[HN Gopher] Crypto leads to surge in online scams
___________________________________________________________________
Crypto leads to surge in online scams
Author : jimmy2020
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-01-27 21:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| MrYellowP wrote:
| The internet lead to a surge of online scams, lasting to this
| very day. The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots
| falling for them.
|
| I simply can not have any sympathy for idiots so greedy they fall
| for the "I'll double your cryptos" scam. None.
|
| The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically
| thinking people. If this wasn't so deliberately undesired by
| politics, the world as a whole would be a better place.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| You won't find much support for individual responsibility here.
| blooalien wrote:
| By "here" I assume you mean "Earth"... Responsibility is
| _not_ a thing humans are good at.
| msoad wrote:
| Everyone scammed is an idiot until I'm scammed. There are many
| ways you can undo traditional scam transactions. Even Western
| Union can be undone. Cryptocurrencies have no such means except
| for forking which is not going to happen for small amounts.
| k__ wrote:
| I lost 600EUR last year in an traditional transaction.
|
| Told the police, they said, they can't do a thing, because
| the scammer stole the bank account and probably lives in
| Estonia or somewhere.
|
| So, while I use banks on a daily basis, simply because I have
| to, I don't believe they are much safer.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| Did you try to work with your/estonia bank? Police can do
| something, but usually for small values is too much
| trouble, but with the police report, most banks are very
| accommodating (Estonia is in the EU and has to follow EU
| banking laws, so it isn't like the money went to some
| backwater, no law country)
| k__ wrote:
| Yes, they said, a standard transaction can't be reverted
| and I should talk to law enforcement.
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Did you talk to your bank? Getting police involved is nice
| and all but often times the banks themselves are a lot more
| helpful!
|
| Also, depending on how it was possible for the scammer to
| "steal the bank account" in the first place you might be
| entitled to damages or something, though that heavily
| depends on your legislation and where your bank is located
| of course.
| philipkglass wrote:
| A friend's not-so-bright boss was recently scammed into
| buying Amazon gift cards, scratching to reveal the codes, and
| then emailing the codes to the scammer. Can that be undone?
| This isn't intended as a "gotcha" question. I honestly don't
| know.
| msoad wrote:
| it's all about effort/reward. I'm sure "technically" with a
| police report you can get Amazon to return the money.
|
| I got packages stolen in front of my porch and got my money
| back from Amazon. Did Amazon go find the thief? Probably
| not. Will this always work? Probably not. But I had someone
| to talk to. In blockchain nobody can change the past.
| joefife wrote:
| I've seen intelligent people, who are experts in their domain,
| fall from grace through age or illness.
|
| Once critical thinkers, now vulnerable and gullible.
|
| I wouldn't be so harsh.
| johnebgd wrote:
| As people age they tend to become more susceptible to con
| artists. Society should protect our elders not leave them
| vulnerable.
|
| Victim blaming is a bad idea.
|
| Regulators exist for a reason.
| blooalien wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > This is especially true among younger people who are
| digitally savvy but less financially literate.
|
| > People ages 18-to-39 were more than twice as likely to
| report losing money to social media scams as older adults
| last year.
|
| Seems like maybe we should be protecting the "young know-it-
| alls" from themselves?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Do the same rules apply to slot machines and carnival games?
| Should we make those illegal also because people fall for
| them? Is it victim blaming to say "you know what you're
| getting into when you walk into a casino"?
| arcticbull wrote:
| They're already heavily regulated, the machines inspected,
| odds posted and support available. You can't do it online
| due to the increased risk. And casinos are few, far
| between, outside of most population centers, and broadly
| not easy to get to for most people.
|
| If publicly traded companies started putting their
| treasuries into Caesar's chips, you bet we'd see more
| regulation.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| We aren't talking about that though, we are talking about
| whether someone who falla for a scam bears any
| responsibility for that, at least in this thread started
| by the parent comment. When you walk into a building with
| a big sign above it that says "warning: scams ahead" can
| we really say "blaming the people that walked in here is
| unequivocally wrong"?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Seems like your lede is "why not victim blame, honestly?
| Should we really ignore what she was wearing when she
| walked down that back alley?"
|
| This isn't an argument that I think is particularly worth
| entertaining. People should exercise due caution at all
| times appropriate to their surroundings. However if a
| criminal robs them it's the criminals fault.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It's always the criminal's fault. But we aren't trying to
| blame the criminal in here, we are trying to blame the
| infrastructure the criminal used. It's a false dichotomy.
| arcticbull wrote:
| If the main thing an infrastructure enables is crime,
| then it's ok to blame that infrastructure. For instance
| if there's a network of tunnels under the border used
| exclusively for smuggling, that's bad infrastructure.
|
| Our reaction wouldn't be, well, let's arrest the
| criminals but leave those tunnels, the tunnels did
| nothing wrong!!
|
| Doing so would simply give the next criminal a head
| start.
|
| This is a great analogy for crypto. Sure once in a while
| an asymlum seeker may get through too, but overwhelmingly
| it's narcos and Bolivian marching powder. So we blow up
| the tunnels.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It's not that great an analogy actually.
|
| It's not about the main thing an infrastructure enables,
| it's about what the infrastructure is designed for.
| Tunnels under the border are specifically there to
| smuggle. Highways are there to do move anything you want,
| including illegal activity, which is policed separately.
|
| And the asylum seekers and Bolivian marching powder
| examples are good to address the main point here as well.
| Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is that
| victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?
|
| Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways. But
| it was designed to facilitate commerce without regard for
| legality. It's not like a smuggling tunnel, it's like a
| highway. And it's like that because sometimes you want to
| smuggle something, like asylum seekers, but you want it
| to serve legitimate purposes also. So not a very good
| analogy at all.
| arcticbull wrote:
| This is a tortured reading.
|
| > It's not about the main thing an infrastructure
| enables, it's about what the infrastructure is designed
| for.
|
| It's not at all, what it was originally designed for is
| irrelevant, the question is what it's being used for.
|
| > Does the cokehead share any blame in using coke? Is
| that victim blaming? Should asylum seeking be illegal?
|
| These are all utterly aside the point. These are matters
| of law. Law governs. Infrastructure which facilitates
| that is better than infrastructure which does not.
| Infrastructure that makes breaking the law easy is worse
| than one that does not.
|
| > Was bitcoin created to break the law? In some ways.
|
| Again intent is completely irrelevant except for the
| prosecution of those doing the creation.
|
| Because cryptocurrency is slower, less efficient, more
| volatile, and incorporates dramatically more counter-
| party risk than classic payment methods it self-selects
| primarily for the criminal activity. It's useful as a
| payments system of last resort in certain cases but
| that's dwarfed by the illicit use which is in turn
| dwarfed by speculative use. It actually creates roughly
| zero value.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Slot machines are heavily regulated to ensure some level of
| fairness.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| Yes, you will "fairly" lose all your money to games
| designed to be as addictive as possible. Sure the odds
| are regulated and posted but they are always against you
| and the advertising around them makes it seem like you
| can't lose.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| They're actually regulated to be completely unfair. Any
| regulation ensures no randomness in results. You're
| guaranteed a percentage loss due to regulation. When you
| walk into a casino you're wittingly consenting to being
| scammed.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think the critical distinction is that the Internet _also_
| gave us online banking, shopping, streaming, real-time
| communication, &c.
|
| It's not clear what cryptocurrencies have given us, apart from
| a (not very secure) way to buy drugs on the Internet and the
| occasional slower, power guzzling alternative to a service that
| already exists.
| throwawayay02 wrote:
| Censor proof, private, transactions.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| How are they private when they're viewable by everyone in
| the world? All it takes is one slip up or security breach
| to connect your IRL identity to your wallet hash and every
| transaction is public for all to see.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| Plenty of cryptocurrencies are private: Monero, Dash,
| Zcash, Beam, Grin, etc...
|
| I actually prefer using the public ones when I want a
| paper trail. But I've got a stash of the private ones in
| case I ever need to relocate to a different country one
| day in my life.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| There's no such thing as a wallet hash. A wallet consists
| of any number of individual keys that cannot be linked
| together except through using them together in a single
| transaction. Yes, careless use can link your identity to
| one or more keys, but software can help prevent that. But
| if you use a P2P wallet, there is no equivalent of your
| bank that can see or censor all of your transactions.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| It gave us an uncensorable, global, and decentralized
| payments system. To some people this is extremely valuable.
| ravenstine wrote:
| How so many people overlook this, I'm surprised by.
| Everyone at every level has been distracted by
| cryptocurrency being either a way to make money or an
| investment scheme. It'd be nice if it _could_ be those
| things, but there are already other systems of _actual_
| investment. On the other hand, cryptocurrency, whether or
| not you hate them for their energy consumption, provide a
| means of independent economies being created outside of
| whatever regimes are in control. _But that 's boring._
|
| Then again, hopefully we'll never need to see a future
| where everyone values the decentralized nature of crypto
| more than its monetary value at any given moment. If that
| happens, it might be under a regime where sneezing in
| public or looking in the wrong direction would lose you
| enough social credit that your bank account gets
| terminated.
| user-the-name wrote:
| "Some people" being mainly criminals and money launderers.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| A lot more people than just criminals and money launders.
| But yes, criminals ironically tend to be some of the
| first adopters of new technology. So the fact that it's
| so popular with criminals should be the signal that it
| actually is really powerful technology.
|
| Or do you think criminals are using crypto because
| they're uninformed reddit HODLRS hoping to moon?
| user-the-name wrote:
| Plenty of non-criminals adopted bitcoin. Then they un-
| adopted it once they found out it was actually not useful
| at all.
|
| The criminals stayed though.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| I've legally bought and sold quite a few things on
| craigslist using cryptocurrencies. I'm personally finding
| it easier and easier to use cryptocurrency as a payments
| system as time goes on. You really don't know what you're
| talking about.
| user-the-name wrote:
| You could have done that just as easily, or easier, using
| other payment methods that are not boiling the planet.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| And Argentinians, and Venezuelans, and Nigerians, and the
| Salvadorian government...
|
| There's flyover country, there's flyover _countries_ ,
| and ignoring the masses that make that up is equal parts
| condescending and ignorant.
| user-the-name wrote:
| No significant number of people in any of those use it.
|
| El Salvador's wannabe dictator is pretty keen on it,
| though.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Define "no significant number."
|
| And we aren't going to get anywhere in this discussion if
| your only rebuttal is "the leader of a country using it
| voluntarily is a dictator so that settles it." Do you
| have a rebuttal to my point at all?
| chaxor wrote:
| I think the "power guzzling" claim is kind of ridiculous,
| considering that crypto currency consumes a tiny fraction of
| power compared to that of fiat currency. Disliking the hype
| and speculative aspects makes sense, but consideration for
| comparison shows energy use isn't a concern
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Completely agree. I used to have sympathy for these victims.
| Not anymore. Not after actually interacting with them and
| getting literally banned from a group for trying to warn about
| risks. One guy literally sold his car in order to buy scammy
| shitcoins.
| mbesto wrote:
| > The best way of fighting scams is intelligent, critically
| thinking people.
|
| This sounds like "if everyone was a good driver, we'd have less
| auto related deaths". C'mon - that's not how the world works,
| this is just wishful thinking.
|
| The problem with crypto scams is there is no clawback. If
| someone commits wire fraud and I accidentally send the wire for
| my $100k down payment for my new house to <insert imposter> the
| bank can potentially reconcile it. With crypto? Nope, you're
| f'd. Sorry there's no trace.
|
| > intelligent, critically thinking people
|
| Like the Winklevoss twins who store their wallet keys
| in....BANKS so _they_ don 't get scammed. The irony is
| hilarious.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/technology/bitcoin-winkle...
| [deleted]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| People fall for scams/cults/MLMs for all kinds of reasons:
| because they're bored/lonely, because they're in a bad place in
| their life, because they put their trust in a person they
| shouldn't have, etc. Not just because they're idiots.
|
| My personal belief is that the best way I can set myself up to
| fall for a scam is by incorrectly believing that I would never
| fall for one. "Pride goeth before the fall." That's why I try
| to remind myself I'm as fallible as the next human.
| varenc wrote:
| We could say the same thing about phishing attacks. "Any
| company that hires idiots so dumb they'll type their password
| into a random site without confirming the certificate deserves
| what's coming to them".
|
| Except we know that at scale very large organizations, i.e.
| Google, cannot 100% stop phishing attacks just by user
| training. Humans are always fallible in a large enough group.
| The solution for phishing protection is to take the human out
| of the equation and rely on something like U2F to perform the
| authenticity check for you.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| > The problem isn't the medium/platform, but the idiots falling
| for them.
|
| That's victim blaming
| arcticbull wrote:
| The internet also created things of value. Connecting people
| all over the world instantly. Businesses built on leveraging
| newly created efficiencies.
|
| Crypto is intentionally the opposite. Imposing artificial
| scarcity on a world without, leveraging inefficiency and
| complexity at every level to obscure what's actually happening.
| It's an ideology not a technology. It's just a linked list but
| much slower. Anything that can be built on the blockchain can
| be built faster, cheaper and more efficient without.
|
| Ask yourself why in 14 years no industries have been
| revolutionized, no businesses built (except for trading) and no
| value created. If there's so many industries ripe and begging
| for the tech why hasn't a single one of them gained any value
| from even one blockchain implementation?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| The internet had existed in some iteration for 3 decades
| before the business world started using it, and was publicly
| accessible for one entire decade before that. The first
| businesses to really adopt it were pornographers.
|
| Why exactly do you think the valuation of cryptocurrencies
| are so high? Certainly it's not an indicator that the
| business case for it is nil. Maybe not revolutionary, but it
| is disingenuous or delusional to suggest that there's no
| business use for this thing while staring point blank at a
| world getting eaten by it in real time.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The internet connected people on day one. That's all it
| did.
|
| > Why exactly do you think the valuation of
| cryptocurrencies are so high? Certainly it's not an
| indicator that the business case for it is nil.
|
| Completely irrelevant. Prices are determined at the margin,
| its most recent price times supply. It's got nothing to do
| with how much money is in the system or how useful any of
| it is. They're all priced in USDT which has at numerous
| times been totally unbacked and issued on loans to
| institutions who use it to control the marginal price.
|
| As for shared delusions, the entire economy of Albania
| collapsed into a civil war because 66% of the GDP got
| locked into MLM schemes in 1997. [1]
|
| You must evaluate this from first principles not based on
| what the other lemmings are up to.
|
| 14 years in can you name a single business built on crypto
| that's even remotely successful?
|
| [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarv
| is.ht...
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It is very relevant, it wouldn't be if I was arguing that
| this will revolutionize everything, but you specifically
| said it has no real world business utility whatsoever,
| and the fact that people are using it, in business, right
| now, so much so that they pay outrageous prices to do so,
| that is very relevant.
|
| Built _on_ crypto? By definition you can 't name a single
| business that isn't an exchange built _on_ it. That 's
| like naming a business built on stock trading that isn't
| a stock exchange or investment fund. But ones that use
| crypto in some way? I can name a few, not counting black
| market businesses, overstock.com is one.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Please name one business that is successful thanks to the
| value created by cryptocurrency that is not a crypto
| exchange or related MSB.
|
| Overstock doesn't use crypto, they use Coinbase who gives
| overstock good old American greenbacks. Like most of the
| world accepting crypto they don't actually - it would be
| impossible due to the massive forex risk. They rely on
| third party MSBs like Coinbase and Bitpay to liquidate
| incoming crypto.
|
| I'm thinking of the crowd with a list as long as their
| arm of ideas including replacing Ticketmaster, supply
| chain management, voting, all the other broad ideas.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| "Nobody uses credit cards except for payment processors."
| If I accept British Pounds at my online store but only
| receive dollars to my business account by way of a
| processor, does that mean I did not use British Pounds in
| the transaction?
|
| I've never once claimed cryptocurrency would be useful
| for anything other than money, so I'd be the wrong person
| to argue with about that. I'm not a web3 evangelist.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Oh ok, well, there's tons of reasons its bad money. Hard
| money is no longer the law of the land because it was bad
| at being money. A fixed supply cannot respond to
| population changes, cannot respond to shocks, external
| stimuli. A low, predictable rate of inflation is broadly
| regarded as a good thing - it incentivizes investment and
| productive allocation of capital. All of the worst
| periods in history have been characterized as
| deflationary.
|
| Of course, the sheer inefficiency of the system makes it
| practically useless as money due to the transaction
| times, costs and volume capacity.
|
| It's bad at _being_ money too.
|
| The philosophy behind it is a widely debunked model
| (Austrian economics) which isn't taken serious by ...
| anyone outside a fringe group of libertarians.
|
| Also it's critical to note: it's market cap is not the
| quantity of value 'stored.' It's simply most recent price
| times supply. You couldn't get a fraction of a fraction
| of that back out without zeroing out the entire thing.
| Proof of work relies on wasting as much of the world's
| limited resources as you can within the budget allotted,
| and proof of stake is simply a perpetual wealth machine
| for the already wealthy.
|
| Then of course the ability to reverse transactions is
| huge value-add for customers, the ability to block
| transactions to sanctioned countries is a huge value-add
| for the world.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide
| whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people
| use the tools that work for them and not use them if they
| don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so
| bad then people won't use it. If it sucks at it's stated
| purpose but is good for something else, people can use it
| for that instead. If people are using it for something
| then it's good for _something_ and not really my business
| if they use it or not.
|
| The philosophy behind "it" is a pretty complex thing. You
| can design a currency using the tools used to make
| bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your
| guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can
| have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite
| supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of
| supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine
| it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling
| the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.
|
| I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and
| it's relative uselessness.
|
| If reversible transactions are a value add, people will
| use currencies with that option, and where it's not,
| people won't.
|
| I don't think bitcoin makes good money. But I do think
| you can make good money with the technology, I think it
| is good that this thing is driving people to make
| technology with which you can make potentially better
| money, I think we are finding the utility of this stuff
| by just letting people do what they want with it, and I
| personally find it useful in my life.
| hollerith wrote:
| The internet connected mainly CS researchers for the
| first 5 to 10 years of its existence.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The internet however had to overcome and deploy worldwide
| physical infrastructure to succeed. Crypto does not.
| Roll-out isn't even remotely comparable due to relative
| barriers to entry.
|
| Everyone who wants crypto can have it, now. And could
| have had it on day one.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| No one uses cryptocurrency for non cryptocurrency purposes.
| It is like an ouroboros, consuming itself in real time.
| kobieyc wrote:
| check out helium.com
| betwixthewires wrote:
| "Nobody uses money for non money purposes."
| arcticbull wrote:
| I strongly suspect the parent to which you are replying
| was saying that there are no uses for blockchain outside
| of "money."
| jueteng_lord wrote:
| I agree with most of the comments here on falsely accusing the
| actual technology for the surge. Gift card scams are about triple
| of 2018 in 2021.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/data-spotlight/2021/12...
|
| Should we start blaming gift cards too?
| alphabetting wrote:
| With so much negative press around crypto the industry should
| consider rebranding. Give it a new catchy name, like web3 or
| something like that.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| You joke, but after the backlash to web3 on here I saw multiple
| people trying to rebrand it as web4.
| [deleted]
| wmil wrote:
| I remember back in 2008 they were trying to push Web 4.0 as
| the successor to Web 2.0, because it was the web squared.
| dibujante wrote:
| The web should proceed as a series of prime numbers, so web
| 5.0 follows web 3.0
| groby_b wrote:
| That clearly went nowhere, because it would have needed to
| be rounded instead.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Just call it web3.14 and add a decimal every time someone makes
| off with > $1MM in a crypto heist.
| akomtu wrote:
| Call it "meta currency".
| Victerius wrote:
| The Zuck has called. He wants his Libra back.
| masegod wrote:
| I guarantee you half the people who attack crypto for having
| scams argue the solution is banning it, using the same arguments
| to ban the internet.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| "Internet leads to surge in online scams". What an incredibly
| stupid headline.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Lol. How about "Crypto leads the surge in online scams". Saying
| that crypto causes the scams, rather than being the scam, is
| splitting hairs. This is also a report focusing on social-media
| scams. The net is Inception-level nesting of scams atop each
| other. Social Media + Crypto ... what else could it be but a
| scam?
| vmception wrote:
| I had to reread the title a couple times because the article is
| about crypto leading a surge in a variety of other surges
|
| Sounds more like younger people were willing to report
| woah wrote:
| Society is a scam
| danuker wrote:
| A legitimate use of crypto "currencies" is defense against
| hyperinflation. Ask anyone in Venezuela.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is true about any asset that's not undergoing
| hyperinflation itself including stocks, bonds, commodities,
| real-estate, and foreign currencies. What's special about
| cryptocurrencies in this regard?
| floren wrote:
| The answer is usually "well, I happen to _own_
| cryptocurrencies, but not those other things you 're
| suggesting"
| masegod wrote:
| the supply of bitcoin is mathematically guaranteed, also
| much harder to steal
| bradjohnson wrote:
| > much harder to steal
|
| This is objectively false given that the article is about
| how _easy_ it is to scam people out of their bitcoins.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| What is the advantage of this over investing in GME? Both
| backed by strength of a meme, both highly speculative, except
| at least converting GME to actual money doesn't require you
| to burn energy equivalent to the average US household's
| monthly consumption.
| knorker wrote:
| So Venezuela is all fine now, thanks to blockchain?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| No, but people there have options thanks to it.
| curtisf wrote:
| You can't spend cryptocurrency at the grocery store. So your
| "money" can only at best be _backed_ by cryptocurrency.
|
| But if all you want is your money to be backed by something
| that intrinsically retains value, there are many standard
| choices. Like _foreign currency_. Or something more involved,
| like stocks and bonds and commodities contracts.
|
| Or you could just plain use precious metals.
|
| Cryptocurrency doesn't uniquely solve the problem of
| inflation, but it does introduce a lot of others. (Including
| the risk that a country's entire Treasury gets drained
| because an office worker plugs a USB stick they found in the
| parking lot into the wrong computer)
| betwixthewires wrote:
| In Venezuela and Argentina you can absolutely buy goods at
| the store with cryptocurrency, if you whisper low enough to
| the owner. In El Salvador the government mandates it be an
| option. Money is money where it's accepted, everywhere else
| it's not. That's not really a point at all.
| csours wrote:
| My rule of thumb: By the time I've heard of a crypto, someone is
| definitely running a scam.
| magicjosh wrote:
| Ah the 1:00 PM HN anti-crypto honeypot has arrived.
| tyleo wrote:
| Just what I was waiting for. I missed the 12:59 one :p
| Animats wrote:
| The real question is, will the big cryptocurrencies hold? Bitcoin
| is down almost half from its peak, but it's done that before.
| What's different this time is that more countries, especially
| China, have banned cryptocurrency operations. Hard to say.
|
| At some point, Tether is going to crack. The backing isn't there,
| and everybody knows it now. It can't survive a net outflow. It's
| still possible to exit Tether for another stablecoin. USDT and
| USDC are still trading at 1:1. You can redeem USDC for US
| dollars. So if you own USDT, get out while you can. When
| stablecoins crash, they crash all the way to zero.
|
| The SEC continues to bring enforcement actions. 97 so far in the
| cryptocurrency area.[1] Most recently, "Gold Hawgs". "Instead of
| using all of the investor funds to develop Gold Hawgs' business,
| Garcia, the chief financial officer and a 50% owner of the
| company, allegedly stole approximately $123,000 of the money
| raised from investors by transferring the funds to another
| company that he controlled; he then allegedly used the money to
| pay for various personal and business expenses unrelated to Gold
| Hawgs."
|
| Before that, "Crowd Machine": "In this offering, which occurred
| between January and April 2018, Sproule told investors that the
| ICO proceeds would be used to develop a new technology that would
| enable Metavine, Inc.'s existing application-development software
| to run on a decentralized network of users' own computers.
| Instead, Crowd Machine and Sproule began diverting more than $5.8
| million in ICO proceeds to gold mining entities in South Africa -
| a use that was never disclosed to investors."
|
| Before that, "Denaro": "Auzins misappropriated all of the ICO's
| proceeds."
|
| Before that, "MyMicroProfits": "Defendant Ryan Ginster allegedly
| engaged in a fraudulent scheme raising millions in cryptocurrency
| using online investment programs and then converted the
| cryptocurrency for his own benefit,"
|
| Totally ordinary con game rip-offs. Only the hype is new.
|
| It looks like 2022 will be the big shakeout year for NFTs and the
| low end of cryptocurrencies.
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-
| acti...
| [deleted]
| richardburton wrote:
| Remember porn on the web or spam on email?
|
| HN's hate for crypto is hilarious.
| enlyth wrote:
| I don't think HN hates crypto itself, at least speaking for
| myself, I hate the community that formed around it. It is
| impossible to even have honest conversations about the it
| because they are drowned out by all the dishonesty and noise
| about 1000x gains and it being the future of finance which will
| somehow replace the whole financial system.
| bookaway wrote:
| >Remember porn on the web or spam on email?
|
| >HN's hate for crypto is hilarious.
|
| Really? I don't recall members of "our own tribe" sitting down
| and cranking out 2 hours of VHS video takedowns of "the web" or
| "email".[0]
|
| [0] The Problem with NFTs -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
| betwixthewires wrote:
| No, you had members of _the dying tribe_ do that. Time will
| tell if this is the same thing or not.
| bookaway wrote:
| No, the dying tribe never went to these extensive lengths
| and exhibited this level of disgust toward the web or email
| during its initial rise.
| xtracto wrote:
| Have you heard of this internet thing? it's full of SCAMS and
| people trying to get advantage of you (with penny stocks,
| nigerian prince, get-rich-quick websites, and all sort of
| crap).
| outside1234 wrote:
| NO YOU DON'T SAY!!!!
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| If you actually read the article, most of the scams of all types
| start on social media. Why is it so easy for a scammer to talk to
| my nephew on the same places he talks to his friends? If you look
| at actually consumer fraud (1) according to the FTC, crypto isn't
| even mentioned.
|
| The abundance of crypto hate is confusing to me as one hand HN
| believes it's a pointless & worthless technology but also somehow
| this unstoppable force giving criminals limitless power to burn
| all the trees and rob the youth.
|
| (1) https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2021/02/top-frauds-2020
| user-the-name wrote:
| Why do you think that is some kind of contradiction? It is
| technology that is largely useless for legitimate projects, as
| other solutions are always better and less inefficient. And it
| is inefficient, because it does use 0.5% of the electricity of
| the entire planet, which is not something people imagine, it is
| very real. The only benefits it has are mainly useful for
| criminal purposes, thus it does help criminals.
|
| All of this is consistent, factual, and a huge problem.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| "Mechanism to scam leads to surge in scams in place where
| mechanism exists" yeah they scam you at the carnival too but you
| still go to the carnival. What matters is if you choose to ride
| the rides or play the games.
| Tenoke wrote:
| We are getting so many 'crypto=bad' basic articles (this one
| seems particularly devoid of relevant content) that I'm surprised
| the topic isn't auto-downweighed by now.
| rinze wrote:
| "Bogus cryptocurrency investments"
|
| What's the purpose of starting the article with so much
| redundancy?
| solveit wrote:
| This is snark that does not contribute to the discussion and I
| would like to see less of this on HN. There is a difference
| between an investment doomed to failure and a scam that was
| never meant to even try to succeed. Regardless of your views on
| crypto, there exist projects that are not fraud and you know
| this.
| roomboasted wrote:
| boom roasted
| explaingarlic wrote:
| I don't understand this at all. Shouldn't "cryptocurrency" - I.E.
| currency based on an understanding of computational complexity
| and a view into abstract mathematics - appeal to those that have
| a vague idea of what their money is most-physically represented
| by?
|
| If so, then why are these logically refutable scams ("Give me
| 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back!!!": Just think that the person
| would, if they can generate 4btc of value out their ass like
| that, simply likely keep it, whether they valued the fiat value
| of it or not) so common?
|
| I understand the idea that the emotional gain from giving
| something to someone who has never had anything of that value may
| be overwhelmingly tempting or fulfilling on the "giver's" part
| but similarly, aren't there people more deserving of this than
| _you_ , the "scam" victim? At that point, I don't even know if I
| would call it a scam.
|
| If someone posed as a verified conveyancer and built a fake
| profile, payed legitimate businesses and entities off for
| positive testimonials etc. And encouraged me to hire them to re-
| mortgage my property for me then I would call that a scam - but
| someone asking for money with the vague promise that "they need
| it more than you" not so, similarly not with a "I will give you
| double the money you give me" scheme. It just feels more like
| something so stupid that you are entirely at fault if you fall
| for it.
| masegod wrote:
| Some people made a bunch of money on dogecoin and it got enough
| attention to spark a wave of scamcoins
| __s wrote:
| We're well pass bitcoin being a mathematical curiosity. There's
| plenty invested because line on graph goes up & smart sounding
| person sounded smart talking about it
| explaingarlic wrote:
| Indeed. I'm way too young but I would have loved to be one of
| the people who, back in the day, thought "there's no way that
| $1mil of fiat value would exist in the blockchain because
| SHA256 _must_ be fuckable in some way, if that kind of money
| was in it ".
| ajross wrote:
| Numerically, most of the scams are rug pulls. "Get in on the
| ground floor of our hot new web3 token issue that will be the
| next BAYC or whatever". There are enough such things out there
| that _do_ make money (a lot of it) that people are willing to
| bet on them anyway.
|
| Then the owners take the $2M they got in early financing or
| seed money or reservations or whatever it's called and
| disappear with it.
| Victerius wrote:
| Sadly, too many smart people are too greedy for their own good.
|
| Stop chasing the easy money. In fact, stop thinking about money
| all the time.
|
| Stash a little money from your paychecks into a 401k and a Roth
| IRA and invest in passive, broad market ETFs. Hold no matter
| how the market is feeling this week. Don't trade on margin,
| don't stock pick, don't daytrade, and stay away from options.
|
| The buy and forget way to wealth is a much surer path than the
| risky one.
| explaingarlic wrote:
| Are these "intelligent" investments? Or just complex adaptive
| systems which are theoretically digestible by you but you
| don't even bother?
|
| Honestly, I wouldn't bother putting my money into a 401k - I
| would stash it away, let a little rot away with inflation and
| use it to start a business that provides real people with a
| real product and pray. That seems like a more sure-fire way
| to get across the line.
|
| Ostensibly, that can be thought of as a more extreme version
| of your "pick an index and stick in it" approach. The reality
| of it is that we don't know which one of these choices is the
| right one - it may be so that cryptocurrency will make you
| trillions! Or that the Roth IRA will have 70% of the people
| who stick their money in it as actual millionaires despite
| them only making $70k a year for 30 years.
| usrusr wrote:
| Stuff like "Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back!!!" works
| better with bitcoin (even if only marginally) because the
| occasional mark who might actually fall for it has heard so
| many confusing stories about something called bitcoin making
| some people rich for reasons that certainly did not make any
| sense at all to them.
|
| Now they hear another of those stories that don't make any
| sense at all. But this time with a peculiar tweak, they might
| perhaps be the protagonist themselves! Two wrongs don't make
| one right, so far so good. But what about two utterly
| confusing?
| lm28469 wrote:
| > appeal to those that have a vague idea of what their money is
| most-physically represented by?
|
| It attracts people who want to make money easily. A crazy
| amount of people who have no idea about the tech aspect of
| crypto are "investing" and active in crypto social groups. Just
| go on the major subreddits and read a few threads, it won't
| take long to see that a very large portion of them are
| kids/teenagers who invested a few hundreds or less in the hope
| of a 1000x pump, these are the people who get scammed.
|
| Everyone says they're here for "the project", "the future of
| currencies", &c. most of them are here to make a quick buck
| beebmam wrote:
| "Give me 1btc and I'll send you 3btc back" is not logically
| refutable in the strictest sense of "logic".
|
| It's obvious, socially/culturally, that this is a scam; why
| would anyone give people money after they get money?
|
| But logically, no. This is not a "logically refutable scam".
| Unless you misunderstand what logic is.
| explaingarlic wrote:
| I don't know if I understand what "logic" is, but I clearly
| used the context of sociology and the game of life.
| Furthermore, if you want to fight on the ground that this
| isn't logic - who's to say that a higher number is better?
| That consent is required for BTC to be sent? That the number
| of BTC sent is not based on an outside variable?
|
| If you add the context of "More money is better", "Value is
| gained after gaining money" and "Money has value", it seems
| to perfectly fit into logic. Prove me wrong if I am, I would
| appreciate it - I am not a Haskell programmer, so I think I
| could learn from it.
| robot_no_419 wrote:
| I don't think the strictest sense of "logic" has much use
| outside of pure math. Using commonplace definition of
| "logical=rational", it's logically refutable. Any rational
| person should be able to reason out that it's a scam.
| beebmam wrote:
| Certainly that's incorrect, actual logic is used throughout
| virtually all sciences to deduce conclusions using methods
| of proof. The reason we're able to deduce many core truths
| of reality is by relying on both observation and logic to
| guide us to truth.
|
| But, to engage with your implied argument in good faith: Do
| irrational people deserve to have all their money taken
| from them?
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| For anyone interested in seeing what one of these scams looks
| like: - http://ark-musk.com
|
| They ran a YouTube Live stream on loop with an Auntie Cathy and
| Elon interview about crypto and made it look very believable.
| YouTube finally took down the video after about a day.
|
| Hard work.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Funny that the TX Hashes are truncated and (of course) not
| real.
|
| But i've seen those YT live streams since forever, and sorting
| by upload date shows just how much uses his likeness for
| unrelated scams / grifting.
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elon+crypto&sp=...
| 3np wrote:
| Interesting that they seem to have one global address for each
| coin - so we can go look at their transactions[0][1].
|
| Note that the ticker on the button is obviously fake (the
| truncated addresses line up with the addresses here but not the
| txs). 45 ETH transactions and 19 BTC transactions over 3 days.
| Here[0] we can trace the one time they moved BTC so far: A
| CoinJoin. I'm not sure how Samourai's joins work these days but
| it doesn't look like JoinMarket so I'm guessing that or Wasabi.
|
| The majority of incoming are exchange withdrawals.
|
| [0]
| https://etherscan.io/address/0x53F6656DE60C7c92317dCBed4E034...
|
| [1]
| https://mempool.space/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxa...
|
| [2]
| https://mempool.space/address/bc1qgv9vntpdvyedgr3lj9p5az0hxa...
| nightski wrote:
| It amuses me how much of an anti-crypto sentiment HN has. It
| wouldn't surprise me if there was a more nefarious agenda behind
| it. It's kind of a joke at this point.
| timeon wrote:
| Where is the joke? You have technology designed to be
| inefficient (proof of waste) and you are amused that there is
| sentiment against it on Hacker News.
| ngokevin wrote:
| The anti-anti-crypto sentiment is more outspoken here. No need
| to wonder their agenda (hint: it involves personal gains).
|
| Anyways, negative press floats up and stirs the pot. So here we
| go
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Uh oh, we're all busted. Send in the black helicopters!
| Animats wrote:
| What was once the biggest NFT, Axie Infinity, has tanked. Today,
| for the first time, their Smooth Love Potion token fell below one
| cent, to US$0.009954. The peak was around $0.36 last summer. This
| is the one all those people in the Philippines were playing a
| grinding game to earn, and paying about US$1000 up front to get
| into the game.
|
| Axie Infinity combined the worst features of a gig economy,
| multi-level marketing, and a Ponzi scheme.
|
| The company responded by launching another token.
| bookaway wrote:
| I have trouble finding good pro arguments taking on the
| strongest anti- arguments, it's pretty frustrating. To rebut
| moxie's OpenSea monopoly criticism, one guy goes and pulls up
| stats from a week-old competitor that fueled their first week's
| performance by airdropping tokens on a bunch of nft high-
| rollers. Apparently they consider this ample evidence of a
| healthy competitive ecosystem given the amount of words they
| labored on the point. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.notboring.co/p/the-web3-debate
| daenz wrote:
| Is this the setup for regulation?
| outside1234 wrote:
| I mean the first 15 scams should have been that
| johanneskanybal wrote:
| While they fight over which opinion to cancel half the youtube
| comments on any investment video is scams, half the promoted
| tweets on twitter are scams, half the facebook ads are some type
| of scam. Imagine a traditional news paper publishing a single one
| of those and what consequences they would face.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I still get around 5 robocalls of people trying to scam me a day.
| Scammers are not just part of cryptocurrency. Businesses scam
| legally all the time.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-27 23:02 UTC)