A woman in Youngsville, North Carolina, whose pet dog had gone missing, was told to pay a bitcoin ransom by criminals claiming to have taken the family pet. Patricia Howell was told to pay $600 in bitcoin or Happy the basset hound would be sold or killed. The pet owner said that she knew it must be a scam because she already had her dog back. When Happy went missing, Howell posted details of the...
Copycat bitcoin wallet service “Electrum Pro” has shut down its website after the company it was attempting to impersonate released evidence demonstrating its software was “bitcoin-stealing malware.” As CCN reported, the team behind Electrum (electrum.org) -- a popular lightweight bitcoin wallet that has been around since 2011 -- released evidence on GitHub demonstrating that the so-called...
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently sounded the alarm on tech support scams throughout the web and pointed out that cryptocurrency users are being increasingly targeted. Individual victims, according to the agency, often see losses “in the thousands of dollars.” The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) sounded the alarm through a notice that warns users tech support fraud...
If you’ve fallen prey to a cryptocurrency-related scam, you’re likely too mortified to admit it publicly. However, you should take heart because even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has found himself a few BTC short at the hand of an experienced scam artist. Wozniak related this embarrassing incident at the Economic Times Global Business Summit, explaining that he had sold approximately 7 BTC to a...
There’s a new bitcoin scam extorting funds from unfaithful spouses, but it’s using an old-fashioned medium: the United States Postal Service (USPS). Cybersecurity researcher Brian Krebs reports that scam artists have begun sending personalized letters via snail mail, threatening to tell the recipient’s spouse about an alleged extramarital affair unless he or she pays the extortionist several...
Earlier this week, Emin Gün Sirer, associate professor and co-director for the "Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts" at the Computer Science Department of the Cornell University, was impersonated by an amateur scammer who tried to trick people into sending funds to his bitcoin wallet. However, the scamming attempt failed. The scammer impersonated Gün Sirer in a Slack channel...
According to increasingly large numbers of reports, Group Bitcoin is yet another Bitcoin cloudmining scam that has been recently unveiled. As more and more ponzie and pyramid schemes are toppled, we can only hope that Bitcoin users are getting more wise. Kossigan Kpedenou stated that he had opened an account on August 1st with Group Bitcoin. On their website, Group Bitcoin states that they will...
As Bitcoin becomes more popular, so do phishing websites. A phishing website is a website that attempts to impersonate a company to gain information about it, or to steal money. One of the more popular methods of phishing is to make a fake website that looks identical to the real one with only a slightly different URL, and then have the user log in with their real credentials. The phishing site...