Bitcoin Forum

Hello Dear Bitcoiners,

Firstly I appreciate the Beautiful Block Chain Technology but after

Have anybody lost/got stollen their Bitcoins due to Fradulent activity and the best ways to get/retrieve them back.However the accounts have been locked but the damage was already done.I got to know that somebody transferred the Bitcoins into an external address only by myself after checking my account which had 0 coins after two hours of the transfer was done,immediately called my Wallet customer care where they locked my account to hold off on the further transactions but thought two hours was not too late to hold off the transaction but it was already done.4.5 BTCs just got off and my heart broke.

When I buy a Bitcoin it takes a week to be delivered into my account but when a fraud happens the transfer went on immediately :(..Wish these scammers are punished and there is a little enhanced block chain technology to stop these :(

Any advices/help in this regards is appreciated :(

But always protect/safe guard your accounts,I would repeat the same message in each of my post as I know how painful it was to loose your hard earned money for some scammers :(..I would have been happy if it was donated by myself for charity purpose rather being robbed/stolen by the scammers/hackers :(

:(

Sorry for you loss. However, this is nothing new, people need to understand the technology and risks. Never leave BTC on exchange wallet, web wallet. You need to secure your BTC and control your private keys with hardware wallet like Trezor, Ledger...I hope you will recover from this hard experience.

First, there is probably nothing that can be done to get your coins back.

But, can you tell us more about the service you used to buy your coins and where you were storing them?

Something doesn't sound right.  You said it took a week to get the coins deposited in your wallet?  And your wallet has a "customer care specialist"?

Bitcoin deposits can be slow, but not a week.  And most people store their coins in a desktop wallet or hardware waller, which would not have a customer care specialist.  Something sounds scammy about the people you were dealing with.  No one should have access to you wallet except you.  If you were storing them at an online service, there is a chance it was the online service that stole them.  

Yes Hashface, I know nothing can be done but ray of hope always exists.
Bought the BTC from coinbase and were left on gdax , that is what I do and both coinbase and gdax do have limited customer phone support .As I again said dont mistake with the numbers you find on google, lot of scammers there. Make sure the numbers are posted on coinbase and gdax accounts.

Btw it takes a week time on coinbase to receive BTH or ETH atleast when I bought.However now Iam left with nothing with these unknown scammers/havkers whatever they are. It was so unfortunate that I didnt receive an enail either when the BTCs were transferred to an external adress,such a bad day for me.

As I again said ray of hope always exists and some Robinhood comes down to save the depressed souls who loose their hard earned money and kick away the scammers.

These scammers are so occupying the world that even google search is not able to controlthe way they pop in the search as legit.

Thankyou for your time and reply

It is very sad because i can really see that you are a nice guy, and 4.5 bitcoins are not a little amount of money, it is more than a house in some 3rd countries.
I am so sorry mate, but all this things are always happening to those who are never protecting their coins, and of course, their computers.
Maybe you can be infected by a rat, and they are going to stole your coins by that way.. I am sure that it was a hard-earned money, but you are going to recover soon.
good luck mate.

How did you lose your bitcoin? Did you not use any 2FA in your account to protect your account from getting hacked or your bitcoin getting transferred without your permission. Protecting your investment should be on the top of your list, setting 2FA could atleast slow down the hackers and you get notification if your bitcoin is getting transferred.
 
Also, it is not advisable to leave your bitcoins on exchanges for too long.

I'm very sorry for your loss. That's is quite a bit to have taken. Would you care to share what service you used, so others may be more wary

I cannot believe it.

Have you set up F2A protection of your coinbase/gdax account? Then it is impossible to transfer BTC without mobile phone....

Thankyou so much for all those kind and protective bump given.Iam not sure if the coins could ever be recovered or not but to hear kind words makes me feel better.

Two more things I would like to tell is that,not sure if it was a secuirty glitch or so,i didnt receive an email either after the transfer was done which usually I receive.And my 2fa authentication was on too but at times vn i login in the same computer it dont ask me for it.I tried to protect my hard earned coins in all possible ways but that few minutes when the time is not yours and was for the lucky hackers it was all gone.

@slavosome what is there you mean by not to believe it?
Nobody would like to come into a public forum and  and would like to waste everybody's time by giving their untruthful stories.My incident is completely genuine and iam here atleast to alert others to be safe and protective with their accounts and not to be a prey like me for the scammers.Jus a little bit care for the bitcoin society I have shown.

It means ''unbelievable'' , incredible.
I am shocked be honest  ???. I thought F2A had to protect  widhdrawals both FIAT and BTC from exchanges...
I am sorry for your loss.

You've forgotten about the purpose BTC was invented. To allow people to handle their own money, to eliminate the middleman. You're saying that you called your wallet support and they locked it, so you were using an online wallet. In other words you voluntarily gave up the control of your coins.
If you want advice I'll give you one. Stay in control and you will be the only one to blame if you lose your money. Now you don't even know whose fault it was. Did they manage to hack you and get the passphrases or did that site leak it. Maybe one of their employees stole your money? Even if it was so you won't be able to do anything about it.

Hello DarkAngel,

At this point of time,yes I take the total blame for the trust I had on people.After all we are humanbeings with a normal thinking and being a woman,I was pretty cool brained soul and ended up learning a big lesson.

Imagine 4.5 BTCs for a person like me is a Huge loss,non-reversable and unrecoverable.

Big lesson learnt and spreading the awareness to my Co-Bitcoiners to not to fall a prey.My damage has been done ,hope a Robinhood comes his way !!

Sorry to hear about your loss, 4.5 BTC is a big amount and I am sure you feel sad. It is really not feasible to keep your BTC in an online wallet. I suggest you to invest in a hardware wallet which cost less than $100 to keep your BTC safe.

Ah, man, i'm sorry for your loss. This is just plain bad. It's really amazing how many shady characters there are out there just waiting for the oportunity...

The blockchain technology is not weak, it is the endspoints (exchanges, wallets etc) that are weak in security. Bitcoin hacks have become sophisticated with time. But, where there's more regulation and accountability on exchanges, it will only become better. Presently, things are not good but it is going to get better

It's hard to hack  ;D. Impossible, I think so.

Thankyou Svelto,already my money has been drained I should wait for some more time to restart trading and put eveyrhting in a safe wallet once Iam back.To start it back I should wait sometime to earn and buy BTCs or somebody should give a humble donation :))

Anyways thankyou for the concern.

Infact,frankly speaking it would have been nice of those scammers/fraudsters to beg and get money rather stealing somebody's BTCs this way.

I would have been generous to donate if they would have asked me rather stealing from me.

Now my situation is the other way round,after loosing the BTCs :((

You need to improve your account security, your bitcoin wallet. Somehow hackers can install malware on your computer

Thankyou Chip,will take all those precious advices if I start trading again,still coming out of the fact that Iam at a huge loss.
Trying to meditate and keep my mind cool,not so easy though after seeing such a huge loss.

Coming back into the normal world and feeling good after hearing such good words and still makes me feel and hope that there are nice people existing there still.

It's hard, I know, but you need to get up again and maybe, try to investigate a bit on what happened. Malwares, logging in insecure devices, this all make online wallets the worst way to secure your BTC and should avoid it if you have more than 1BTC. Good luck in future, hope you get back.

Today, the case of loss bitcoin so much, we must pay attention to the password security,
We shouldn't say the password for anyone, as well as personally related to bitcoin account

Bitcoin allows you to have a control over your money saving it from fiat inflation and manipulation by centralized authority. This makes you responsible for the security of your Bitcoin. If any one develops a system to reverse Bitcoin transactions, then that gonna ultimately kill the integrity of Bitcoin. Indeed scams are way too common in crypto market. Along with pros decentralization and anonymity have their owns flaws as well.

The only ones that have the power to reverse the transactions are the developers, and I can't see that fork being supported by the miners or the community. Bitcoin allows you to keep your Bitcoin safe yourself, but it's still open to influence from anyone with a decent authority or investment. 

Totally Agreed guys,its irreversible and still havent had that fork introduced/implements and dont think so it would be something we can expect as per the  knowledge I have.

Yes the investigation is being done,I updated my Exchange on the unauthorized transaction,by the time I saw it was 3hours past and was told its not reversible and my acccount has been locked.I was angry/upset/annoyed about the fradulent activity had all the mixed feelings and finally broke and had sleepless nights.

I also updated the scam numbers which says Coinbase/Kraken/GDAX support and try to access your computer.The surprising thing is if you search for GDAX support thats the number which pops up first,already updated Google on the same and have raised a request to delete the number from the search so many people could be saved from those scammers/fraudsters.

Its easily understandable that they were the ones who did all these,but there was no way to get hold off them as the numbers dont allow my calls as my number is blocked in the receiving calls and they dont have a website or anything.ALl they are doing is calling you from 888 number and get hold of you and get into your computer.

Hope Iam already little out of it but still need sometime to completely come out of the nightmare.

Feels like wish I kept it more secure ,it hurts to see the 0 in place of 4.5 BTCs :((

Hope a miracle happens and I see the number again :)

I don't know exactly how the "hacker" stole bitcoins from you, but I can recommend you to use an offline wallet
Because an online wallet or an exchanges wallet , is unsafe. (Like blockchain, localbitcoin etc.)
And NEVER give your private keys to anyone!

@mondobitcoin Lesson learnt :(

I'm really sorry and I know it's a big hit. It would be the same for me as I wasn't born with a silver spoon and I'm not used to taking money for granted.
The only thing you can do is follow your coins on blockchain and hope the thief is dumb enough to deposit on an exchange without mixing it. You can also ask the site your money were stolen from to send you the ip of the person who made the withdrawal. They most certainly have it. Most of these hacks could be tracked back to the source if you were backed by the authorities. For instance if he used a VPN, the service could be asked for his real IP.
Bottom line, as long as you control the keys the money is safe. I have been using various cryptocurrencies for the past 4 years and haven't lost a single coin, although I was close to that when the exchange I used to trade on run away with all the money. Luckily, I went on holidays and had nothing there at that time.
I hope in the near time cryptos will explode again and you'll get everything back and more :)

I do not even know what to say. Maybe you're lucky in something else. Maybe there is love. I dont know. Do not be discouraged, do not worry. If somewhere it decreased in another it'll increase. I hope you will have a pleasant surprise in the future.

Sorry for your loss man and I do feel on what you do feel since I did experience these things back in my newbie days too which ive been scammed and lose up all of my hard earned money which you do strive to earn and they did easily get it from your because of our negligence and carelessness. Talking on enhanced blockchain technology then theres no such thing exist this is why we should really be careful on online transactions to prevent such accidents of being scammed.

first of all people must need to understand the technology and risks, there is no safe fo naif people who not care for the level of security that should be  take before going to press any button   ;)

@fahim Thankyou so much for the kind words..Always a ray of hope exsits for people who are being cheated by shady souls.

Interesting topic.. I've been wondering more about this and how to protect myself.

Improve security..use different accounts.Don't keep all the eggs in one bucket.Divide you money.

Yeah,sharing each others experiences makes others to be more secure and gives a reason to be more protective with their wallets.So please share more and more advices guys !

Sorry to hear that you lost your hard earned money. Let this be a lesson for everyone who uses online wallet.
Online wallet should be used only when you need to exchange or trade the coins. You are not supposed to store your coins in that.
Next thing is always use unique passwords for your wallets . If you think you will forget the password, then store it somewhere safe.
If you use same passwords in all websites you signup then its really easy for scammers to hack your account.

I’m sorry for your loss, it is unfortunate that there are so many hackers and scammers and I do not think things are going to improve if bitcoin becomes more popular since at that point there will be a lot more money to be made for those criminals, the only thing we can do is to secure our coins to the best of our ability, this is why I’m very paranoid when it comes to my bitcoin and I take all the precautions necessary to protect them from those thieves.

Totally agreed with you and lesson Learnt :(

True Bart,still not able to come out of the shock but trying to :(..All these messages are making feel better and strong and to make sure in case if iam back into trading to be more secure.

I have not in any way lost my bitcoin because my private Key is always secured...

I am so so sorry for your loss :(. Online wallets are dangerous to store long term, as you have found out. I know its difficult, that quantity of coins... I would however for future use recommend the following:

If your using Bitcoin and storing funds you do not wish to lose, consider something called a 'hardware wallet'. These wallets store your private keys within them and can be plugged into any PC, even one with coin stealing malware, and the malware cannot at your private keys, especially with the ledger wallet keeping keys in a secure enclave. Your PC sends the transaction to the wallet to sign it, you can use it even on an infected pc, and it shows the wallet your about to send to on its little screen, and forces confirmation with a button on the unit. Ledger also supports multiple cryptocurrencies, and resembles a USB type stick.

PC or mobile / online wallets are fine for day to day change, but for ultimate security, use one of these, and keep the 24 word recovery phrase safe (i mean it!). Simply plug in, enter your PIN and then you can use it like any other PC wallet. You can load the same recovery phrase onto multiples, this phrase is stored offline, store in multiple locations, or even do what I do and keep an encrypted copy on CD at the houses of family members as well as unencrypted copies in a safe. Great if you forget your PIN or the wallet becomes defective.

Grab yourself a ledger nano s:

https://www.ledgerwallet.com/r/e656

I prefer ledger to trezor, as ledger uses am audited type of secure enclave wheras trezor uses a generic microcontroller as does keep key, both are good though.

Or, you could always use an offline generated paper wallet. In any normal PC or mobile wallet, especially on a PC running windows, keys can be stolen by malware, even when encrypted as the malware waits for your decryption password to be entered. Online wallets can go bust or otherwise be hacked. Great for day to day change, not for your savings. Paper wallets are inconvenient unless being used for long term storage. If your going to generate a paper wallet, use bitaddress.org. Bitcoin being a trustless system, the private key is proof of ownership and funds are irretrievable due to shares consensus rules enforced by the protocol. As long as 51% of the network agrees on rules, nothing can happen other than those rules, and the current network rules are the private key no matter who uses it is the key to unlock the funds.

Electrum does 2FA wallets as well, which are more secure than an online wallet, but in my opinion hardware wallets are the best option, but if you go this road, format your hard drive before setting one up, as you have no idea what malware may/may not be there. Plus, Kaspersky internet security is probably one of the best on the market, in my opinion.

I am so sorry for your loss, I'm always aggressively pushing hardware wallets, as it really is the only way to stop crap like this.

Even if your not hacked, an online provider may be, or in the case of blockchain.info, they had a bug a couple of years ago, reusing a numerical value which is meant to be unique each time a transaction is signed. Someone could view the signed transactions on the blockchain and determine private keys from the public keys using this method, as two transaction signatures with the same r value will leak the private key, a flaw in ECDSA public key cryptography.

Multisig wallets or not reusing the same address for sending transactions will protect you from a potentially faulty RNG when signing but not while generating, although most decent wallets fix this. Or fake wallet sites like the 'coinomiapp' (fake knock off of the coinomi site, do not visit it) will try and trick you into entering your seed etc. There are so many pitfalls, and I think the hardware wallets are simple enough to use for the novice user, and much more secure, provided you don't keep the recovery phrase saved on an online pc :)

Please grab yourself a hardware wallet for storage, do away with any kind of online/desktop wallet for any large quantity of funds, although I would give an exception to coinbase multisig vaults.

Grab yourself a ledger wallet, store the seed safely in multiple trusted locations, and NEVER have to go through this again. I am so sorry for your loss, £30k plus is no small sum to loose!

I'm sorry to hear that. Well, what happened to you was also experienced by others. Some of my friends encountered stolen wallet. Truly it's painful and hard to think about it because you did not only lose the money on your account but also the time and effort you had given for a certain period of that campaign that was lost. But as everyone said, charge it to experience and take the lesson learned. All you have to do now in order to avoid stolen bitcoins or hacked account is to take necessary precautions, secure your account's password or private key. If possible, you must be the only one who knows it. Do not share it to anyone or any othe websites prone to scammers or thieves.

Even so, online wallet accounts are at risk as they keep your private keys. Even using most online PCs is a risk due to malware. Even with an encrypted wallet, they will lie in wait for you to decrypt, then swipe the private key from memory. The mt gox and the cryptsy situation is an example of this, you should always use a paper/hardware wallet for storing large quantities. I have an electrum 2FA wallet and an android wallet for day to day change, but most of my funds are secured by a ledger wallet/paper wallets. Ledger wallet chrome app is easier to use than most wallet software, all it needs is the ledger wallet be plugged in to sign transactions.

HD wallets with seeds like ledger/trezor/keepkey/electrum also remove the problem of change addresses not being in recent backups, with all keys generated from said seed.

I would say hardware wallets are more secure than unpassworded paper wallets, as you can use them on a compromised machine safely, whereas a paper wallet is ever so slightly vulnerable if you were to sweep it on a compromised machine.

Everyone are not lucky dude :(

Plus, even if its secured, if hes used any type of wallet with a faulty RNG, its a ticking timebomb. Hence why theres only a few well known wallets that I trust to have a secure RNG.

Quite a few people on here who take security measures like 2FA on online wallets get quite cocky about it, but thats not enough. A good, audited hardware wallet like ledger, an audited paper wallet generator, or a wallet like electrum 2FA is probably one of the of the few ways to keep coins 99.9999% secure. Even then, there is the $5 wrench attack (google it).

Even the trezor hardware wallet had an exploit which helped some soul here recover $30k USD of coins - $3000 bounty to the hacker he paid to help him, a wallet used to secure millions of pounds in coins:

https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/

granted, you needed physical access and its been patched, but no system is infallible. Plus i bet there are many trezors out there which hasn't been updated. And this is one of the go-to secure wallets, but very few notices it uses a generic microcontroller.

Best that people on here even those who are 'i told you so' type, should never get cocky. Even I do not, and i use multiple wallets. And now is not a time to get cocky or i told you so when some poor soul has lost £30k.

Even I, a big proponent of bitcoin security had a dumb moment and entered my ledger PIN wrong three times, making good storage of multiple backups of the seed vital. Not counting the time my other ledger wallet somehow became defective, im currently trying to RMA it with them now, but i still have used, and trust their product for years after doing my research.

2FA while good, is not enough on its own, i proved this to a friend of mine with his permission, was easily able to social engineer most places to remove it. Yes, always enable it, though.

I am really sorry for your loss mate  :(

hard to know about your loss getting 4BTC hacked is not a small thing as per the current market one btc itself is above 7K and its not a small amount to loose what you have invested . And it is not practical  to reverse the transactions as they won't be traces left to find out to which person or account the btc was transferred as btc tech maintain high privacy of its clinets and never keep any kind of personal data of its users so its not at all possible to find out where your btc went its always safe to hold on your btc in offline wallet so that it doesn't get robbed in the future.

That was a valuable info not only for me for all the Crytp holding guys.BEcareful guys,shady ppl and shady activities to steal your digital currency.

The case of loss bitcoin so much, we must pay attention to the password security. We shouldn't say the password for anyone, as well as personally related to bitcoin account.

Have done the investigation Member.

They called themselves as GDAX customers care and took control over the systems and have done this hacking.

As said lot of shady people around :(

"Wallet customer care" smells scammy. In actuality you don't need any person to work with your wallet. If you wanna store your BTC really securely, you should use hardware wallets.

yeah thats right mate that is the must important to avoid  that problem so that no one can manage our account . But there are some stuff now adays around the internet that maybe can force brute our wallet information such as phising link / url link and etc to read all the information involve in our security.so isuggest to becarefull dont attemp to browse if you have doubts on it. Review first before doing anything . Best regards