Bitcoin Forum

A person (who shall remain unnamed) in my high school told me that they bought an alienware laptop from someone (worth around $2k) for $250.  Immediately, alarm bells went off, so I asked him how he got it for so cheap.  What he said disgusted me:

He bought it from a guy in Italy who told him that it was with a stolen credit card.


I dont get this.  How can someone morally accept that they are blatantly defrauding some poor unsuspecting person?  I mean, I get it, Amazon.com will probably take the heat for it, but I still don't get it.

How the hell can people think that this is OK?  And, I mean, the guy was 14 or 15 years old.  At such a young age, buying a laptop with a stolen credit card.


I worry about the next generation of humanity.

almost everything has a good and a bad side

eg. the more credit cards that are stolen, the more careful people will be with their credit card numbers

he could be doing the 'victim' a favour... but no-one other than the victim will ever know whether this is the case


you are simply speculating that this is bad from his point of view, when in reality you don't know him, his personality, etc.

life-changing events can also change people's lives in a positive way, despite how unrelated third-parties may judge the event from the outside.

Well, it's not as if the victim had to have been stupid with their CC info.  Many credit card thefts are at no fault to the victim.

Also, I cant think of _one_ person who would want to have their CC stolen.  I don't think personality matters too much there.

i never said he wanted to have his CC stolen, only that having it stolen may have had a positive effect on his life.

not knowing him or his situation or his personality, i can't say whether this event was bad or good.

;;votekick danieldaniel

I don't really understand what you're saying.  How can having something stolen -- not at fault to them -- have a positive effect on his life (not being sarcastic, I actually want to know what you're thinking)?

;;voteban jcpham
;;tell jcpham LOLUMADBRO

this hardly requires much imagination, so it's perplexing that some may find it difficult, but here's just one of a billion possibilities:

guy is lonely, wants a girlfriend
guy has cc stolen, goes to bank to address the issue and meets the teller of his dreams
guy weds teller and has kids, grandkids
guy tells grandkids, "my life really turned around that day, i'm so glad my cc was stolen"


looking back, i can say that having had my house burgled in 1993 had a hugely positive effect on my diligence for security and data backups. and i'm glad it happened.

He's not defrauding anyone. They just write it off.  ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCZRqH7sRyA

Whether or not the victim is actually better off in the long run or not has nothing to do with the buyer's lack of moral convictions.

Of course, we are talking about a teenager in high school.  My own mores were not very solid at that age either.  But knowingly buying stolen property is still a crime.  Perhaps you should educate your schoolmate, if possible?

As for all this ;;voteban crap.  This is not a democracy.  No one gets kicked because they express an opinion, even if it's obviously bullsh*t.

also, whether something is a crime or not ALSO has nothing to do with the buyer's morals or lack thereof.

Just because they write it off, does not mean it's not a criminal activity.  This is exactly the reason why businesses that accept CC's have to increase their prices buy about 3%, in order to cover the chargeback theft & fraud.  It's just like how shoplifting increases the costs that everyone else pays.

Granted, that's one more reason for Bitcoin uptake, but it's still wrong no matter how you spin it.

I intended "crime" in the malum in se sense.  That it's always wrong to knowingly buy stolen property, and it's illegal (or should be) as a reflection of that fact.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Malum+in+se

are you being off-topic intentionally?

or are you accidentally confusing the law (not mentioned in the OP) with morality (mentioned in the OP)?

nm, read your above post.

Dude, just keep reading.

Someone should bring out a credit card where instead of the 3 secret numbers you can instead use a code generated by a yubikey or google auth etc. I think this would be a great invention  :o

I agree.  It's very sad to see people with such fuzzy morals that they cannot see how something like this is wrong.

I live in Italy and and I was offered a 2012 MacBook Air for 300€ yesterday. I admit that I really wanted it but I refused.

I'll take it.  :D

Hah, this is funny.  The guy that he bought the alienware from scammed him, so now he's out $250.

Karma.  It's a bitch.

And I tried to "educate" him, but sadly he didn't really care.  All he could see is that he was getting a great deal on a laptop.  He didn't understand that someone paid for that.

I think people do stuff like this without feeling guilt because of how much the credit card companies and banks rip people off. In the end, they're the ones who will pay for it.

That might just be me though. Still a sad thing to see someone do something like this :/

Prince Wabubi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5FXmAfxkg&t=26m22s) strikes again.

Criminals. What can 'ya say.



That said, a certain stance in this thread... is screaming for a comment.

"E&G", also known as payb.tc, operated Bitcoinmax, the largest feeder fund to Pirateat40's BS&T Ponzi scheme. His final block chain balance with the Ponzi appears to be above 83000 BTC at over 159000 deposited and over 75000 withdrawn. His paper account balance on shutdown should have been above 140000 BTC. When BS&T was attacked with serious Ponzi allegations, the user was extremely uncooperative in providing or even confirming data. His posts were deceptive and happy to undermine the credibility of critics like myself. Block chain data appears to show his account being early to withdraw back out of the Ponzi -- before he even started the feeder fund. Later he was able to claim an undisclosed 0.7% additional weekly paper profit on the entire paper balance, again only public through block chain analysis, though the withdrawn amount is unknown.

His real balance appeared to be negative with more than 3800 BTC withdrawn pure profit BEFORE the feeder fund even took off. The lack of data on the feeder fund leaves a window for personal profit far in the five-digits. He is probably the second-most important person to organizing the largest Bitcoin scam in history, and likely to rank the same as profits are concerned.

I would take this person's moral stance with a grain of salt. (This is a euphemism. He is blacklisted to me and anyone who takes my advice.)



And now: posts telling the world how being scammed can be good for your life.


inb4 absurd comparisons to the bet I negotiated.

Thieves always have a reason why they are not the bad guy.   ::)

::votekick BS

just for the sake of replying to ridiculous accusations: in total i lost over 5000 personal coins to pirate. believe whatever you want though, the opposing side does a good job of pulling figures out of thin air.

also anyone that thinks [some event X] is either inherently bad or good has a seriously one-sided view of the world.

ultimately all events are neutral until someone (without all the facts, mind you) decides to make a judgement call, putting their own personal stamp of approval/disapproval on said event.

doesn't change the fact that an event may be good and bad at the same time, or neither.

There is no point in claiming "these" numbers are out of thin air. You know where quite a few of them come from. The site itself spread some data and there is plain accounting on two block chain addresses that happens to perfectly match a deposit-withdraw-interest pattern. How exactly is this thin air? You call my reasoning "ridiculous". How so?

State the correct numbers instead of making fuzzy statements on the correctness of mine. Which are wrong, and why? How about publishing some Bitcoinmax accounting data?

Also, "Opposing side" is an interesting choice of words these days. By the way, I know of exactly one (!) person of "the not opposing side" that has apologized. Many of the rest either went silent, got scammer tags, or even banned, though none were punished directly for he case at hand. It seems nobody feels they did anything wrong and people like Hazek, Maged and Vladimir, who tried to prevent this catastrophe, don't even deserve a comment after the fact. They surely got into an unnerving flamewar for months only because it was so much fun.

Let's say it is true and through a sudden change of heart a net 5k personal coins were lost in the end. Not that I have any reason to believe it. So I also shouldn't use the block chain evil thin air numbers. How much was it then that your customers burnt via Bitcoinmax? How much was withdrawn overall by Bitcoinmax? What was the final paper balance? And, again, which of my above statements are wrong, by how much and why should we have ended up with wrong numbers?

damn he got a hell of a deal

leaving pirate and bitcoinmax in the past where they belong

focusing on the future

last bump on the subject

I don't think karma applies to this situation.. if he were the one who carded the gear and then he got scammed by someone buying it then ya karma yada yada.

He was gullible and fell for a scam... sounds like bitcointalk member but in any case he should have used escrow lol.

too bad he wasn't legit or I would be asking you to hook it up  ;D