Every bitcoin scam is inventive. The criminals who are behind bitcoin scams and other types of crypto scams never cease to come up with new ways to steal your coins. Is bitcoin a high-risk investment? Consider this: One report claimed that during the COVID-19 pandemic bitcoin scams involving extortion shot up by 1,300% in one month alone.
Quite literally, operators of bitcoin scams think of everything. Want to commit suicide? There are Facebook pages advertising poison pills you can order by paying in bitcoin. Apart from the brashness and ghoulishness of it, the pills are fake. The bitcoin scam wasn’t. It was real. And the bitcoin that was paid (and lost) was also real.
Since 2015, moreover, cryptocurrency has become the payment of choice for kidnappers. Since then, bitcoin ransom has been demanded by kidnappers in at least 12 countries as the price for freeing their hostages.
What are the most common cryptocurrency trading risks? How do bitcoin scams and other crypto scams work? What are the risks involved in investing in bitcoin? Most victims report falling for one of the six types of crypto scams below.
Fake cryptocurrency exchanges are easy to find. This type of crypto scam is all over cyberspace. They are especially dangerous for first-time investors, who will find it hard, if not impossible, to distinguish fake exchanges from legitimate ones. In December 2017, Korean authorities closed down one of them, BitKRX.
What was particularly pernicious was that BitKRX usurped the last three letters of its name from KRX, the Korean Stock Exchange. It purposely misrepresented itself in order to provide itself with a veneer of legitimacy. A fake exchange is a very useful front for a bitcoin scam.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, rapper Wiz Khalifa, and YouTuber MrBeast. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Mike Bloomberg. Apple, Wendy’s, Uber, and Cash App. What do they all have in common?
The short answer is influence. The full answer is that they are all on Twitter, they have gazillions of followers and, on July 15, 2020, hackers hijacked their Twitter accounts. Same with bitcoin and Ripple, the online cryptocurrency news site Coindesk and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Cybercriminals targeted their Twitter accounts in what may very well be the most widespread and successful simultaneous crypto scam hacking attempt ever.
After logging in, the hackers tweeted out faux messages claiming that the celebrity would double any amount of bitcoin they were sent. Some of the tweets (including the one attributed to Barack Obama) also noted that the sudden generosity was due to COVID-19.
The half-hour deadline, of course, was necessary because the hackers who ran this bitcoin scam knew that from the moment they clicked on “Send” the clock would be ticking. They would be lucky to have even that much time before the true extent of the bitcoin scam would be discovered and their phony posts were removed.
Victims had to be found and suckered into the crypto scam before it was too late. And it turned out to be a very successful bitcoin scam. The scammers walked away with 12.5 bitcoins, then the equivalent of $121,000. Not bad for one night’s work. They lost out on another $278,000 because an alert cryptocurrency exchange intervened to prevent it.
Despite the publicity that the episode generated, Twitter accounts continue to be hacked for purpose of committing bitcoin scams. In January 2021, crypto criminals walked away with what was then the equivalent of approximately $587,000 in bitcoin by hacking into a number of verified Twitter accounts. They changed the account holder’s name to Elon Musk and repeated the same discredited offer used less than half-a-year earlier.
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