Bitcoin Forum

Blockchain.info provides a nice to use feature "WatchOnly Address"


With use of watch only address you can add address to your wallet to keep track of its balance. This is useful when you have offline wallet and you would like to see its balance in your blockchain.info account. This is possible because blockchain.info will also add balance of this address to your wallet balance and will show it as total balance in your account. For example, you have balance 2 BTC in your wallet and you add a watchonly address having 3 BTC balance , blockchain.info will show you 5 BTC as your total balance. Good.

Since it is just an address added to your wallet and not actual private key you will not be able to spend bitcoins from this address. If you will try to spend, it will ask you to provide private key.

How the scam works :

Scammer creates a brand new blockchain.info account and adds an address as watchonly. So now it will show you balance of that address as balance in the account.

Scamer confirms trade with some one for BTC. Scammer says to seller that he is a noob and  dont know how to operate blockchain.info account. He gives account access to seller. Scammer asks seller that he will give access to his blockchain.info wallet to seller and seller sends him agreed upon goods ( most probably LTC or any other crypto currency ). Seller checks account and sends him goods. Seller tries to withdraw BTC and he can not.

Normally new users get stuck with this. One of my customer got this issue :(

So now onwards make sure you do not accept blockchain.info wallet access as payment. In case you do make sure you transferred coins to your wallet first.

In any case you should never trust wallet coming from other party as he may always have access to private keys. Always make sure bitcoins are transferred to address under your control only before completing the deal.

Cheers

Interesting. If only the scammers used their brains for something useful. It is actually the fault of blockchain.info for showing "watch-only" balances as true balances.

right, the scammer can't be held accountable for his actions. damn the blockchain.info! witchhunt!! witchhunt!!

Blockchain.info is a forever BETA software with its share of problems.
Add scammers to this and it makes it a boiling pot.

I do not think this is blockchain.info fault. Its simply the smartness of scammer that he exploited it to scam some one.Though it will be great if blockchain.info can do something about it.

The day when scammers will  use it for some productive work, I am sure we do not need to worry about, well we have lot of worries :(

Cheers

oh i agree. i just got done exporting 14 addresses due to uncomfirmed tx's. i kind of see it as myself "graduating" to bitcoin-qt. now im a real bitcoiner. with the help of pyWallet the unconfirmed tx's dissapeared.

Blockchain actually writes
"(Watch Only)"
next to all watch only bitcoin addresses in Red.

Very hard to confuse it with a usual bitcoin address whose private keys are stored.

But yes, its always best to sweep the account first with all bitcoins before processing your end of the bargain. Or to use an escrow.

Thanks.

very hard to miss unless u r colorblind, which some people can be.

The issue is blockchain.info adds balance of watchonly address to your main balance and thats where the issue is. So when poor newbie receives account from scammer it shows 2 BTC in balance, and when he tries to withdraw, well he will get annoying message box asking to provide private key. The issue is, no newbie is going to check addresses to verify if it is watch only address or not.

This has happened to one of our customer and while helping him we realized how creative scammers are these days :)

Cheers

i wonder why people dont come to this forum first and look around then do the trade.

If people only took the time to learn the basics of bitcoin they would never be fooled by this scam. I mean you don't even have to know about how blockchain.info my wallet works just how bitcoin works. The private key behind an address is the key to spending the coins in that address. A wallet is just a collection of private keys and anyone who has had access to a wallet has those private keys. So there is no question of transferring wallets. Not even those that do contain private keys.

Can I publish this post on my BLOG?

Yep, sure.. 

Cheers

That's great that there's a big red warning to protect people. I believe I've seen a similar practice used before.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRwYDSUNDSDZ0r64O7h9nfxiCTUhkyOkkE6TQaXDJPCS1yinuOd

The above doesn't apply to me because I smoke ONLY two packs a day.

Offtopic...

Phin I will recommend you to watch "Thanks for smoking" :)


Regards

I think we can unpin this now.

To many topics pinned on the main page.

+1

Agreed.

so are you about to a make video on this kind of things to aware your customers how to be careful from scammers? ;D

No bro you are 100% wrong. its not fault of blockchain.but they bring this great feature for everyone. people often like to use multiple wallet for multiple pupose like- different wallet for exchange, trade,store,cold storage,lend...etc.now this is great feature to track your all wallet in just one place.

now according to you this is fault of blockchain so nowadays there are many cases can be easily seen that someone call you and ask your credit card detail otp on your number too.and they suck all your bank money.
so we just started to blame bank instead of peeking inside your foolishness?
really this point should be noted.
actually this method to fool people is called phising not fault of any service.because any service security and accuracy is defined as how its difficult to break or inject on it's database.phising is another matter here.

one more thing for your such type of through (blockchain have fault)that if you get someone's bitcoin account, wallet you he can easily transfer all coin because he is created that bitcoin address so he have private key.and if you are really doing this you are plait person ever. ;D