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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."
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.
>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.
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!)
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)
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.
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?
... 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
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)
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
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.