bitcoin_scam

Bitcoin Scam Alert! List of Current Bitcoin Scams and Scammers

Last updated on January 2nd, 2018 at 12:00 am

After falling for the latest bitcoin scam out there I am compelled to write about the number of bitcoin scams going on out there and the scammers behind them. My Story began in a Thursday after noon (Wednesday August 13, 2014) when I was contacted by a person pretending to be a representative of cryptocoinsnews. com selling sponsored posts on the site with bitcoins. The individual asked for .40 worth of bitcoins for the sponsored post but I was able to convince him to accept .02 bitcoins. See a copy of the first bitcoin scam email I received below.

CLICK TO READ

Here’s first problem I failed to spot. Take a look at the email address the bitcoin scam was sent from. It reads “[email protected] David Parker is the a real co-owner of the website CryptoCoinsNews.com and is listed on the site as so. David Parker is legit. However, what is not legit is this David Parker from this email address. Someone duplicated CryptoCoinsNews.com to CryptoCoinzNews.com. Can you spot the difference? The bitcoin scam website/email is CryptoCoinzNews.com with a ‘z’ and the legit bitcoin news site is CryptoCoinsNews.com with an ‘s’. But when the bitcoin scam email is sent, the correct website is listed in the body of the email with the fraudulent email address!

A few hours later after negotiating a lower rate for the sponsored post, I sent .20 bitcoins to the scam bitcoin address 1NzpPpSKJyFbpUruMkxF8FVm6huoUw hrLc. Little did I know this bitcoin address was the address that would disappear with my bitcoins to the ‘never recover’ land.

ClICK TO READ

Forward to 9 days later. After countless emails to the fake David Parker asking for the status of the sponsored post that was supposed to be posted within 24 hours, I went to the bitcoin news site CryptoCoinsNews.com and contacted everyone listed on their contact page with a disappointing message. It was then that I was sent a post written weeks ago about the bitcoin scam artist falsely representing the real David Parker. I read the post and learned that I was not the only one to fall victim to that particular bitcoin scam.

The same type of scam seems to be running around Coindesk as well. Someone pretending to be Shakil Khan (Coindesk’s owner) is sending emails regarding fake advertising spots.

As a results, I decided to tell my story and create a list of bitcoin scams and scammers to help the bitcoin community identify and neutralize them! Please fell free to add to this list (on the comment page and we will move them to the list) any known bitcoin scam artist or bitcoin scams!

List of Bitcoin Scam Artists / Scammers / Websites / E-mail Address / Bitcoin Address

The scam called Bitcoin

A twenty-five bitcoin is arranged for a photograph in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, April 25, 2013. The digital currency, which carries the unofficial ticker symbol of BTC, was unveiled in 2009 by an unidentified programmer, or group of programmers, under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Supply is capped at 21 million Bitcoins and managed by a software algorithm embedded into the digital currency's design, rather than a monetary authority such as a central bank. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes it's hard to tell whether bitcoin is more like Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme.

Whatever it is, though, it isn't a currency. It's a tech stock. Each bitcoin is really a share in a system that seems to make it cheaper to transfer things online -- money, stocks, bonds, even the deed to your house -- by cutting out the middleman. Well, kind of. Bitcoin doesn't remove the middleman so much as replace him with middlemen who don't make you pay much, but make society as a whole do so instead. Is this progress?

It's supposed to be. Ever since the early days of the Internet, people have been trying to figure out how to transfer money online without having to go through the financial system. The problem, though, is if I send you money, how do you know I haven't already spent it or sent it to somebody else? You don't. So the only solution has been to have a trusted third-party, like a bank, sit in between us. I send the money to the bank, it verifies that I actually have this money to send, and then it sends it on to you, all for a 2 percent fee, of course.

Bitcoin's breakthrough is to have a decentralized network of "miners" sit in between us instead. Now, remember, these miners are trying to win new Bitcoins by solving computationally taxing math problems. The clever part, though, is that in the process of doing so, they also create a public ledger of every single bitcoin transaction, what's called the blockchain. That includes every bitcoin that's ever been won, every bitcoin that's ever been used, and every bitcoin that's ever been transferred. So now we don't need a bank to know that I have the money I'm sending to you, and that I'm only sending it to you. The miners confirm all this. And the best part is that instead of having to pay the bank myself to do this, the system pays the miners in new Bitcoins.

The question, though, is how you get people to mine bitcoin to begin with. Sure, you can tell them that bitcoin is digital money they can use to buy things online, but they already have money they can already use to buy things online. And while merchants would be more than happy to save the 2.5 percent they pay in credit card transaction fees, customers are a lot more bias� since they don't pay them directly. The answer, then, was to do what makes anything popular: make it exclusive. Specifically, bitcoin limits the total number of coins that will ever be created to 21 million. Now, for Bitcoin's first year and a half, as Nathaniel Popper documents in his page-turning history "Digital Gold," there were still only a handful of people, if that, mining it. But that began to change when libertarians, who were convinced, just convinced, that the Federal Reserve's money-printing would mean the doom of the dollar, discovered bitcoin and its non-inflatable money supply. A boom was born.

But what made people mine Bitcoins is what has kept them from spending Bitcoins. Think about it like this. Bitcoin's finite supply means that its price should go up, and keep going up. So if you have dollars that are losing a little value to inflation every year and Bitcoins that are gaining it, which one are you going to use to buy things with? The question answers itself, and it raises another. Why would this ever change? Unless you can't buy something online with dollars -- like drugs -- you'd always want to use your dollars instead. Buying things with bitcoin would be like cashing out your Apple stock in 1978 to go grocery shopping even though you have plenty of actual cash lying around.

The catch-22 is people buy Bitcoins because they think the price will go to infinity and beyond once everybody uses them, but they don't spend their own Bitcoins because they think the price will go to infinity and beyond once everybody else uses them. And so nobody uses them. But if nobody uses them, then the price will stay stuck at something a lot less than infinity let alone beyond. So the bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this.

Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees.

Sounds great. How does it do that?

Well, bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible.

So . if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it?

OK, but is it at least easy to use?

The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs.

Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours.

I'll get back to you on that.

But bitcoin is good for something other than redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. That's transferring money, or anything else for that matter, online. "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types," Bitcoin's shadowy inventor Satoshi Nakamoto wrote back in 2010, including "escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multiparty signature, etc." So anytime you need to send any kind of financial asset or agreement to somebody else, you can send it along with a bitcoin and, through the beauty of the blockchain, avoid having to pay a lot of fees. That's why Wall Street banks are looking into whether they can buildtheir own blockchains to cut costs before their competitors do. And while sending money is cheap within the U.S., it's not across international borders -- the average transfer fee, according to the World Bank, is 7.5 percent. It's not hard to imagine, in other words, that bitcoin could claim a big chunk of the $500 billion remittance market, although the difficulty of actually getting the physical cash to people in developing countries is still a significant hurdle.

Wait a minute, though. How does the blockchain cut costs again? Remember, instead of you paying the bank a fee to process a transaction, the bitcoin system pays miners new coins to do so. Then these transactions get added to the list of all others in the public ledger, the blockchain. But anytime it seems like you're getting something for nothing the costs are probably just being hidden. What are those costs? Well, bitcoin mining is a pretty expensive business. Even the most specialized computers, which mine Bitcoins and only mine Bitcoins, require a lot of energy. So much so that bitcoin miners have set up shop in far-flung places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and Arctic air is cheaper still -- free -- for them to run and cool off their machines at the lowest possible price.

OK, but why should we care that bitcoin miners have big energy bills? They're the ones paying them, after all. Well, for the most part. The problem is the price you pay for energy doesn't include the cost we all pay for pollution. So energy-intensive businesses that are paying less than they "should" for it can generate environmental spillovers on everyone else, or what economists call negative externalities. Once you take this into account, it's not clear how much bitcoin is really cutting cost so much as shifting them. Specifically, it turns your transaction costs into our pollution costs. Now, bitcoin might still lower costs overall, but the calculus isn't as simple as it appears if you only add up the benefits.

It's not clear what bitcoin is or what it will be, but it is clear what it's not. It's not a currency. People don't set prices in bitcoin and, for the most part, don't buy things with it either. The only function of money it comes close to performing is as a store of value, but it doesn't even do that well. Even though it seems like bitcoin prices should go up and up and up, it hasn't for a year and a half now. In fact, Bitcoin's $225-a-coin price is 80 percent less than its December 2013 peak. That said, bitcoin might be a better way to send things online -- or at least its technology, the blockchain, might -- but, again, that depends on how much energy it takes to run the network. In the meantime, though, bitcoin is still a little bit of a Ponzi -- or is it a pyramid? -- scheme that its libertarian early adopters are trying to cash in on.

The future might not belong to bitcoin, but it should to its technology.

• O'Brien is a reporter for Wonkblog covering economic affairs. He was previously a senior associate editor at The Atlantic.

WASHINGTON POST-BLOOMBERG -- 06-08-15 1130ET

Beware of these Five Bitcoin Scams

Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in prices over the last year has awakened mainstream interest in the original cryptocurrency. With prices looking bullish once again, investing in bitcoin has never been as popular, but the rise in interest has not been without consequences. One of the downsides of new investors entering the market is the increase in the number of scams, frauds, and stories of retail investors who lose their coins to shady ventures. From ICO scandals to wallet theft and fraud, regular consumers can fall prey to crime easily.

It may seem as though it’s the wild west for investors, but it doesn't have to be. While there are certainly risks in the market, the opportunities may be irresistible for some. However, being cautious is always a must, and there are clear signs of scams that investors can look for. By avoiding these traps, users can better their chances for success and protect their investments. These are some of the most common scams, and how they can be avoided.

Hardware Wallet Theft

For users who are concerned with security and privacy, a hardware wallet—a physical device that stores their private keys—is an increasingly popular option. Usually as small as key-chain USB drives, these wallets offer an offline way to help crypto investors protect their bitcoin even further. However, there have been reports that some of them have built-in vulnerabilities which open them to hackers that could easily steal all a user’s holdings.

This is far from the only issue, however. According to Ofir Beigel, owner of 99Bitcoins.com, “one scam entails selling hardware wallets to users with a ‘pre-configured’ seed phrase hidden under a scratch card. The new user is told that he should scratch the card… and set up the wallet with the compromised seed.” This creates a back door that allows hackers to simply drain funds once a wallet is activated. These scams are becoming more common, but they can easily be avoided by only accepting wallets from trusted sources.

Exchange Scams

Despite their decentralized nature, most cryptocurrencies are still bought and sold at exchanges. While this makes it easier to find the coins investors desire, there is still no regulatory body overseeing these exchanges in many countries. Thus, many investors have been left penniless when the exchanges they signed up for turn out to be traps. In December, several South Korean exchanges were exposed, leading to promises of stiffer regulations by the country’s authorities.

These scams are not hard to spot, but can be costly if not avoided. One of the biggest red flags is the promise of unrealistic prices. Exchanges that promise heavy discounts on bitcoin use this strategy to lure in unsuspecting victims. Additionally, users can check exchanges’ URLs. Web addresses should always begin with HTTPS, a sign that traffic is encrypted. Visiting unsecured websites is a bad idea, but alert investors can avoid losing thousands by looking for the right signs.

One of the best results of the cryptocurrency boom has been the rise of the initial coin offering as a way for companies to raise capital. With thousands of new blockchain-based companies entering the market with unique ideas and exciting projects, users can now back their favorite businesses easily. However, this massive explosion of ICO opportunities has inevitably raised the specter of fraud.

There are several ways scammers can separate investors from their bitcoin. One popular method involves creating fake websites that resemble ICOs’ and instructing users to deposit coins into a compromised wallet. Other times, it’s the ICOs themselves at fault. Centra Tech, for example, a blockchain venture backed by several celebrities has been sued in the US. The company stands accused of portraying fake team members, misleading investors, and lying about their products. The best way to avoid these scams is close research that involves picking apart the white paper, reviewing the team behind the venture, and key board members or investors. Before making any investment, it’s vital to learn as much about the company as possible to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

Cloud Mining Schemes

Mining is the only way to extract new bitcoins without buying or exchanging them, but it has become an incredibly resource-intensive activity. Due to the unique way new coins are mined, it takes massive amounts of processing power and electricity, and thus money, to mine a coin. However, many companies now offer regular users the ability to rent some server space to mine coins for a set rate.

Some companies offer ‘lifetime contracts’, which keep costs the same and supposedly offer outstanding returns. However, as the difficulty of mining increases, the same investment will return smaller amounts each time. Moreover, some companies make bold claims regarding their returns without being transparent about the true costs and diminishing returns. Others simply operate Ponzi schemes that can lead to massive losses. It’s vital to look into opportunities and understand the risks and costs associated with mining before investing.

Multi-Level Marketing

Even in the digital spheres, many multi-level marketing schemes have emerged that offer naïve investors excellent ‘opportunities’ for progressively larger sums of bitcoin. MLMs, as they’re known, are predicated on offering quick returns, but actually involve taking more money for the promise of even higher profits.

One major company that has been repeatedly outed is OneCoin, whose owners were implicated in several other shady operations. The company offered investors massive earnings, and even luxury goods and perks for paying more. However, there is little information on the company outside of their own site, and users have left scathing reviews online. It’s important to always pay attention to a company’s fine print and ensure that their claims are feasible and real. Avoiding these scams early can protect investors’ wallets.

With the current craze, being vigilant and doing one’s due diligence are a must before investing in bitcoin. The market is also showing signs of maturing, leading to better transparency and clearer rules. Regardless, any smart investor’s first step should always be careful research to ensure their investments are always winners.

Wealth Daily

May has been a big month for Bitcoin. The digital currency is up 30%.

Japan recognized Bitcoin as a legal currency. Russia is also eyeing legalization, a goal it will hopefully reach by 2018.

Bitcoin has become a global phenomenon. No longer is it lurking in the shadows of internet chat rooms. It has gained fame and enchanted millions of investors in the process.

That said, people are buying the currency at an unprecedented rate. I recommended Bitcoin at $600 back in 2016. If you had bought then, you would have tripled your investment. As I write this, Bitcoin is worth around $1,841.

But with the coin's upward momentum have come a slew of critics. And I don't blame them. Bitcoin is a new, uncharted investment. It's going to generate speculation.

Many critics are quick to point out that Bitcoin's creator never came forward. The currency was published under an anonymous pseudonym. Conspiracy theorists view Bitcoin as a scam created by an unknown enemy.

But in all actuality, Bitcoin can't be a scam.

It lacks the ability to be.

The Smoking Gun

Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people.

More than likely you have heard this phrase. It's dropped whenever we are presented with a situation where someone is blaming a tool instead of the human yielding it.

Bitcoin is a technology, and, as a technology, it doesn't inherently have the ability to be a scam.

Because of the algorithm, Bitcoin is more secure than any paper currency. It can't be manipulated to influence the market.

But that doesn't mean the currency can't be repurposed or exploited to scam investors. It has proven to be incredibly lucrative, and clever criminals will always find a way to cheat people when money is involved.

There is one scam that new investors should be particularly wary of. a smoking gun using Bitcoin as bullets.

A Review of Bitcoin Exchange Scams

Here at Wealth Daily, we use Coinbase to purchase or sell Bitcoin. The platform is easy to use. It is also secure and widely recognized.

In Bitcoin's early days, exchanges were popping up everywhere. They cycled in and out faster than tents at a music festival.

These websites were scams, and, sadly, many investors put money into them. They bought Bitcoin that never arrived, and the next day the website disappeared.

Prosecuting this kind of fraud is like chasing a ghost.

So investors should take steps to protect themselves. One such step is familiarizing yourself with the warning signs of fraudulent exchanges.

1.) The exchange is offering to sell Bitcoin below market value.

Offering digital currency at a lower price is an easy was to snare new digital currency investors eager to scrape up a deal.

2.) The domain is not secure.

In the internet world, very few things are actually secure.

3.) The site makes outrageous claims.

Some scammers try to woo investors with outrageous promises. With digital currency, this is easy to do. After all, Ethereum saw a 1,100% rise. And Bitcoin has made millionaires out of paupers.

Those kinds of gains are real, and you will find testaments of them all over the web.

But investors should be wary of currency exchanges that promise an edge on the competition. These sites often guarantee dynamic returns — something no site can safely promise because they don't control the market.

And digital currency is still a high-risk investment.

Bitcoin has been the launching point for a lot of scams. The technology itself is innocent.

But a fear of scams shouldn't stop investors from capitalizing on digital currency. Just make sure to do your research. With a surge of interest in digital currency, there are more resources out there than ever.

We continue to produce weekly content covering the digital currency revolution.

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Is Bitcoin a scam?

It is a Ponzi Scheme/Scam/etc. - and why I am playing.

Let me see if I get this straight. A "currency" was created out of thin air and now people are spending hundreds of dollars each for one reason: the belief that some other fool will pay more for it later.

scam -- not backed by anything but faith

A real national currency, if not backed by gold silver, is backed by the economy and military might and legal system of the issuer. This is backed by nothing, but "faith".

This is an INCREDIBLE scam.

The difficulty with Bitcoin is the production of Bitcoins, which are unregulated and not transparent to the world. There is nothing to prevent a sudden surge in Bitcoins being dumped by a creator, a major cash-in, and anyone who pays in legal fiat will be left with nothing. Oh, Bitcoins.

So what makes it better than any other real world currencies? Nothing really. So everyone runs around crazy waving their hands that USD is dying (it will eventually collapse at some point, or other huge implications will happen), but bitcoin is the same, it can be destroyed by the same problems a real world currency can be, its highly volatile and isn't backed by anything (alas usd is not either).

Doesn't add up. Unregulated and without any fundamental value! Derr!

Consider this an entirely invented medium of exchange that has not basis in fundamental value or agreed and recognised unit of exchange. It is an unregulated finite supply of nothing, artificially inflated to exploit unsuspecting persons. The only persons who win are he early inflators who get out leaving a void of nothing while the unsuspecting persons are left with literally nothing.

You lose more than you can get

All this bitcoin is a big scam, you support the network with hardware, time and electricity to process the transactions but eventually you give way more than you get! The only people who benefit from this currency are the initiators and the people causing the inflation, its a smart scam, a digital one.

the latest nonsense, defended by the parochially "knowledgeable"

There is no supporting, stable (= governmental) infrastructure. Security depends upon software deployed on readily hacked Microsoft Windows platforms. Security depends upon continual re-verification of transaction logs that can be forged and destroyed. "Money" has value because an entity with control over the economic behavior of millions or billions of people--and with governance over trillions or quadrillions of dollars--is willing to back it. Bitcoins are beyond foolishness. Why not peanutbuttercoins?

Yes. Bitcoin could be a scam.

I do not know a whole lot about Bitcoin, but there is always a chance something new is a scam. If people are looking to use it then they should do as much research before hand to get all their facts straight. Right now, there are many scams out in the world and it is important to be on our toes.

Anyone can make more Bitcoin

It seems that anyone can make bitcoin if they are good with a computer and then sell that for real money. Once we all figure out there is an unlimited supply of bitcoin its value will fall like a ton of bricks. Some will get rich and others just scammed

Its tricky, but it looks to good to be true

I've been doing a lot of research and it seems that to get bit coins you must invest i good amount of money, so either buying at bit coin or buying a rig that mines them cost an considerable amount of cash, and the process of mining inst guaranteed income if yu rig isnt top of the line with the most expensive hardware your not making profit, not to mention the cost to constantly update to the latest hardware cost more than is made, in my opinion it seems like a way to make people spend real currency on either the coins or the rig to make a currency that's not back by anything. Sure the first people who got into are making a profit but like any good scheme, thats what happens, you make it look good.

No, scams always have a hidden aspect to them.

Bitcoin is a pure information system and 100% open source. Basically it is a simulation of gold, but without the all the baggage that gold comes with (not seizable, heavy or counterfeitable). Bitcoin sets the bar very high as a currency and due to no middle men the transaction costs are very low.

Scam requires hidden information, but bitcoin is open sourced.

Bitcoin is open sourced. All the details are in the paper and no one is out there to con you or anything. Even if the founder wants to generate more bitcoins now he can't without going through more than 50% consensus. You can choose not to buy in to it but that's different from a scam.

How exactly could a an open source p2o cryptography protocol be a scam?

Its a protocol people, and one of the best ones yet invented, the only people calling this a scam are the ones who don´t know anything about it. Is it risky to invest your money into? Yes. Does that make it a scam? No. This shouldn´t even be on the table for debate

Bitcoin is digital cash, not a scam.

With bitcoin people are actually in control on their own money. It allows for less dependency on third parties and middlemen who always take a slice of the profit for themselves. If you're looking for the scam, you need only look at the fiat currencies used by countries. The reason people are buying bitcoin is because they realize it's utility as a currency.

"Bitcoin is a technological tour de force" -- Bill Gates

I'm surprised that so many people at the end of 2013 still seem to not understand what Bitcoin is. Oh well, at least I see things changing.

The Bubble Theory of Money

Bitcoin is a bubble, and so is every other form of money. A bubble is when people buy an asset, not to use it, but to trade it for some other asset at a later date. Like Las Vegas real estate in 2007, or Amazon.Com stock in 1999, or tulip bulbs in 1637. And also like US dollars and like gold. If an asset is held only to trade it away later, and it fails to become money, the bubble pops and it becomes worthless. If it becomes money. Well, the bubble can continue, weathering every adverse condition imaginable for 6000+ years, as with gold.

Bitcoin is open source

Sceptics can read the source code, and evaluate it. Everything in bitcoin is completely open, that's the beauty of it.
If it is a scam, why can I buy actual things with it right now?
There's going to be a bumpy road ahead, much like any new technology before it goes mainstream.

Its real money

Its a decentralized (meaning nobody can scam you) digital currency that floats like a real currency, except no one country backs it, the people who own bitcoins back it, and add value to it at the same time. They can exist completely without any one central authority. Completely decentralized, yup.

Having messed around with the code, have seen nothing that makes it a scam.

Saying that Bitcoin in itself is a scam is just ignorant. Now saying that some people viewed as innovators of Bitcoin gone rogue are scammers is more appropriate. People as mark kerpeles (mt. Fox) and such. They used Bitcoin as their scam. Much like people used cash as their scam or gold as their scam.

Bitcoin Blackmail Scam Is On The Rise: Watch Out

• More on Blockchain and Bitcoin
• What's the Vice Industry Token—A Crypto for Porn?
• Governance: Why Crypto Investors Should Care
• Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS)
• Which FAANG Will Win the Blockchain Wars?

One of the greatest strengths of bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry is the fact that transactions can be conducted quickly and anonymously. But this is also a weakness, at least in a particular light. While users feel that their security and privacy are greater when transacting on cryptocurrency exchanges than they otherwise would be in the traditional banking world, some nefarious actors have taken advantage of that anonymity. (See also: Beware of these Five Bitcoin Scams.)

This has taken several forms, including periodic hacks and thefts which can be very difficult to trace. Now, a new scam seems to be taking hold: as part of this blackmail operation, wealthy men from the U.S. have been receiving demands for bitcoin ransoms lest the blackmailer reveal their past "infidelity."

Bitcoin Ransom

A recent report by Coindoo describes one victim of the blackmail scam, Dave Eargle. He received a letter suggesting that he had cheated on his wife, indicating that if he wants the writer to "destroy the evidence and leave [him] alone forever then send $2,000 in BITCOIN."

The letter had Eargle in "a bit of a fluster," despite the author's unfounded claims of infidelity. Regardless, the assistant professor at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business couldn't help but be targeted, perhaps because of his position and status.

Eargle notified the police of the blackmail letter and shared his experience online. It was then that he discovered that other individuals had been targeted in similar blackmail attempts. The letters even include instructions on how to buy and transfer bitcoin. (See also: Bitcoin-Related Scams on the Rise This Month.)

Letters Sent From All Across the U.S.

Based on responses that Eargle received to his blog post, he determined that the blackmail letters could be traced to numerous locations across the U.S. Still, they all shared the same content and threatening messages. Eargle believes the letters are still being sent, with some newer versions demanding as much as $8,000 in bitcoin to keep quiet.

Patrick Wyman, a supervisory special agent for the FBI's money laundering unit, indicated that "the amount of money is such that it's not so much that someone might be willing to just pay that to make it go away. They're hoping that they might get lucky with someone who actually. [has] some infidelity there. And if they hit that target, that's a person who's probably willing to pay." The FBI is reportedly investigating the scam at this time.

In the meantime, Wyman suggests that recipients of new letters should not pay the ransom and should instead alert the police. "If you're cautious about where you're sharing your personal information. very specific details about yourself or your family. that is going to help protect you from maybe this sort of a scam," he suggested.

Investing in cryptocurrencies and other Initial Coin Offerings ("ICOs") is highly risky and speculative, and this article is not a recommendation by Investopedia or the writer to invest in cryptocurrencies or other ICOs. Since each individual's situation is unique, a qualified professional should always be consulted before making any financial decisions. Investopedia makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or timeliness of the information contained herein. As of the date this article was written, the author owns cryptocurrencies.

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I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be… more

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Golf handicap tracker, why can't I get to it?

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RYAN RAHSAD BELL literally means

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In the search for Anaïs Nin, one of the first few links shows a picture of a man. Why? Since Nin is a woman, I can’t figure out why. Can you show some reason for this? Who is he? If you click on the picture a group of pictures of Nin and no mention of that man. Is it an error?

Repair the Yahoo Search App.

Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.

I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and I signed in so he could try to fix the Yahoo Search App not working. He also used another phone, installed the app from the Google Play Store to see if the app would do any kind of search thru the app. The Yahoo Search App just wasn't working.

I also had At&t try to help me because I have UVERSE for my internet service. My internet was working perfectly. Their Technical Support team member checked the Yahoo Search App and it wouldn't work for him either.

We can go to www.yahoo.com and search for any topic or website. It's just the Yahoo Search App that won't allow anyone to do web searches at all.

I let Google know that the Yahoo Search App installed from their Google Play Store had completely stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I told them that Yahoo has made sure that their Yahoo members can't contact them about anything.

I noticed that right after I accepted the agreement that said Oath had joined with Verizon I started having the problem with the Yahoo Search App.
No matter what I search for or website thru the Yahoo Search App it says the following after I searched for
www.att.com.

WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE
This webpage at gttp://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geJGq8BbkrgALEMMITE5jylu=X3oDMTEzcTjdWsyBGNvbG8DYmyxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDTkFQUEMwxzEEc2VjA3NylRo=10/Ru=https%3a%2f%2fwww.att.att.com%2f/Rk=2/Es=plkGNRAB61_XKqFjTEN7J8cXA-
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED

I tried to search for things like www.homedepot.com. The same thing happened. It would say WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE. The only thing that changed were all the upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
Then it would again say
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED

This is the same thing that happened when Samsung and At&t tried to do any kind of searches thru the Yahoo Search App.

Yahoo needs to fix the problem with their app.

Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.

I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and… more

Bitcoin Scams - How To Stay Safe In The CryptoCurrency World

Scams have long been part of the day to day lives of human beings. While today's scams are quite a bit more intricate, people have been trying to defraud each other since the beginning of currency as we know it.

In fact, even back in the renaissance days, the shell game was used by con-artists to fool people out of their hard earned money. With Bitcoin being a relatively new currency, yet a widely accepted one, scams revolving around the currency seem to be everywhere.

Scam #1: Bitcoin Ponzi Schemes

One of the most common scams in the world of Bitcoin at the moment is the Ponzi Scheme. Essentially, the con-artists grab your interest by promising you high interest rates on deposits made.

As the nature of the Ponzi Scheme would tell you, those who make their investments early are paid out using the dollars from those that come in later.

This lasts for some time. However, must come to an end at some point. When there's not enough new people signing up to pay out on older investments, the scam falls apart, and those who took part start to realize losses.

Scam #2: Bitcoin Wallet Scams

One of the factors that makes bitcoin an interesting currency for many is anonymity when making purchases. This anonymity is generally provided through Bitcoin wallets. Essentially, these scammers tell you that their program is the safest and easiest way to transfer Bitcoin anonymously.

The wallet will work perfectly for days, weeks or even months. However, at some point, he con-artist behind the scenes will transfer the bitcoin out of your wallet and into their own. So, when choosing a Bitcoin Wallet provider, make sure that you do your research!

Scam #3: Bitcoin Exchange Scams

There are several Bitcoin exchanges out there. These exchanges simply sell Bitcoin at the current market rate. However, when looking for a Bitcoin exchange, make sure to do your research. Some exchanges will grab your interest by charging incredibly low fees on credit card processing (an area where exchanges realize their profits).

When your credit card is processed, you receive nothing. No Bitcoin, no refund, the money is gone. One great thing to keep in mind here is that if the fees sound too good to be true, they probably are!

Scam #4: Bitcoin Mining Investment Scams

Bitcoin mining is a process that involves incredibly high level equations. These equations are designed to validate transactions and provide security for the public ledger, something known as the blockchain. However, in order to mine bitcoin, you generally need extremely powerful and expensive computer equipment.

As a result, many people invest in the equipment for these mines, earning returns in the long run as more Bitcoin is mined. Unfortunately however, there are mining investment scams that will take your money, not to purchase equipment, but simply to realize a product. At the end of the day, the investment was never real, and your money is gone.

So, when thinking of investing in Bitcoin cloud mining, make sure that you do your research on the investments you make.

Scam #5: Bitcoin Phishing Scams

Finally, many con-artists have been sending emails to people letting them know that they have been given or awarded Bitcoins. However, in order to accept the gift or reward, they will need to log into to their wallet using the link in the email. However, when the user logs in, the information is stolen, giving the con-artists full access to the user's wallet.

Final Thoughts

While there are quite a few scams in the world of Bitcoin, you don't have to become a victim. At the end of the day, you can avoid most scams by simply being aware of them. With that said, if you're involved or want to get involved in the Bitcoin movement, keep an eye out for the scams above.

The scam called Bitcoin

A twenty-five bitcoin is arranged for a photograph in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, April 25, 2013. The digital currency, which carries the unofficial ticker symbol of BTC, was unveiled in 2009 by an unidentified programmer, or group of programmers, under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Supply is capped at 21 million Bitcoins and managed by a software algorithm embedded into the digital currency's design, rather than a monetary authority such as a central bank. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes it's hard to tell whether bitcoin is more like Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme.

Whatever it is, though, it isn't a currency. It's a tech stock. Each bitcoin is really a share in a system that seems to make it cheaper to transfer things online -- money, stocks, bonds, even the deed to your house -- by cutting out the middleman. Well, kind of. Bitcoin doesn't remove the middleman so much as replace him with middlemen who don't make you pay much, but make society as a whole do so instead. Is this progress?

It's supposed to be. Ever since the early days of the Internet, people have been trying to figure out how to transfer money online without having to go through the financial system. The problem, though, is if I send you money, how do you know I haven't already spent it or sent it to somebody else? You don't. So the only solution has been to have a trusted third-party, like a bank, sit in between us. I send the money to the bank, it verifies that I actually have this money to send, and then it sends it on to you, all for a 2 percent fee, of course.

Bitcoin's breakthrough is to have a decentralized network of "miners" sit in between us instead. Now, remember, these miners are trying to win new Bitcoins by solving computationally taxing math problems. The clever part, though, is that in the process of doing so, they also create a public ledger of every single bitcoin transaction, what's called the blockchain. That includes every bitcoin that's ever been won, every bitcoin that's ever been used, and every bitcoin that's ever been transferred. So now we don't need a bank to know that I have the money I'm sending to you, and that I'm only sending it to you. The miners confirm all this. And the best part is that instead of having to pay the bank myself to do this, the system pays the miners in new Bitcoins.

The question, though, is how you get people to mine bitcoin to begin with. Sure, you can tell them that bitcoin is digital money they can use to buy things online, but they already have money they can already use to buy things online. And while merchants would be more than happy to save the 2.5 percent they pay in credit card transaction fees, customers are a lot more bias� since they don't pay them directly. The answer, then, was to do what makes anything popular: make it exclusive. Specifically, bitcoin limits the total number of coins that will ever be created to 21 million. Now, for Bitcoin's first year and a half, as Nathaniel Popper documents in his page-turning history "Digital Gold," there were still only a handful of people, if that, mining it. But that began to change when libertarians, who were convinced, just convinced, that the Federal Reserve's money-printing would mean the doom of the dollar, discovered bitcoin and its non-inflatable money supply. A boom was born.

But what made people mine Bitcoins is what has kept them from spending Bitcoins. Think about it like this. Bitcoin's finite supply means that its price should go up, and keep going up. So if you have dollars that are losing a little value to inflation every year and Bitcoins that are gaining it, which one are you going to use to buy things with? The question answers itself, and it raises another. Why would this ever change? Unless you can't buy something online with dollars -- like drugs -- you'd always want to use your dollars instead. Buying things with bitcoin would be like cashing out your Apple stock in 1978 to go grocery shopping even though you have plenty of actual cash lying around.

The catch-22 is people buy Bitcoins because they think the price will go to infinity and beyond once everybody uses them, but they don't spend their own Bitcoins because they think the price will go to infinity and beyond once everybody else uses them. And so nobody uses them. But if nobody uses them, then the price will stay stuck at something a lot less than infinity let alone beyond. So the bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this.

Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees.

Sounds great. How does it do that?

Well, bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible.

So . if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it?

OK, but is it at least easy to use?

The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs.

Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours.

I'll get back to you on that.

But bitcoin is good for something other than redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. That's transferring money, or anything else for that matter, online. "The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types," Bitcoin's shadowy inventor Satoshi Nakamoto wrote back in 2010, including "escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multiparty signature, etc." So anytime you need to send any kind of financial asset or agreement to somebody else, you can send it along with a bitcoin and, through the beauty of the blockchain, avoid having to pay a lot of fees. That's why Wall Street banks are looking into whether they can buildtheir own blockchains to cut costs before their competitors do. And while sending money is cheap within the U.S., it's not across international borders -- the average transfer fee, according to the World Bank, is 7.5 percent. It's not hard to imagine, in other words, that bitcoin could claim a big chunk of the $500 billion remittance market, although the difficulty of actually getting the physical cash to people in developing countries is still a significant hurdle.

Wait a minute, though. How does the blockchain cut costs again? Remember, instead of you paying the bank a fee to process a transaction, the bitcoin system pays miners new coins to do so. Then these transactions get added to the list of all others in the public ledger, the blockchain. But anytime it seems like you're getting something for nothing the costs are probably just being hidden. What are those costs? Well, bitcoin mining is a pretty expensive business. Even the most specialized computers, which mine Bitcoins and only mine Bitcoins, require a lot of energy. So much so that bitcoin miners have set up shop in far-flung places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and Arctic air is cheaper still -- free -- for them to run and cool off their machines at the lowest possible price.

OK, but why should we care that bitcoin miners have big energy bills? They're the ones paying them, after all. Well, for the most part. The problem is the price you pay for energy doesn't include the cost we all pay for pollution. So energy-intensive businesses that are paying less than they "should" for it can generate environmental spillovers on everyone else, or what economists call negative externalities. Once you take this into account, it's not clear how much bitcoin is really cutting cost so much as shifting them. Specifically, it turns your transaction costs into our pollution costs. Now, bitcoin might still lower costs overall, but the calculus isn't as simple as it appears if you only add up the benefits.

It's not clear what bitcoin is or what it will be, but it is clear what it's not. It's not a currency. People don't set prices in bitcoin and, for the most part, don't buy things with it either. The only function of money it comes close to performing is as a store of value, but it doesn't even do that well. Even though it seems like bitcoin prices should go up and up and up, it hasn't for a year and a half now. In fact, Bitcoin's $225-a-coin price is 80 percent less than its December 2013 peak. That said, bitcoin might be a better way to send things online -- or at least its technology, the blockchain, might -- but, again, that depends on how much energy it takes to run the network. In the meantime, though, bitcoin is still a little bit of a Ponzi -- or is it a pyramid? -- scheme that its libertarian early adopters are trying to cash in on.

The future might not belong to bitcoin, but it should to its technology.

• O'Brien is a reporter for Wonkblog covering economic affairs. He was previously a senior associate editor at The Atlantic.

WASHINGTON POST-BLOOMBERG -- 06-08-15 1130ET

Bitcoin Exchange Scam – Bitcoins Are Now Worthless

After considerable thought, I’ve decided to put the Bitcoin Exchange Scammer comment back up as I believe it’s in the public interest, especially so given recent events on Bitcoin Exchanges.

For those unaware, every now and then, I receive a comment through the wonderfully inefficient Nerdr.com spam filter from someone who couldn’t quite find my email address. That’s fine and most times it’s a small fire that’s quickly put out, or a start-up proposal to consider. All good fun.

Yesterday was a little different. I came across a message that sent a shiver down my spine. As much as I have discussed the pros and cons of Bitcoin, I never once realized this could be happening. It was a comment intended for the Bitcoin Shutdown article and originated from what appeared to be an actual Bitcoin Trading Exchange owner.

Now I’d take this with a grain of salt (heck a sack of it judging by some of the comments left here last week), but it seems like the real deal from what I could dig up. I’ve removed the Bitcoin Exchange name for obvious reasons and cleaned up the grammar and spelling as best I could.

THE BITCOIN EXCHANGE SCAM:

“Hi Nerdr, I could not find an email address to contact you and have some information for you.

Let me first say who this message is from. I own and run a Bitcoin trading exchange. Here many users buy Bitcoins and sell Bitcoins for dollars. As you know it has been a great time for Bitcoin trading with a large rise in value over a very short period of time.

First I started like the others. I wanted to trade the bitcoins for the dollars on the Bitcoin forum like others. Then I started my own Bitcoin website to do this. Some people from the Bitcoin forum used it and were happy. Some told their friends and so on and so on. It grew like a mushroom. I want to say again, first it was all good and clean, no mess, very honest.

Then I had my big idea. I wanted to make more money. The number on the exchange. A number. I could change it in the programming. Not too much, because their are other exchanges to balance, but a little would be okay to do. So I did it. I increased the Bitcoin value a little. Say from $1 to $1.05. No one noticed and many were happy to see it go up. I was making people happy and the forum enjoyed the fun times with many dreaming big money! haha.

Now I change the Bitcoin price by hand nearly everyday now. I increase the number and more people give me money. Sometimes I let the files do this. It is a miracle like I have a bank haha. I give them numbers and they give me money. I thank god everyday.

They are greedy. I don’t care if I cheated them. I wonder is it bad? I have a nice life now and will marry soon. We will buy our first house soon with my Bitcoi money the greedy have gave me.

I am blessed to be alive.”

MY OPINION:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; their are 3 main users of Bitcoin:

• The Money cleaners/tax evaders.
• Those involved in non-legal activities.
• The Greedy.

It seems our friend is going after the greedy.

We all know Bitcoin is a sham, it’s a pyramid scheme, but I never thought to consider the exchanges to be on such shaky ground. I guess something about them encouraged trust, we think of them with the same respect we hold for the DAX or FTSE 100, but when one considers why we revere these Bitcoin Exchanges the argument falls short and the mental house of cards we’ve built comes crashing down.

Bitcoin Exchange

Bitcoin Exchanges have no audit process, no way of keeping them honest, no trail and no verification procedures. It’s just a number like he said. It’s all trust, based on a house of cards and this is one of the issues I’ve been harping on about from the beginning. Why do you trust the exchanges? What gives Bitcoin it’s value?

An anonymous currency requires trust between users. Especially when used online. If I pay you N Bitcoins, I have to trust you will send the goods in exchange. Think about who you will be sending those Bitcoins to. Without trust, there is nothing. The key to remember is the Bitcoin system relies on trust, yet you are dealing with the most untrustable and criminal of people, exactly those who seek an anonymous currency like Bitcoin. For those who are still unaware, there is no honor among thieves except in Hollywood.

Bitcoin Scam

It is possible that last weeks Bitcoin Black Friday event (10th June 2011) was a market manipulation. If you owned an exchange and were running low on Bitcoins, what would you do?

I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d drop the prices on the exchange, buy up as many Bitcoins as I could get from Idiots looking to sell, then jack the Bitcoin price right back up and make a killing. And I’d do it everytime.

And you would too.

There are no controls, no structure and no systems in place to keep things honest on the Bitcoin exchanges. No Securities and Exchange Commission. No Financial Services Authority. Bitcoin is unregulated and not the right place for a regular Joe to be placing money. Especially when they gain little value from Bitcoins anonymity, unlike those intending nefarious acts. Add in Bitcoin pricing volatility and you have a currency that is unusable for real world trade.

Having said that, without the Bitcoin Exchanges, how else will Bitcoin users value their “currency”? They can’t. Bitcoin valuation, as with any currency, requires a central base to assign that value.

A currency requires agreement on value, even if it is just perceived with little or no tangible mass behind it.

Even if it is just a database our friend can change at will.

What do you think? Would you put your life savings into Bitcoin?