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Crypto leads to surge in online scams
- sandworm101 5y agoLol. How about "Crypto leads the surge in online scams". Saying that crypto causes the scams, rather than being the scam, is splitting hairs. This is also a report focusing on social-media scams. The net is Inception-level nesting of scams atop each other. Social Media + Crypto ... what else could it be but a scam?
- woah 5y agoSociety is a scam
- danuker 5y agoA legitimate use of crypto "currencies" is defense against hyperinflation. Ask anyone in Venezuela.
- knorker 5y agoSo Venezuela is all fine now, thanks to blockchain?
- betwixthewires 5y agoNo, but people there have options thanks to it.
- curtisf 5y agoYou can't spend cryptocurrency at the grocery store. So your "money" can only at best be _backed_ by cryptocurrency. But if all you want is your money to be backed by something that intrinsically retains value, there are many standard choices. Like _foreign currency_. Or something more involved, like stocks and bonds and commodities contracts. Or you could just plain use precious metals. Cryptocurrency doesn't uniquely solve the problem of inflation, but it does introduce a lot of others. (Including the risk that a country's entire Treasury gets drained because an office worker plugs a USB stick they found in the parking lot into the wrong computer)
- betwixthewires 5y agoIn Venezuela and Argentina you can absolutely buy goods at the store with cryptocurrency, if you whisper low enough to the owner. In El Salvador the government mandates it be an option. Money is money where it's accepted, everywhere else it's not. That's not really a point at all.
- danuker 5y ago> _backed_ by cryptocurrency. Governments have fallen for the siren call of inflation ever since Nixon. They won't give it up and adopt any standard, gold or otherwise, because it would imply they have to be accountable for finances. This is why private individuals have to use more creative ways of storing their value.
- AlexandrB 5y agoThis is true about any asset that's not undergoing hyperinflation itself including stocks, bonds, commodities, real-estate, and foreign currencies. What's special about cryptocurrencies in this regard?
- floren 5y agoThe answer is usually "well, I happen to own cryptocurrencies, but not those other things you're suggesting"
- masegod 5y agothe supply of bitcoin is mathematically guaranteed, also much harder to steal
- bradjohnson 5y ago> much harder to steal This is objectively false given that the article is about how easy it is to scam people out of their bitcoins.
- danuker 5y agoThe ease of sending it. Stocks and bonds are not bearer assets, so you have to sell them before spending them. Commodities are inconvenient to carry (though in some cases maybe more convenient than wheelbarrowing cash). Real-estate is much less liquid, you can't sell or spend 0.01% of an apartment.
- bradjohnson 5y agoWhat is the advantage of this over investing in GME? Both backed by strength of a meme, both highly speculative, except at least converting GME to actual money doesn't require you to burn energy equivalent to the average US household's monthly consumption.
- vmception 5y agoI had to reread the title a couple times because the article is about crypto leading a surge in a variety of other surges Sounds more like younger people were willing to report
- rinze 5y ago"Bogus cryptocurrency investments" What's the purpose of starting the article with so much redundancy?
- solveit 5y agoThis is snark that does not contribute to the discussion and I would like to see less of this on HN. There is a difference between an investment doomed to failure and a scam that was never meant to even try to succeed. Regardless of your views on crypto, there exist projects that are not fraud and you know this.
- roomboasted 5y ago
- MrYellowP 5y agoThe internet lead to a surge of online scams, lasting to this very day. The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling for them. I simply can not have any sympathy for idiots so greedy they fall for the "I'll double your cryptos" scam. None. The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically thinking people. If this wasn't so deliberately undesired by politics, the world as a whole would be a better place.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoCompletely agree. I used to have sympathy for these victims. Not anymore. Not after actually interacting with them and getting literally banned from a group for trying to warn about risks. One guy literally sold his car in order to buy scammy shitcoins.
- johnebgd 5y agoAs people age they tend to become more susceptible to con artists. Society should protect our elders not leave them vulnerable. Victim blaming is a bad idea. Regulators exist for a reason.
- betwixthewires 5y agoDo the same rules apply to slot machines and carnival games? Should we make those illegal also because people fall for them? Is it victim blaming to say "you know what you're getting into when you walk into a casino"?
- arcticbull 5y agoThey’re already heavily regulated, the machines inspected, odds posted and support available. You can’t do it online due to the increased risk. And casinos are few, far between, outside of most population centers, and broadly not easy to get to for most people. If publicly traded companies started putting their treasuries into Caesar’s chips, you bet we’d see more regulation.
- 5y ago
- alphabetting 5y agoWith so much negative press around crypto the industry should consider rebranding. Give it a new catchy name, like web3 or something like that.
- akomtu 5y agoCall it "meta currency".
- Victerius 5y agoThe Zuck has called. He wants his Libra back.
- ShamelessC 5y agoYou joke, but after the backlash to web3 on here I saw multiple people trying to rebrand it as web4.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wmil 5y agoI remember back in 2008 they were trying to push Web 4.0 as the successor to Web 2.0, because it was the web squared.
- magicjosh 5y ago
- tyleo 5y agoJust what I was waiting for. I missed the 12:59 one :p
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- richardburton 5y agoRemember porn on the web or spam on email? HN's hate for crypto is hilarious.
- xtracto 5y agoHave you heard of this internet thing? it's full of SCAMS and people trying to get advantage of you (with penny stocks, nigerian prince, get-rich-quick websites, and all sort of crap).
- enlyth 5y agoI don't think HN hates crypto itself, at least speaking for myself, I hate the community that formed around it. It is impossible to even have honest conversations about the it because they are drowned out by all the dishonesty and noise about 1000x gains and it being the future of finance which will somehow replace the whole financial system.
- bookaway 5y ago>Remember porn on the web or spam on email? >HN's hate for crypto is hilarious. Really? I don't recall members of "our own tribe" sitting down and cranking out 2 hours of VHS video takedowns of "the web" or "email".[0] [0] The Problem with NFTs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
- betwixthewires 5y agoNo, you had members of the dying tribe do that. Time will tell if this is the same thing or not.
- bookaway 5y agoNo, the dying tribe never went to these extensive lengths and exhibited this level of disgust toward the web or email during its initial rise.
- 5y ago
- dumbfoundded 5y agoIf you actually read the article, most of the scams of all types start on social media. Why is it so easy for a scammer to talk to my nephew on the same places he talks to his friends? If you look at actually consumer fraud (1) according to the FTC, crypto isn't even mentioned. The abundance of crypto hate is confusing to me as one hand HN believes it's a pointless & worthless technology but also somehow this unstoppable force giving criminals limitless power to burn all the trees and rob the youth. (1) https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2021/02/top-frauds-2020 https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2021/02/top-frauds-2020
- user-the-name 5y agoWhy do you think that is some kind of contradiction? It is technology that is largely useless for legitimate projects, as other solutions are always better and less inefficient. And it is inefficient, because it does use 0.5% of the electricity of the entire planet, which is not something people imagine, it is very real. The only benefits it has are mainly useful for criminal purposes, thus it does help criminals. All of this is consistent, factual, and a huge problem.
- dumbfoundded 5y agoOkay, that's a change in the narrative. It's not useless. It's only useless if you're not a criminal. But that's sort of backwards. Technology is just a tool. It doesn't decide how it's going to be used. Humans decide the ways in which tools are used, adding morality & legality. What about this tool makes it criminal by nature? It's censorship-resistant, private (if you want it to be), and very inefficient energy-wise. It's the logical extension of encryption. Encryption is also useful for criminal purposes and internet crime wouldn't really exist without it. Privacy != criminal. Also, do you know how much energy it would save if nothing was encrypted? Every government in the history of the world has eventually collapsed causing devastation for its people. Money printers go wild. Corruption everywhere. People cannot afford basic necessities. If we can figure out a money that cannot be messed with, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
- betwixthewires 5y ago"Mechanism to scam leads to surge in scams in place where mechanism exists" yeah they scam you at the carnival too but you still go to the carnival. What matters is if you choose to ride the rides or play the games.
- Tenoke 5y agoWe are getting so many 'crypto=bad' basic articles (this one seems particularly devoid of relevant content) that I'm surprised the topic isn't auto-downweighed by now.
- explaingarlic 5y agoI don't understand this at all. Shouldn't "cryptocurrency" - I.E. currency based on an understanding of computational complexity and a view into abstract mathematics - appeal to those that have a vague idea of what their money is most-physically represented by? If so, then why are these logically refutable scams ("Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back!!!": Just think that the person would, if they can generate 4btc of value out their ass like that, simply likely keep it, whether they valued the fiat value of it or not) so common? I understand the idea that the emotional gain from giving something to someone who has never had anything of that value may be overwhelmingly tempting or fulfilling on the "giver's" part but similarly, aren't there people more deserving of this than you, the "scam" victim? At that point, I don't even know if I would call it a scam. If someone posed as a verified conveyancer and built a fake profile, payed legitimate businesses and entities off for positive testimonials etc. And encouraged me to hire them to re-mortgage my property for me then I would call that a scam - but someone asking for money with the vague promise that "they need it more than you" not so, similarly not with a "I will give you double the money you give me" scheme. It just feels more like something so stupid that you are entirely at fault if you fall for it.
- __s 5y agoWe're well pass bitcoin being a mathematical curiosity. There's plenty invested because line on graph goes up & smart sounding person sounded smart talking about it
- explaingarlic 5y agoIndeed. I'm way too young but I would have loved to be one of the people who, back in the day, thought "there's no way that $1mil of fiat value would exist in the blockchain because SHA256 must be fuckable in some way, if that kind of money was in it".
- Victerius 5y agoSadly, too many smart people are too greedy for their own good. Stop chasing the easy money. In fact, stop thinking about money all the time. Stash a little money from your paychecks into a 401k and a Roth IRA and invest in passive, broad market ETFs. Hold no matter how the market is feeling this week. Don't trade on margin, don't stock pick, don't daytrade, and stay away from options. The buy and forget way to wealth is a much surer path than the risky one.
- givemeethekeys 5y agoFor anyone interested in seeing what one of these scams looks like: - http://ark-musk.com http://ark-musk.com They ran a YouTube Live stream on loop with an Auntie Cathy and Elon interview about crypto and made it look very believable. YouTube finally took down the video after about a day. Hard work.
- judge2020 5y agoFunny that the TX Hashes are truncated and (of course) not real. But i've seen those YT live streams since forever, and sorting by upload date shows just how much uses his likeness for unrelated scams / grifting. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=CAI%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=...
- 3np 5y agoInteresting that they seem to have one global address for each coin - so we can go look at their transactions[0][1]. Note that the ticker on the button is obviously fake (the truncated addresses line up with the addresses here but not the txs). 45 ETH transactions and 19 BTC transactions over 3 days. Here[0] we can trace the one time they moved BTC so far: A CoinJoin. I'm not sure how Samourai's joins work these days but it doesn't look like JoinMarket so I'm guessing that or Wasabi. The majority of incoming are exchange withdrawals. [0] https://etherscan.io/address/0x53F6656DE60C7c92317dCBed4E034f822Fe1233B https://etherscan.io/address/0x53F6656DE60C7c92317dCBed4E034... [1] https://mempool.space/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxapn6507ux4u39 https://mempool.space/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxa... [2] https://mempool.space/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxapn6507ux4u39 https://mempool.space/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxa...
- nightski 5y agoIt amuses me how much of an anti-crypto sentiment HN has. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a more nefarious agenda behind it. It's kind of a joke at this point.
- ngokevin 5y agoThe anti-anti-crypto sentiment is more outspoken here. No need to wonder their agenda (hint: it involves personal gains). Anyways, negative press floats up and stirs the pot. So here we go
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoUh oh, we're all busted. Send in the black helicopters!
- timeon 5y agoWhere is the joke? You have technology designed to be inefficient (proof of waste) and you are amused that there is sentiment against it on Hacker News.
- daenz 5y agoIs this the setup for regulation?
- outside1234 5y agoI mean the first 15 scams should have been that
- johanneskanybal 5y agoWhile they fight over which opinion to cancel half the youtube comments on any investment video is scams, half the promoted tweets on twitter are scams, half the facebook ads are some type of scam. Imagine a traditional news paper publishing a single one of those and what consequences they would face.
- jueteng_lord 5y agoI agree with most of the comments here on falsely accusing the actual technology for the surge. Gift card scams are about triple of 2018 in 2021. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/data-spotlight/2021/12/scammers-prefer-gift-cards-not-just-any-card-will-do https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/data-spotlight/2021/12... Should we start blaming gift cards too?
- ryanSrich 5y ago“Internet leads to surge in online scams”. What an incredibly stupid headline.
- csours 5y agoMy rule of thumb: By the time I've heard of a crypto, someone is definitely running a scam.
- outside1234 5y agoNO YOU DON'T SAY!!!!
- encryptluks2 5y agoI still get around 5 robocalls of people trying to scam me a day. Scammers are not just part of cryptocurrency. Businesses scam legally all the time.
- masegod 5y agoI guarantee you half the people who attack crypto for having scams argue the solution is banning it, using the same arguments to ban the internet.
- Animats 5y agoWhat was once the biggest NFT, Axie Infinity, has tanked. Today, for the first time, their Smooth Love Potion token fell below one cent, to US$0.009954. The peak was around $0.36 last summer. This is the one all those people in the Philippines were playing a grinding game to earn, and paying about US$1000 up front to get into the game. Axie Infinity combined the worst features of a gig economy, multi-level marketing, and a Ponzi scheme. The company responded by launching another token.
- bookaway 5y agoI have trouble finding good pro arguments taking on the strongest anti- arguments, it's pretty frustrating. To rebut moxie's OpenSea monopoly criticism, one guy goes and pulls up stats from a week-old competitor that fueled their first week's performance by airdropping tokens on a bunch of nft high-rollers. Apparently they consider this ample evidence of a healthy competitive ecosystem given the amount of words they labored on the point. [0] [0] https://www.notboring.co/p/the-web3-debate https://www.notboring.co/p/the-web3-debate
- Animats 5y agoCentralization may be a problem, but it's not the biggest problem with NFT land. The big problem is that NFTs aren't being used to do anything. They're mostly closed zero-sum systems for transferring money from suckers to minters. The metaverse NFT thing has not resulted in much in the way of good 3D worlds. Decentraland and Sominium Space actually got worlds going, but they're not very impressive virtual worlds and few people go there. Many of the later entrants don't even try to implement a product. They just hand-wave that as something scheduled far down the roadmap. They go on and on in their "white papers" about the details of the token system, while saying nothing about how they plan to implement the supposed product. Then there are the people who just sell plots on a 2D map and don't even pretend to have ambitions of making it into a usable virtual world. There are a few NFT promoters who aspire to build a 3D world, or at least talk about it, but they are not seen to be working at the scale required to bring it off. Now, what props up this house of cards is the success of Bitcoin, Etherium, and Tether. We now have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in memes. So people think that investing in new memes is a real business. The history of financial scams suggests that it is not. It's worth noting that none of this stuff has faced a recession yet. In a recession, there's net outflow from investments. What could possibly go wrong?
- Animats 5y agoThe real question is, will the big cryptocurrencies hold? Bitcoin is down almost half from its peak, but it's done that before. What's different this time is that more countries, especially China, have banned cryptocurrency operations. Hard to say. At some point, Tether is going to crack. The backing isn't there, and everybody knows it now. It can't survive a net outflow. It's still possible to exit Tether for another stablecoin. USDT and USDC are still trading at 1:1. You can redeem USDC for US dollars. So if you own USDT, get out while you can. When stablecoins crash, they crash all the way to zero. The SEC continues to bring enforcement actions. 97 so far in the cryptocurrency area.[1] Most recently, "Gold Hawgs". "Instead of using all of the investor funds to develop Gold Hawgs' business, Garcia, the chief financial officer and a 50% owner of the company, allegedly stole approximately $123,000 of the money raised from investors by transferring the funds to another company that he controlled; he then allegedly used the money to pay for various personal and business expenses unrelated to Gold Hawgs." Before that, "Crowd Machine": "In this offering, which occurred between January and April 2018, Sproule told investors that the ICO proceeds would be used to develop a new technology that would enable Metavine, Inc.’s existing application-development software to run on a decentralized network of users’ own computers. Instead, Crowd Machine and Sproule began diverting more than $5.8 million in ICO proceeds to gold mining entities in South Africa – a use that was never disclosed to investors." Before that, "Denaro": "Auzins misappropriated all of the ICO’s proceeds." Before that, "MyMicroProfits": "Defendant Ryan Ginster allegedly engaged in a fraudulent scheme raising millions in cryptocurrency using online investment programs and then converted the cryptocurrency for his own benefit," Totally ordinary con game rip-offs. Only the hype is new. It looks like 2022 will be the big shakeout year for NFTs and the low end of cryptocurrencies. [1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...