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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$3 billion are involved,' he told AFP."
How can they be missing? It's just digital data. Don't these bit-tards make backups?
Bit-tards don't make backups, or else they wouldn't be bit-tards. And then you have people who leave all their private keys online and people steal those and transfer the money away. And then you have people who run a Ponzi scheme and never had the funds in the first place, but shuttled the investments away and are living like kings in Patagonia.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's 90% paper losses - certainly nothing like 10% of BTC just stolen. You deposit 100K HKD, they tell you that you now have 1M HKD in your account and then it turns out you invested in a ponzi scheme - did you lose 1M HKD? No, just the original 100K since the gains never happened. The press will always choose to not write a story accurately as long as it gets better headlines.
No lack of government here.
Enron:
"The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, eventually led to the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas, and the de facto dissolution of Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in American history at that time, Enron was cited as the biggest audit failure" -- Wkipedia
MCI:
"fraud was accomplished primarily in two ways:
Booking "line costs" (interconnection expenses with other telecommunication companies) as capital expenditures on the balance sheet instead of expenses. Inflating revenues with bogus accounting entries from "corporate unallocated revenue accounts".
In 2002, a small team of internal auditors at WorldCom worked together, often at night and secretly, to investigate and reveal $3.8 billion worth of fraud." -- Wkipedia
Taylor,Bean & Whitaker:
"Taylor, Bean & Whitaker was a top-10 wholesale mortgage lending firm, the fifth-largest issuer of GNMA securities.
On August 5, 2009, following an FBI raid and suspension by the Federal Housing Administration from issuing FHA mortgage loans and Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities, it ceased business operations. In April 2011, its majority owner was convicted of 14 counts of securities, bank, and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud, and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas have sued Bank of America, the trustee and collateral agent of Taylor Bean's Ocala subsidiary, over $1.75 billion in losses stemming from the subsidiary's fraud." -- Wkipedia
Bernie Madoff:
Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff (/medf/;[1] born April 29, 1938) is an American convicted of fraud and a former stockbroker, investment advisor, and financier. He is the former non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market,[2] and the admitted operator of a Ponzi scheme that is considered to be the largest financial fraud in U.S. history. -- Wkipedia
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.
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