Slashdot Mirror
About $1.2 Billion in Cryptocurrency Stolen Since 2017 (reuters.com)
Criminals have stolen about $1.2 billion in cryptocurrencies since the beginning of 2017, as bitcoin's popularity and the emergence of more than 1,500 digital tokens have put the spotlight on the unregulated sector, according to estimates from the Anti-Phishing Working Group released on Thursday. From a report: The estimates were part of the non-profit group's research on cryptocurrency and include reported and unreported theft. "One problem that we're seeing in addition to the criminal activity like drug trafficking and money laundering using cryptocurrencies is the theft of these tokens by bad guys," Dave Jevans, chief executive officer of cryptocurrency security firm CipherTrace, told Reuters in an interview.
I think we know what really happened. #UsedToBeABitcoinBillionaire ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
that the Justice Dept is criminally investigating people involved in fixing the price of bitcoin?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the way crypto currency works there is no bank involved. you load the "wallet" as a file onto your system that says how much you have and you generate a private key to open the wallet. you pay for the contents of the wallet. then as you spend (anonymously) the wallet is reduced by the block chain to show your spend and balance. idiots don't protect their wallet and private key as cash, so they get ripped off. stupido dumbo.
nothing to see here - move along
Why do you think credit card transaction fees exist?
It's to cover fraud/theft with some margin for profit.
Unfortunately transaction fees don't cover the costs for fraud/theft. Basically credit card issuing banks are permitted to charge usury interest rates from people who carry monthly balances (and demographically are generally poor) to make their profit.
The merchants and issuing banks pay transaction fees to the VISA/MC, but the banks charge the interest (and assume the fraud/theft risk).
Just last year, VISA+MC received only $7.8B+$6.1B in worldwide transaction processing fees, but Citibank (one of the largest V/M card issuers ~15%) made a whopping $4B in credit card interest on a loan balance of $146B in the USA and Canada alone.
Note the transaction fees are not only payed to Visa/MC, payment processors (like square) also take a cut of the fees paid by merchants before it even gets to Visa/MC.
(fwiw, Visa also made $6B on currency exchange operations last year which is a profit center for them nearly equivalent to transaction processing fees).
And if you are wondering where them money for "rewards" cards come from, basically it comes directly from the merchants who pay more to payment processors to clear rewards cards than cards without rewards...