BITCOIN FRAUD is Everywhere. Unfortunately there are No Exceptions.
You have seen them a million times. They are annoying and they seem to follow you. Always refer to where you are connected and you feel you just can’t escape them.
It’s because you can’t. Most of the time that is.
Today I visited CNET, a trusted tech news website, and lo and behold, another ad about making money with BITCOIN was there. A bit upset because I was hoping that CNET that talks about cyber fraud on a daily basis would be filtering their paid ads on their website.
So there you are, the Livingstone dad who made £88,960 per month on Bitcoin. Pages like these are fake and they tend to use legitimate photos of other people. So I scrolled down and got this guy’s photo.
Meet George Taylor. This is not actually George Taylor, but let’s just play along. Where is this photo coming from ? There is one simple way to find out. A bit of very simple OSINT (Open Source INTelligence). Save the image and uploaded to Google Images and reverse look it up.
So you will get a screen with results like this one. Going through these pages you will find the one odd out, that is actually the original source.
It was the GQ magazine and an article about wine and cars.
So this photo was stolen and used in the fake Bitcoin news. How does George Taylor actually look in listings in other languages? Not so different from the Livingstone one !
But George was not the only one mentioned in this article:
Apparently Warren Buffett said Bitcoin and Litecoin will replace all flat currencies in 2020 !!!
Warren Buffett certainly knows his stuff. There is no doubt about it. But was it Warren who tweeted that? Actually no! The “Warren Buffett” twitter account @ORACLEofETH is not the genuine article.
How hard is it to go to Twitter and look for the verified account and check your facts there?
As a matter of fact, BITCOIN.COM has disassociated itself with any of those schemes and is actually naming some like BITCOIN CODE or BITCOIN TRADER or BITCOIN DOUBLER.
All these schemes are just a series of frauds.
During the last couple of weeks I have been looking at the amount of spam email and fake news websites and fake ads that redirect to the same content.
Websites about making money with Bitcoin are by default frauds waiting for vulnerable and greedy internet users to bite.
I asked personal friends and acquaintances about receiving Bitcoin related emails and messages, and literally everybody had received at least one.
My investigation on the matter just confirmed my suspicions and the suspicions of others who are looking into cyber crime:
This is a large scale organised crime. It is not small individual scammers running some random websites.
The content is the same and the websites that host them (and domain names) are carefully managed and maintained. Once a domain is burned by Google or any cybersec organisation, the domain name is killed and another pops up, with a different IP address and exactly the same content.
Bitcoin in itself is a tool. It is not a fraud, but it is a financial tool with associated risks.
Bitcoin fraud is the abuse of the platform by scammers and criminals. Being naive and/or greedy will guarantee you that you will lose money. That is a fact.
What most people though do not understand is that much of the online crime is not run by scammers who are looking for financial gain, but also by terrorists. So the money you loose on a Bitcoin fraud may contribute to the next ISIS recruitment campaign or purchase of explosives. It may fund criminals who will kidnap children to exploit and sell.
So next time, take a step back, give it a moment and think before you click.
#ThinkBeforeYouClick #SocialEngineering #Bitcoin #BitcoinScams
