Bitcoin Forum

apparently a 28 year old man was mugged last month in New York City.

he wanted to sell his bitcoin in person, when the buyer (which he met on Craigslist) turned out to be a robber and took his coins at gunpoint!

story at coindesk:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-stolen-new-york-gunpoint-robbery/


selling bitcoin in person is not safe anymore, next time we should sell out coins in a public place with witnesses present!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082099.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082099.0)

Thanks for sharing man now i will also go with gun when selling my bitcoins...hahah

Btw how are he going to sell to him in a person? There is so many escrow that you can count on here and he is selling it without any third party? I think that is a bad idea on selling bitcoin. You just at least pay a little fee to some escrow and he can transfer it to you safely

True, but maybe there is a reason to him so he can't sell it in a person. At least, this news has made us be careful and aware to any crimes that can be happened everywhere and every time.

That's the business model localbitcoins uses. You can arrange to meet buyers in person and sell to them directly for cash. I think the sellers often charge more for the service, but take the risk of being mugged or followed home.

You still expose yourself to risk even when using a trusted escrow from this forum. On the other hand, there's little to no motivation for an escrow to steal your money if he/she already has a sizable collection of coins from back in the CPU/GPU mining days.

Hard luck to the guy in the article, it's a real shitty thing to happen to somebody but I guess the risks are there when meeting for a face to face trade.
I've already decided what I'll do if we go to the moon, I'll want to sell a large portion of my stash in one go i.e. not on an exchange.
I'll do an OTC (over the counter trade) with a large bitcoin business & they'll charge like 5% of the fee etc but it's safe, quick & easy.
Maybe the guy in this article needs to take a shotgun to his next face to face trade.

Thanks for the new news, only last month ya say. Don't fud of course it is as safe or not as safe as it has ever been, the only thing you have to do is use your head and think security over profit. There are places to meet things or people you can take that can make things go as smoothly as needed but greed gets the best of some/most people.

Bitcoin is getting known so there will be a spot for a crime that will happen in present or in the future. We can't avoid this things but we can still try to prevent it happen.

This is where digital world meets the real world.

If it has value then some New Yorker is going to figure out how to steal it and sell it at a pawnshop. It's the state pastime like baseball is for the rest of the country. lol

NYC is big place im down south country where most people in this town i've known my whole life... but yeah internet you may get scammed but your life will never be in danger... always try stay safe bitcoin or $ not worth it

Well at least somehow bitcoin is getting in the news. Maybe not in the correct way, but at least the distribution is happening. ;)

I am just joking and BTC users should be more careful.

The coindesk article doesn't say which area he was robbed in. People used to say the bronx was rough, then one of my friends said queens was getting a bad reputation. He said in certain areas you were very likely to get robbed if you had anything of value.

Years ago I heard they had gangs that could strip a car in minutes and you only had to park in the wrong area to find your car had been dismantled. If the Bitcoin seller was in a rough area it's no more than you would expect if you had anything of value.

That problem has existed for a very long time in New York. If you're an old movie buff watch the 1970s movie The Out of Towners: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066193/
Or the 1979 movie The Warriors: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080120/

There's an option at person on person exchange;
Do the exchange at a police station. If the buyer/seller doesn't accept that term then he's probably a robber :)

The things people will do for bitcoin is just ridiculous, I thought the begging on dice sites was bad but this is on another level of ridiculous.

even then he could threat you with a gun in his jacket pocket
actually theres almost no way to sell bitcoins without risking a scam.

There isn't really an issue with meeting people face to face as long as it's done in public. I sell on both Craigslist and Gumtree quite often. I never meet at I home for my own safety and always insist on meeting in a public place. Go into a Starbucks, buy a drink and wait. Even if the buyer doesn't show up because he/she only intended to scam/cheat and doesn't want to meet publicly, I still get to keep whatever it is in selling.
I feel bad for the guy, but the message is to meet publicly and stay safe.

"A fool and his money will soon part."

Economically and potentially physically suicidal to trade BTC in NYC, if you don't go through metal detectors with armed security at all access points (ie courthouses). Or just violate "gun control", because violent criminals give zero fucks and have all the guns they want at all times everywhere else.

why a police station?! :O
if you tell someone to meet you for trade at a police station he will run off thinking you are going to arrest him. lol

probably in a dark alley :"
but the article mentioned that the robber lured him to a vehicle, and then forced him at gunpoint. maybe the meeting started in a public place and ended up in another place.

That's why always sit in a very very public place like lunch time at a coffee shop.  Or even better preferably at a place where there are armed guards as well like airport, train station, downtown security office, municipal lobby, etc.

that person create a new history so after this Robbery now he is the first person who get robbed, i think never heard that kind of story in the bitcoin's history anybody lost his coins on gunpoint so that is another interesting story added to there.

Public places are not that safe either. I remember seeing a thread here almost two years ago (can't locate it right now), which dealt with a similar incident. A bitcoin seller transferred his coins to the potential buyer (the deal happened in a crowded library). But after the coins were transferred, the potential buyer, rather then paying the cash created a noisy scene and in the end, ran off with the coins. The seller was a handicapped man, and he couldn't chase the thief.

actually i don't think that he was the first one who got mugged.

he was the first one who got mugged and became known, maybe because he was from New York.

but i have heard that someone has got mugged before, there was a similar topic here long time ago about it.

The guy that got robbed is an idiot.

1) Replace "bitcoin" with "gold" and then think through if it's a smart idea. You're going to meet a stranger to arrange to sell your "gold" - in NYC of all places - and expect the transaction to not be at risk of theft? Completely naive.

2) Bitcoin's infrastructure makes it possible to sell your bitcoin for cash without having to go on Craigslist to do it! If this guy spent a bit of time figuring out what steps in the transaction he needed to get cash in his hand he would have been able to avoid this risky (albeit convenient) transaction. Clearly the robbers know how to get the full value out of those bitcoin, I doubt they'll be posting another craigslist add to sell their stolen bitcoin.

Is it news if someone claimed "I was robbed, someone took my cash!"? No. Unless the volume is in the tens of Millions.

I think a better take on this is that if the NY Post is writing articles about bitcoin, bitcoin is becoming more mainstream. People in NY aren't going to be turned off of bitcoin due to the theft, they're going to be intrigued thinking "maybe this bitcoin is something I need to have!"

they can force you even without any weapons, so it's a bit of pointless, usually if i see someone else with the one you are trading, i would raise, in no time, a red flag in to my head, especially if that person is unknown or slightly known

wow you paint a horrifying image of NYC, I feel like I am watching Sopranos. and the guy was mugged by Christopher in broad daylight while cops were watching :D

Things like that do happen in RL. I went to the Pride Parade on Market Street one year (in SF) and watched a cop watching two guys pass a joint around 10 feet away from them. They never did anything and eventually walked away. I'm sure NYC cops see so much crime they get immune to it and ignore most of what they see.

NYC doesn't consider selling bitcoins for cash money transmission like all the other USA states? Because then the victim could become the criminal...

Well we want BTC to become mainstream, right? So, this was bound to happen. Actually, I wish it would have already happened, it just shows everybody that BTC is real. It has real value so it can be stolen like any valuable.

Force you how? Blackmail? Unless they hand you a document and don't say a word, they're being recorded by your mobile device. Pop out a memory card or otherwise transfer it to law enforcement at the courthouse after the blackmailer's in cuffs.


Good for those cops not arresting victimless criminals, assuming they were not forcing people to inhale secondhand smoke (one would think the winds would disperse it quickly if they were in open air). NYC cops in public are not who you want intervening, unless you want to be shot along with some innocent bystanders as they mag dump at your armed robber. At least at a courthouse, the timing will be such that you'll either be inside already, and they'll be firing in the opposite direction, or outside, and they will have already shot the armed robber for trying to pass through the detectors/x-ray before you arrived.

It becomes a criminal offense only if the value of the transaction exceeds $10,000 (as per the anti-money laundering law, and the Statute 560.125). Then the person will be in trouble if he doesn't possess a money transmiting license. But in this case, Bitcoins worth some  $3,500 were stolen from the victim. So criminal charges doesn't apply, in my opinion.

not sure about NYC but in texas we have a crime for committing theft under $50 (Yes a 0.05$ piece of gum could get your this charge) and felony charges start at thefts about $1,500 which means min 6months prison after $5000 would be minimum 2 years prison sentence

This only happens in "gun free zones" like NYC. In the rest of the U.S. a crook would be risking his life to try this.

the fact of people using weapons in public its not safe i mean the secure state policie and al its nessecary but for regular peopleno soo you shoud invetigate if that person hass wepons possession in law if soo be even more carfull people with gun licences and nervouse are quite terroristical never aprroax to much even being your infancy friends all people commits errors and pays  for it and megligence of safty its a error too.

Well I know I don't want you to carry a gun. At least not until you sober up.

Too true.  But your logic is too overwhelming for most to comprehend.

Seems to happen a lot in Texas too. Or Alabama. Why are the armed citizen not firing back?

https://www.google.com/#q=robbery+at+gunpoint+texas
https://www.google.com/#q=robbery+at+gunpoint+alabama

I think the robbers always risking their life everywhere they do action. There is always a chance to them even the place full of people. The robbers just point gun to the victim, tell to be quiet, and give what they want.

Because there are Jim Crow infringement taxes to be paid to be a legally, publicly armed citizen in those southern states. Violent criminals love the disarmed who can't/won't pay.

His first mistake was craiglist.
If you use LocalBitcoins and use a person with a long history of successful transactions, in a public crowded place with cameras, I don't think there is any risk involved.

Interesting story. I agree LocalBitcoins are a better option, but i never really understood local btcs the whole point is a digital way so going someplace to exchange a digital good seems silly to me.

i can only think of traceability, and more privacy wanted, or because it is more practical for them, if you knows someone that sells bitcoin in your zone, i'm sure that you will deal with him instead of going through all the hassle of registration that are present online

False sense of security: 1) Almost all CCTV systems do not have sufficient resolution to run facial recognition on and 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect