The user checked other people were seeing success with this. The user probably double and triple checked the bitcoin address he was sending to. He probably looked for the padlock symbol on the site he was getting the details of the scam from. He might have checked his computer for viruses and been using a hardware wallet with a really long password. He just checked all the wrong things.
- bb123 6y ago
  All of those things are a good start but it is five hundred thousand dollars. It’s obviously a huge amount of money for someone like this. Why wouldn’t you check with your bank or a solicitor or the financial services regulator in your country before undertaking such a large transaction? The blue check mark just means they’re a celebrity, immediately dumping your life savings into something because the meme man told you to is a pretty foolish thing to do...

boyadjian 6y ago

I never understand, why people who already have money, want to have more. Personally, I keep my money at the bank, for days when I will have to spend it (Buying things, going on holidays, etc)

lm28469 6y ago
The bank is gambling it for you, some people prefer gambling it themselves
- mcosta 6y ago
  The bank is gambling it for you, in the same sense taking a road trip is a life gamble.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    Hm no, they're literally investing it and you get the 0.x% they're willing to let you touch
- gizmo686 6y ago
  The bank is FDIC insured. If the bank loses your money and FDIC cannot make you whole, you would be in a serious problem even if you had a pile of cash, as that is basically a 'the entire USD economic system has collapsed' scenario.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    Well yes, but if you invest your own money without going through banks at least you have some choice in where it goes (oil companies, weapon companies, sustainable funds, &c.) and you get to cash out all the benefits (or loss) I'll take my 7%+ average over the last 100 years vs the "insured" 0.5% my bank proposes me (which doesn't even pay for what my bank charges me monthly)
    - gizmo686 6y ago

rdevsrex 6y ago

I'll stick to physical gold, thank you very much.

tatref 6y ago
If you send me 1kg of gold, I'll send back double the amount!

dr-detroit 6y ago

saying "twitter bitcoin scam" is triply redundant

lm28469 6y ago

> the website promised participants that they could double their money. I fell for that, once, when I was 8, with virtual money, playing an online game. How can an adult be this gullible...

adnzzzzZ 6y ago
Environments in which children can get scammed safely in have been increasingly becoming rarer because people are too soft.
NewLogic 6y ago
To think how many scams have been prevented because the target played Runescape or WoW

nkrisc 6y ago

> It also does sound quite plausible that someone like Elon Musk, a big supporter of cryptocurrency, would give away Bitcoin. Really? Most m(b)illionaires, however eccentric, typically don't go around doing the equivalent of throwing money from rooftops, especially not by means of blurry Times New Roman text on a GIF directing you to some .info website.

Grustaf 6y ago
And of they did, why require that you first send them money? This is the most absurd scam to ever succeed.

mihaifm 6y ago

> 10 Bitcoin were transferred and then cashed out anonymously a few days later. Genuinely interested how the coins were cashed out anonymously. Pretty much all exchanges require KYC these days, and Bitcoin addresses can be tracked and blacklisted if the right processes are put in place, in theory at least.

hayd 6y ago
That probably just means it was moved to another BTC address.
lawrenceong 6y ago
hi @mihaifm -- it could simply be a wallet address that one can forward the coins to I believe?
DocTomoe 6y ago
You use them to buy stuff on the darknet and resell. Classic money laundering.
throwawayffffas 6y ago
There are shady services that will convert bitcoin to monero with no questions asked.
theonlyklas 6y ago
It could have taken time for the BTC from his wallet to be marked as tainted. Once that happens, the person who buys the 10BTC is bag holding. I wonder what happens if it's an exchange holding tainted BTC, though. Will it be excluded from the supply indefinitely?

viraptor 6y ago

> The 42-year-old says he first invested $40,000 in Bitcoin in 2017, and quickly made his money back as the value of the coins rose on the open market. He cashed out and got his initial money back, but then watched excitedly over the years as the 10 coins grew to be worth nearly 500,000 euros. Fortunately this sounds like he didn't lose anything, just never realised extra gains. I know it's slightly nitpicking, but losing your actual $500k and losing $500k unrealised gains from a gamble is a massive difference. Especially if you already withdrew the original investment.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Right. This guy was happy when the unregulated Wild West made him a fortune for doing no work, but started crying for regulation when he was on the bad side of a trade.
WA 6y ago
No. This is a common way to think about it, but it's wrong imho. Because that money is real and it buys you real stuff. If you have that money one day and it is gone the next, you effectively lost that money. It doesn't matter where it came from. Think about it: You inherit $500k. You lose it through a scam or a bet or gambling. Do you think it doesn't matter? I mean, you didn't earn that money yourself, right? There are no paper losses and no "unrealized gains". It's your money and if it's gone, it's gone. Doesn't matter how you earned it.
- shawnz 6y ago
  I agree with you, he lost real money. But I also agree with the other poster: it's hard to feel bad for him gambling away money that he got by gambling to begin with.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  But it's not real money, it's an asset! I think you have a wrong understanding of what unrealized gains are. It's not about whether you earned it yourself - it's about whether it's liquid cash or just an asset. Only once you sell your asset do you realize your gains.

Grustaf 6y ago

How can someone be smart enough to earn that kind of money, but stupid enough to fall for this hilariously obvious scam?

_jal 6y ago
The first part of this assumes having money is some sort of proxy measure for intelligence. It is not.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  It definitely is. The correlation between money and intelligence is very high.
  - thatguyagain 6y ago
    Yeah, it is super clever to inherit money, or be born in the right place at the right time, or not being abused by alcoholic parents turning you chronically depressed, etc, etc. Please..
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      Just because the correlation isn't 100% doesn't mean it's 0.
- arethuza 6y ago
  There is also an assumption that if you are "intelligent" then you are intelligent at everything - this has not being my experience of knowing some really smart people. In fact, I actually that to do something really stupid requires a high degree of intelligence - largely down to sheer hubris.
satysin 6y ago
That is all I could think when reading the article yesterday. I can understand some people such as older and less tech savvy people getting caught up in scams but an otherwise intelligent early 40s person working in the IT industry?! I just don't understand how he fell for it. I guess the only answer is greed overrode his better judgement.

tirpen 6y ago

Wow, It's sure is a nice feature that Bitcoin doesn't have any way to dispute charges and that it's mostly anonymous. This article is yet another amazing illustration of why that's definitely two features you want from something that's intended to be used as a currency.

celticninja 6y ago
cash is used as currency and would meet the criteria you listed.
shawnz 6y ago
You obviously don't want that in every situation, only some situations. Would you make an argument like "Wow, it's sure a nice feature that [full disk encryption software] doesn't have any way to reset lost passwords" on an article about someone losing their life's work due to misunderstanding the consequences of full disk encryption?

thejackgoode 6y ago

Reminds me of some phrase I read from a scammer: "At some point, it's their own fault". There's something interesting to it. As if we as a society allow (or condemn less) preying on the "weak" and uninformed

alisonkisk 6y ago
The guy only lost money he made in BTC speculation. He's not an innocent victim, just a little predator fish who got bit by a bigger fish.

dan-robertson 6y ago

It seems the bitcoins went up 10x since he bought them. It would be really tragic if he still has to pay capital gains tax on the 450k of gains.

alisonkisk 6y ago
He has as much in losses in his latest "investment". Now if the authorities suspect he is running a tax evasion scam...
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  It’s not super obvious to me. If I bought some shares in some company and they went up 10x, I don’t think I could get out of the tax by gifting them to someone else (though maybe I could get out of it if I gifted them to a charity). Taxes can be a bit weird with investments in general. eg if you invest in a mutual fund that reinvests dividends, you only pay tax when you realise gains, whereas if you invested in an equivalent mutual fund that didn’t reinvest dividends but reinvested them yourself, you would be liable for tax on the dividends before reinvesting them which means less compounding. Obviously this all massively depends on local laws and weird specifics.
cyberpunk 6y ago
In Germany profits from crypto speculation are not taxable if you have held the coins for two years. At least, according to my accountant a year or so ago, may have changed since..

pwinnski 6y ago

I believe that he's "normally not the biggest idiot in the whole world," but that's a belief I'm holding despite the available evidence. 1. Why would anyone give away free bitcoin in large amounts? Seriously, why? That should already have been an end to this. 2. If the screenshot is representative, it is clearly "@JoshyMcB" tweeting, not @elonmusk. It should take much more than an icon and a not-quite-matching display name to suggest it's the same person, and a tweet from @JoshyMcB[0] later the same day makes it clear he was hacked. There are more differences than similarities in that screenshot. 3. He got this part right: "I was greedy that night and it made me blind." 0. https://twitter.com/JoshyMcB/status/1363724497375825927 https://twitter.com/JoshyMcB/status/1363724497375825927

vdddv 6y ago

you can't cheat an honest man

alisonkisk 6y ago
Thia is not true. GoFundMe is daily proof of that.

zenon 6y ago

Everyone does stupid things sometimes. Maybe from tiredness, inattentiveness, excessive emotional influence, drugs, whatever. Maybe there's just a small chance at any point in time that a brain will malfunction slightly and direct a stupid action. Even intelligent people, who know intellectually that things that sound too god to be true usually aren't, and that greed can make you do dumb things, are not exempt from this. By presenting themselves to zillions of people, these scammers ensure that they will catch at least some people who happen to not be thinking correctly at the moment. People who will fall for the scam, and then slap their foreheads 15 minutes later wondering what the hell they were thinking.

iso1631 6y ago

Why would you believe it? Sure, some scames are complicated - credit swaps, sub prime mortagges, etc, I can see why people fall for that. Sometimes you're relying n a greater fool, sometimes you're relying on unlikely events (horse winning etc), because you value the potential reward more than the risk. All of that's rational - hell even buying a lottery ticket is rational for many people. But in all those areas I can see why the other person is involved and what they're getting. My risk/reward ratio is different to theirs. I go into a greater-fool situation and yes, I expect that I'll find a greater fool, the person selling me the $whatever doesn't. I could buy a Tesla and think that they will take over the entire planet's energy grid. I can see why someone is selling me a TSLA share at $800 (they don't think tesla is worth that much), that's reasonable. I could even see a transaction where I give my email address to "Elon" and he sends me money, because he's a gajillionaire and doesn't value it, but does value email addresses, or maybe a transaction where I make or share a DOGE meme and he likes it, so gives me money instead of a "like". But what possible reason would there be for me to send Elon Musk money and him to send it back? Why would he do this? Why not just send me the money for sharing a DOGE meme or something? Or just send it for being the first person to click his link?

system16 6y ago

It's awful that this guy was scammed, but I am really having difficulty wrapping my head around it. Presumably he follows Elon on Twitter, and would see these scam fake Elon replies/accounts have been trolling his Twitter feed for years. I guess seeing the blue verify check and FOMO at doubling his holdings made him throw caution to the wind.

aequitas 6y ago

Since this man is German, he lost euro's, not pounds or dollars. Or more accurately, bitcoin.

tjpnz 6y ago

I'm not on Twitter much but I've seen plenty of livestreams coming up in my YouTube feed. What I find striking about some of them is just how creative the scammers have gotten and the production values involved. During the last Starship launch there were several fake livestreams purporting to be from SpaceX. They had custom graphics and gauges and were all soliciting Bitcoin in order to "fill the tank" ahead of launch. There were literally hundreds of people on some of them and it's unlikely they were all bots. What's particularly brazen about these schemes is that the normal reporting mechanisms don't work. When YouTube looks into it hours later the damage has already been done.

isthisreality 6y ago

This would be a good way to launder Bitcoin to yourself without paying taxes on it. Could that be what this is?