Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto • Hacker News Board

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#71

Post by spurdoman77 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #37

jwcrux wrote: post #9

This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time. We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitte…

It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies. All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.

Maybe Jack is running the scam as a hobby and doesnt want to kill nice side hobby to stack sats.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#72

Post by miguelmota » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #2

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

Far from dead. It's been growing rapidly, particularly the decentralized finance (defi) space. Number of transactions has been steadily going up in Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#73

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

MichaelBurge wrote: post #11

seibelj wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.

At 72.61 terawatt-hours/year and an average electricity cost of 13.19 cents/kilowatt-hour, that's an asset that loses 9.6 billion per year. And if you ever stop wasting electricity, your bitcoin become less valuable. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/

I think there's a mistake here since crypto is not mined with average electricity. Nobody (at least not at scale) just puts a mining rig in an apartment in the middle of San Francisco. It's mined where it's cheap, so using average residential energy price is hugely misleading. That's like estimating the cost of making a car by summing up the prices of parts and labor at the car dealerships - that's not how the parts are actually procured when making a car!

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#74

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #51

Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?

[deleted]

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#75

Post by bigbubba » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #51

Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?

People who are desperate are easier to scam because they 'want to believe.' They're looking for miracles because they think that's all they could hope for. I think it's less a matter of crypto people being gullible and more a matter of desperate people being gullible and consequently becoming crypto people. Organized religions often target the same demographic for the same reason. Born-again preachers love reaching out to broken junkies and alcoholics.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#76

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #15

coldpie wrote: post #2

So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

I was a Bitcoin skeptic for years so I understand this point of view. This point of view makes sense if you assume that the financial system works properly which is what the vast majority of people still assume. The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system a…

You seem to be confusing two things - system working and system being un-exploitable. Example - it's pretty easy to shoplift in any of the retail shops. In fact, shoplifting happens all the time. Still, nobody would claim retail model doesn't work because people would just come and shoplift everything and nobody would pay and the retailer would go bust. What actually happens is that vast majority of people do not shoplift, and the retail system works and produces massive profits.

> but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable

Advantage, but also disadvantage. If a bank cheats you, you have options to complain to regulators, to the police, to the FBI, to you Congress representative finally. It won't work in all cases, but it's an option that's available to you. If a crypto scammer cheats you, well, nobody is accountable. For some people, it's a big issue, because it greatly increases the friction in transactions.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#77

Post by wmf » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #68

wmf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I sent a wire from US to Canada it bounced because I didn't include the street address of the branch where the recipient account was located . The mind boggles.

I was always wondering - virtually all money being electronic now, what the heck they are doing with all those branch addresses? I don't even have "branch address" - my account is just numbers, and if I need some live human service, I just walk into any random branch and they are happy to help me.

I sure hope there's not a server in the back of each branch holding account state...

(Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#78

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #51

Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?

In the last "doubling" scam I've seen a lot of people literally saying "I don't really believe it but the sum is low enough I'd send it anyway just to see what happens". Get a million of those, and you have some money. I personally don't understand what moves those people but I guess I have to recognize they exist.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#79

Post by flotzam » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #44

leppr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure. Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for…

> inter-bank transfer would take days to go through In the UK bank transfers are practically instantaneous. It's nuts that the US is so far behind on this.

Good luck paying an Iranian mail-order shoemaker... It's not hypothetical: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sa...

(EDIT) Sorry for my rude reply. Your point about intra-national transfers stands.

Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

#80

Post by bleepblorp » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #77

smsm42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always wondering - virtually all money being electronic now, what the heck they are doing with all those branch addresses? I don't even have "branch address" - my account is just numbers, and if I need some live human service, I just walk into any random branch and they are happy to help me.

I sure hope there's not a server in the back of each branch holding account state... (Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)

While I doubt there's a server in each branch managing account balances, there's is some kind of branch-related weirdness involved in bank account management at some banks.

With some banks, if you open a bank account at a branch in one time zone but later move to another time zone, your transactions will still be processed according to the business hours where the account was opened.

I know someone who is in this situation and they can't make transactions for several hours towards the end of the day (after midnight in the originating branch's timezone) because their bank's online banking front end can't agree with the bank's backend system about what day it is.