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Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#22I wonder why you don't see news articles stating 'bank robbers steal $ 123000 from users of [random-bank-branch]' ... could it be because if someone hacks or robs a bank or a legitimate payment service provider such as westernunion or paypal, they are required to eat the loss, not pass it on to users?
Bank robbers typically walk away with a few grand if they're lucky, and it'll almost certainly have a dye pack and a tracker in it. Bank robbery is a fool's business. 39k BTC is what, $39 million worth? You're right, news articles cover that differently than a $123,000 loss that's covered by insurance.
> Bank robbers typically walk away with a few grand if they're lucky, and it'll almost certainly have a dye pack and a tracker in it. Bank robbery is a fool's business.
Exactly. It's all fraud now - much higher rewards with much lower risk of getting caught. Why try to break into a bank vault waving a gun in the air when you can skim relatively small amounts from millions of credit cards or commit identity theft and take out loans in someone else's name, all from a different country to your victim.
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by recourse you only mean chargeback, sure. But that's not the whole story. If you have a legal entity behind something, like say, bitpay or coinbase, you can take legal steps if they screw you over. You can take them to small-claims etc. And if you don't trust some entity, you can use escrow with bitcoins, it's possible to setup a transaction where the escrow provider has no way to get at the funds, but can just…
@RyanZAG Please look into what escrow means. Of course you can do business with an entity you're not sure is legit. The assumption is that you trust the escrow provider, and the Escrow provider is trusted by the merchant. So, the critera of trust for the escrow provider, is quite a bit higher than a random online store. If carefully select the escrow provider, check their business registration, make sure there's a le…
I think Bitcoin can be serve as a money transport protocol and Escrow services can be built on top of it. Think about buiding HTTPS on top of HTTP protocol.
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#24I wonder why you don't see news articles stating 'bank robbers steal $ 123000 from users of [random-bank-branch]' ... could it be because if someone hacks or robs a bank or a legitimate payment service provider such as westernunion or paypal, they are required to eat the loss, not pass it on to users?
My understanding, in the US, is if you have a personal account the bank eats the loss. If you have a business account its gone. This actually is very common. All it requires is enough mule bank accounts to wire amounts below suspicion and spyware on the user's machine (snatches RSA authentication key at entry if two factor verification is used.) The banks don't want the event to be publicized and the company/small bu…
To clarify, it depends on who was robbed. If bank robbers steal green paper from the vault, the bank doesn't know which business account that money came from. If it's wire transferred out because your password was 'banana', it may be gone for good.
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#25Seems a little premature to point at the blockchain and say "STOLEN!". Most people won't be able to make much sense of that. The whole situation is complicated. More info: http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rpy1t/i_w... http://www.sheepmarketscam.com/ tl;dr: For a week or so, many users have been unable to withdraw BTC from Sheep. Admins have been claiming technical problems as they try and implement…
Obvious question: why not let people check the "I understand the risks" box and withdraw without mixing?
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
@RyanZAG Please look into what escrow means. Of course you can do business with an entity you're not sure is legit. The assumption is that you trust the escrow provider, and the Escrow provider is trusted by the merchant. So, the critera of trust for the escrow provider, is quite a bit higher than a random online store. If carefully select the escrow provider, check their business registration, make sure there's a le…
I think Bitcoin can be serve as a money transport protocol and Escrow services can be built on top of it. Think about buiding HTTPS on top of HTTP protocol.
There different ways to implement escrow with bitcoin.
1) You could ignore all technicalities and simply send the coins to a third party which releases it back to you or forward to the merchant. That's probably the least recommendable way, but is the easiest to explain.
2) A smarter way to do it is to use bitcoins transaction script that can process multi signature transactions, which can work in a way that if A wants to send B money, he can setup an address that can only withdraw coins from if C also signs the transaction. This method is supported by Electrum and by the Blockchain.info wallet.
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#27Seems a little premature to point at the blockchain and say "STOLEN!". Most people won't be able to make much sense of that. The whole situation is complicated. More info: http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rpy1t/i_w... http://www.sheepmarketscam.com/ tl;dr: For a week or so, many users have been unable to withdraw BTC from Sheep. Admins have been claiming technical problems as they try and implement…
Obvious question: why not let people check the "I understand the risks" box and withdraw without mixing?
They're not claiming that mixing is required to let people withdraw securely or anything; it was never implemented before, the original SR never had it implemented the way that people assumed they did, etc. They seem to be claiming that attempts to implement the mixing led to technical problems which has buggered up withdrawals rather fundamentally.
With weeks having passed, it should have been easy to implement some sort of emergency measure that would let them transfer money back to people who wanted it. Instead they continued doing business as usual - money in, but not out - while implementing things like this withdrawal countdown system, which arguably seems calculated to try and maintain some confidence and keep the BTC rolling in.
It seems very likely that this is in fact a big scam, particularly given the shady behaviour of prominent and admin-affiliated vendors also happening, but the blockchain info linked isn't in and of itself definitive proof of anything much right now.
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#28I wonder why you don't see news articles stating 'bank robbers steal $ 123000 from users of [random-bank-branch]' ... could it be because if someone hacks or robs a bank or a legitimate payment service provider such as westernunion or paypal, they are required to eat the loss, not pass it on to users?
Relevant illustration of bank theft: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#29Cash = unlimited demand and unlimited supply
Bitcoin = unlimited demand and limited supply (21 million)
Re: Bitcoins stolen from the users of Sheep Market Place?
#30Doubtful. The balance was never 39,917BTC, it's been dropping funds in and out for almost a month now. If it was stolen, they took their time doing it.
The scam has been going on for at least a week. There's no hurry.