Bitcoin Forum

Background
I own Winnipeg's original ATM, it's a two way machine from BitAccess.

What happened.

Yesterday I stopped by the machine to empty it, and a young women was trying to scan a QR Code.
I told her to zoom out, it was pixelated.
So she got that to work than proceeded to insert $1900CAD into my machine.
Pressed finish.

While she was using he machine I had some general inquiries, asked if she knew much about it, If she minded me asking what she was doing it for, her quick answer was "For my work".
So I left it at that.

Once she was finished, I went to open the machine, than she suddenly became more talkative, I guess realizing I owned it.

So here's her story, please, How many red flags do you see?

She was hired by a company out of Miraco*, To be their Canadian Financial Rep.
They were moving a company office into our town and she was the first hire.
She took it upon herself to call the building they had apparently rented an office in. The building told her "No company by that name is moving in, and we have no open offices", She proceeded to contact the company again, they said "Not sure why they would say that, we move in July, maybe it's a privacy thing".
They then wanted to test her ability to handle funds and different currencies.
So they asked her if she had access to purchase and send BTC, she had heard of my machine. so said yes, but clearly knew nothing more about it than that.

So, They send her an Electronic funds transfer of $2000 CAD, Told her to take her fee of $80 and Buy bitcoin to send to them, at a QR code they emailed her, To prove she can use both methods.
After this was where I'd started speaking with her.

** end her story**

Now, had she told me this prior to putting the money in and clicking send, I would have stopped her.  RED FLAGS everywhere.
After the fact, I told her that sounded fishy and to call her bank and see what they say.

Today I got a call from her, she had started a report with the police, and they said it was obviously Fraud. And had told her to call me to see if she could get her money back.
I may be inclined to refund the access feee, for machine use. But frankly, this women had gullable written all over her. They saw it from Miraco, had I not spoken up she'd likely be till all happy.

That being said.

Have people seen this? She said it was sent as an EMT.
Which CAN be reversed, if sent form a hacked account etc.
The other option is, they just used the poor women to make an illegal transaction.
She is unsure if the bank will reverse the funds. Or if the RCMP or some other agency will come knocking.

Here's the transaction ID: ff7145605763de444302d2fd06226cd40c5732568159075ba1de580aaee445dd
And the wallet it was sent to, 17wzu7UDtyRRGWXqHUa8BvY53mJvKGAr7m

Which was clearly done by a few people and than cleared.
My kung foo for searching the blockchain is not very strong. but maybe some bored individual can find something I can pass on.

Although I feel this is gone.

Right now I'm in talks to ensure they don't think they get to come after me for refund.

Mostly posted as a story, and heads up. Although, So many read flags, I'm not sure 99% of people would fall for this, but it clearly works...

Thanks for listening.

EDIT:
To Clarify, I feel bad for the gullible person, but feel they should of known better, put no blame on myself, the BTM or Bitcoin. Just an interesting story.

Wow that's crazy. Maybe they were tricking her into laundering money?

That's my concern, less likely to bounce, mor elikely they used her as middle man for an illegal transaction

a shame to see a person getting taken advantage of. How many atm's do you own btw? all located in the same city?

Only one. First one In Winnipeg, just not enough draw to bring in any more :(

Woah, I think they were basically using her to launder money, and testing to see if she could do a simple transfer before giving her too much on the plate.

Try walletexplorer.com. As far as i see the money going into that address is split into half then send to a new address. There happens the same. Then it gets collect and withrawn. Im not sure what kind of website that might be or whats the purpose is. At the end some landed on btc-e. Though its not possible to know the coins were still owned by the scammers.

Might be worth asking them maybe.

I can understand you pitying her.

Not nice to see someone being ripped off but in this day and age you would think people would  e a bit more savvy when it comes to their money.

Those nigerian prince's and money forwarder and all wouldnt be tried if there arent always enough gullible people that dont know that scam yet.

Im not sure that will ever change.

sadly this is very true

a shame, BTMs should be far more common. I think the main reason they dont get a lot of draw is because of poor advertising though. I think i found some BTM locations in my city but only after searching through a bunch of unreliable webpages. A cheap website with some SEO could do you wonders. Goodluck with the venture!

Or you might add your machine on google maps. You can create entries for such things, normally for businesses. But since google is the most used search engine, and when you add some words that people will search for, then youre chances are good that your ATM will be found more often.

More than a refund I'd worry about legal issues... man you should look to solve this thing in a way

Sounds like a classic Man in the Middle attack to me.

I am guessing the EMT will be reversed and the "company" she was talking to was not even the party that sent the EMT in the first place.

Is is always best to do business only with people you trust and NEVER accept reversible payment methods in exchange for BTC (irreversible)

I believe that the funds were most likely withdrawn into an intermediary address, most likely a blockchain.info wallet and then were directly sent to btc-e. From the blockchain.info address, funds were sent to wallet 00001235fe (https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/00001235fe6868f6) via  c2f05dcf01f4ebef591b34ca7189e70e964b04f7e28402f26a7fc291642741b3 (http://blockchain.info/tx/c2f05dcf01f4ebef591b34ca7189e70e964b04f7e28402f26a7fc291642741b3) and  b8d25dd9cf6c24bd55c2338ec28b12f72d5cb7884a55ef649f99d34ba890bdb7 (http://blockchain.info/tx/b8d25dd9cf6c24bd55c2338ec28b12f72d5cb7884a55ef649f99d34ba890bdb7). If you look at that wallet, you will see that it receives deposits from several different wallets, then all of the transactions out of that wallet have big outputs to BTC-e (https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/BTC-e.com), and the change is only ~.01 BTC.

---

Yes these electronic transactions to that poor ladies bank account are reversible, yes she could potentially be implicated in a number of crimes because of what happened.

Her first mistake was agreeing to use her personal bank account for any kind of business, even if the transaction was legit, (it probably wasn't) you should never conduct business out of a personal account

They used her to launder no doubt about it. Think it was a tim Ferris podcast he had a guy on that described that exact issue of people caught in the middle.

In the balkan region, we have some similar stories, where scammers search for persons willing to take transaction to their account, keep about 5% of it, and send the rest via bitcoin or WU.
They use hacked accounts to send money, and after receiving funds disappear.
Regarding your story; secure your position so that u make sure she cant ask refund from you in some way (although i dont see how she even could).
I believe she honestly was scammed,it's insane how naive some people can be.

cheers

Even though you feel bad about the situation, it is not your fault and you should not have to bear the burden for her mistakes. If you really want to prevent this in the future, perhaps you can add a confirmation screen to your transaction process that asks the user to confirm that they are not doing the transaction on behalf of a third party, and if they say they are, display a detailed warning of this method of criminal activity so they understand the risks before continuing.

(bolded by me)
That's a really good idea. Two thumbs up!
Not only to prevent fraud but also to avoid potential trouble that comes with money laundering laws.

It IS a good idea. Though i think OP wont be able to change anything in the software. Though he might be able to push the provider of the ATM to bring out an update of the firmware/OS so that he can update his ATM.

Even though youre right about that she could be a scamer herself... im negatively impressed about the mindset you show here. Did you have a similar thing happen to you or where does this insensitivity come from?

Besides that... i dont think OP is at risk. The woman chose the way of transaction. OP is not obliged to pay anything back i believe. It was her free will to send it.

If he has the obligation to refund her then i would like to know on what basis.

that story was crazy. I think it would be quite easy to fall for something like this. Especially if you just got hired by a company after a time of unemployment or something like that. Going that extra mile to finally get/or maybe keep a job.  :(

Does the BTM manufacturer have a thread here where I might suggest this?

I dont know. I only remember of occassional groupbuys for ATMs but not of companies presenting their ATMs here. I guess OP should know more and can contact the producer of his ATM as well as other producers. Guess thats something he might do since the topic is clearly worrying him.

The lady is not in on the scam, she is Canadian after all.