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Alleged Bitcoin Scam Leaves Millions Missing
First time accepted submitter OutOnARock writes Yahoo Finance is reporting on the latest Bitcoin scam, this time from Hong Kong. "Investors in a Hong Kong-based Bitcoin trading company fear they have fallen victim to a scam after it closed down, a lawmaker said Monday, adding losses could total HK$3 billion ($387 million). Leung Yiu-chung said his office recently received reports from dozens of investors in Hong Kong who paid a total of HK$40 million ($5.16 million) into the scheme run online by MyCoin, but the total loss may be vastly more. 'The number of cases is increasing. These two days I received calls about more than 30 cases. We estimate more than 3,000 people and HK$3 billion are involved,' he told AFP."
Bitcoin by definition is a scam. You can't have a scam of a scam.
Invest in my scheme! Send me money and I'll send you slips of paper that say you own gold!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
...as much as I try to build sympathy for these people, I just can't.
I mean, just reading about this not knowing what happened would make me think "Hmm this seems shady". I also don't think I'm an overly paranoid person by nature!
if I'm correctly reading the figured I'm finding online, there's about 14 million bitcoins in existence, worth just under 4 billion dollars.
10% of all bitcoins were just stolen, and don't we see a story like this just about once a year?
Once in a rare while I regret not getting into Bitcoins during their huge growth phase. Then I'm reminded of how often this happens and I'm glad I kept my money.
Bitcoin by definition is a scam. You can't have a scam of a scam.
You've obviously never seen the movie "The Sting." :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Bitcoin is like regular bank accounts where most of the moeny is in virtual ones and zeros. Except regular banks have regulation and insurance with decades of history showing they work in most cases. Not to mention if a major bank tried to run away with everyone's money the lynch mob would be epic.
How can they be missing? It's just digital data. Don't these bit-tards make backups?
>Bitcoin is like regular bank accounts where most of the moeny is in virtual ones and zeros.
No. Nope. Not. Bitcoin is like a banking system without a bank, where your friends and relatives keep slips of paper saying (anonymously) who is owed what on a dollar bill by dollar bill basis. When you want to use your money, it becomes hard to get anyone to actually give you cash for it. People are trying to find ways to change a few of those slips of paper without you knowing.
The whole thing is a nightmare. These scams will continue until people get burned enough to walk away.
Were these guys "investing in bitcoin" instead of "buying bitcoins" to avoid sales tax at both ends, when they buy and when they sell? If investment is cheaper, then where are shops where I can "invest" in a bike instead of buying it?
I think bitcoins are a great experiment in 'anarchy'. It goes to show that even a crappy government beats none at all.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Why use cryptocurrency to buy gold? Be generous and lend some instead to those nice Nigerian princes who come begging in your inbox.
I think Bitcoin is one of the world's greatest producers of shadenfreude, but lately it's getting depressing. The cultist mentalities of a lot of them, and their incessant preaching towards their children and loved-ones has gone well beyond obsessed into cult status. The more I read bitcoin stories, the more depressed I get - not for the idiot that blew away all their money, but for the kids getting bitcoin IOUs for gifts, and the wives who are getting their shared vacation savings cashed in to buy more btc.
I still have thousands of my upward-bound A-Plus-rated growing corporations BridgeCoins(tm) ready for money investment by smart people who want to board this exciting trend. They are probably guaranteed to return 50% within just the first year, as other smart investors Get With The Future.
No risk - definitely probably guaranteed!!!
The problem isn't with the technology in general so much as its infancy. Bitcoins simply isn't a mature cryptocurrancy. We simply don't have a mature cryptocurrancy where all the bugs have been worked out. Mass adoption of Bitcoin won't make it a mature thing either . The genuine solutions and extensions to resolve stability and other issues are still being worked out. Anonymity for example doesn't exist with Bitcoins today, but that doesn't mean its not coming. Check out ZeroCoin. It's not a new coin, but an extension that is being designed, proven, and implemented in code. It's just a matter of time before Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency picks it up. While I'm not aware of who or if anybody is working on the stability issue it wouldn't surprise me if there was someone or some entity doing so. The ZeroCoin extension is being worked on by mathematicians for example of which at least some work for universities.
Bitcoins is very much like Tor. There is a lot of work which has been done, but there is a lot of work left to do. Saying its "not safe" plays into the whim of those who want us to be even less secure/less well off. It may not be a perfect solution and may even come with some risks today, but your not going to get a perfect solution if you don't invest in such solutions.
really now? Why is this junk still a thing.
From the aritcle:
"One investor said she spent HK$1.3 million in swap options for the virtual currency last September. She said salespersons had told her she would recoup her investment in four months and make around 200-300 percent profit in one year."
How does someone this stupid get hold of that much money?
Bitcoin: backed by math, er, I mean scammers!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
... or possibly flamebait.
Are the Bitcoin skeptics like me allowed to be smug yet?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Or Inception.
With a bank, they could shut down, and the government would handle their losses, so I'd say a bank is a lot freer to do stuff.
However, BitCoin is a buzzword, similar to how "MP3" was in the early 2000s, where one could have something related, use that term and sell it, such as "MP3 headphones", "MP3 batteries", even an ordinary cassette tape (as opposed to the MP3 player shaped as a cassette which worked in car stereos) marked as "good enough to copy MP3 files to it."
Same with BitCoin. Do a pyramid scheme, stick the term "BitCoin" on it, sit back, rake in the dough. Even though it has -nothing- to do with the cryptocurrency at all, it is just the same type of scam as previously.
Buy bitcoin, otherwise his stash will not grow in value.
If you transfer bitcoins to some other organization, then THEY have the bitcoins, not you. If you just want to give money to someone else, there are easier ways to do that than by using bitcoin :-).
it seems to me that if you want to use bitcoins, then you should keep the bitcoins in YOUR OWN wallet and under your OWN control until you want to spend them. Don't hand your bitcoins to a so-called "bank", a "trading company", or anyone else unless you purpose is to GIVE THEM the money. I don't know how successful bitcoins will be in the long term, but if they succeed it will be because people seriously protect the bitcoins.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
"if a major bank tried to run away with everyone's money the lynch mob would be epic"
Um, ever see the fees the big banks charge??
Um, ever hear of the bank bailouts of a few years ago??
No lynch mobs yet.
I think that everybody who wants to play with bitcoins should first play a year or two of Eve Online. This can teach a lot about dangers of unregulated virtual currency at fraction of cost. From that point on you will approach all financial transactions with question "HOW they want to scam me?" rather than "Is there a chance it might be not as good as they promise? Naaah, somebody would say something if it is a scam."
I was thinking the same thing. "Bitcoin scam" is redundant. It's kind of like saying "worthless Kardashian."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's more like a 419 scam. They are called 419 because that's the law that makes them *legal*.
The Wikipedia article seems to disagree with you:
'The number "419" refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with fraud.'
Nothing about them being legal, in most countries fraud is fraud. Do you have a citation that such scams are legal in Nigeria (or elsewhere)?
Enigma
It's more like a 419 scam. They are called 419 because that's the law that makes them *legal*.
Hopefully that was a typo. It is called 419 because that is the section of Nigerian law that makes it illegal.
Uhhh, no it's their broad statute that covers fraud:
"419. Any person who by any false pretence, and with intent to defraud, obtains from any other person anything capable of being stolen, or induces any other person to deliver to any person anything capable of being stolen, is guilty of a felony, and is liable to imprisonment for three years.
If the thing is of the value of one thousand naira or upwards, he is liable to imprisonment for seven years.
It is immaterial that the thing is obtained or its delivery is induced through the medium of a contract induced by the false pretence.
The offender cannot be arrested without warrant unless found committing the offence
"
The parent to yours was spot on. The fraud associated with bitcoin et al; is no different than any other really. It's just the globalization of it and the semi-anonymity that makes it ripe for abuse. That's why the whole thing is so silly when people point out the lack or regulations and centralization as a benefit. It's the main neon sign drawback.
They are called 419 because that's the law that makes them *legal*.
The number "419" refers to the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code dealing with fraud. So, no, that does not make them legal.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
What's ironic about all these bitcoin scams is that they rely on a technology that removes the need for a middleman (e.g. a bank) to make transactions, the scams always involve people leaving their money in a 3rd party bitcoin bank rather than in a personal bitcoin wallet.
It's like people have bought into the idea of putting their money in safes, but when the "neighborhood safe inspector" comes door to door asking for the combinations to their safes, they don't realize that the whole point of a safe is that you ware not supposed to tell other people the combination.
Didn't the banks already run away with a bunch of money, and then just convinced legislators to bail them out? And I think only 1 person went to jail along with a few fines that were dwarfed by the profits they made? And to top it all off, nothing about our system has really even changed. Banks are still too big to fail. They have no incentive not to pull the same bullshit again.
What do you think regular banking is? Do you think there are no electronic "slips of paper" with normal banks?
I remember when they first came out, the response was that the person in the US suffering a loss to someone in Nigeria committed fraud first (usually by signing an affadavit claiming money they know they have no claim to). And that the law didn't cover two fraudsters defrauding each other. I can't find anything on that now, though based on the wording of the law and the means of the scam, the person being defrauded comitted a violation of 419, so turning the other person in is a confession to fraud.
Learn to love Alaska
You left out the ponzi scheme element of bit coin. Where people who start the scheme get to print out their own money, like printing hundred thousand dollars bills at the start and as more people join the scheme the size of the bills being printed shrink enormously. So that suckers at the other end of the scheme are printing fractions of a cent but running around promoting the scheme to everyone in order to give value to the fractions of a cent that they are printing. Meanwhile the schemers at the other end who were printing hundred thousand dollar bills are laughing. Admittedly this is very much like the US Federal Reserve where corporate types print fake money, that the US government pretends is real and then owes it to those corporations who printed it.
Hugely, dangerously, in the case of the US government is this leads to idiotic statements from the US like "WE MUST LEAD, we have the military and the economy and we MUST USE IT", the US must lead of course to protect the illusion of the US bitcoin 'er' dollar. Basically threatening other countries with it's military and economic sanctions to defend it's bitcoin 'er' dollar scam, so that it can continue to pretend the US GDP is not hugely parasitic off other countries economies. No fucking wonder bitcoin was so popular in the US it is pretty much exactly like the corporate Federal Reserve US dollar 'er' bitcoin. So in the same fashion bitcoin ultimately leads to the similar kinds of crime and abuse associated with the US Corporate Federal Reserve dollar.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Or any Guy Ritchie movie.
It's more like a 419 scam. They are called 419 because that's the law that makes them *legal*.
lol. you're just... lol.
Something's illegal in Nigeria?
Yes. This is what I don't understand. Bitcoin is not a scam in and of itself. It was a means to get around having to keep your funds in a bank or even keep them in a particular countries currency. And yet after having removed the middleman, now a lot of these people seem bound and determined to insert one back in and then they lose their bitcoins.
I keep mine on my computer and nobody has stolen them yet. The only ones I have had stolen were ones I had sitting on a site for about 6 months that I was intending to trade. Unfortunately, they decided to implement some smartphone technology that I did not opt into and apparently allowed someone to transfer my bitcoins to their cellphone. At the time, that only represented $75 worth, but not it is over $3,000 worth.
And just get scammed in some other way
http://www.therichest.com/rich...
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
That's HK$1.3 million, not $1.3 million USD. One HK dollar is worth about 12 cents.
Yeah because no one's account went to 0 overnight. Not saying banks haven't done criminal stuff but it hasn't resulted in people losing everything. As a result, most people didn't really care.
Instead of the ridiculous $387m in losses, it looks like closer to $8.1m in losses, of which Bitcoin is only a marketing tool to make the Ponzi scheme more marketable. http://www.coindesk.com/mycoin... As always, reporters are more than happy to run any title that gets hits, regardless of how likely the situation meshes with the facts.