Bitcoin Forum

Just this year $4.26 billion dollars were stolen from users and exchanges according to a report published by CipherTrace.

Other notable scams include BITPoint, Binance and a 'typosquatting' scam in the Netherlands which I had never heard of until this report. Wild that this news is big enough to hit Business Insider.


https://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-cryptocurrency-scams-and-arrests-of-2019-so-far-2019-8

Out of all the scams I am the most impressed how Binance happened to handle user losses through SAFU.  Was also a great learning lesson for exchanges and users to adhere to privacy also AML/KYC so that users can be repaid. I know they work with compliance company Ciphertrace to help counteract any future problems

This shows that we should all be vigilant with everything we do in the space. Some crypto companies portrayed maturity in their scams, other lied and exit-scammed, whereas others are still trying to survive but in all, life goes on right. I hope that the amount we've all lost by far shall help save us and the future generation to learn and improve, and overall keep the ecosystem alive.

Someone already posted this on Press --> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5175309.0

Lock this thread.

Wow this article is really great and made me understand a lot, there are so many exchanges that I have never even heard about that existed, like that of Japan, this is the first time that I would be hearing of such exchange and also arrest of some of the suspects, so it is not as if the government is not doing anything about the stolen funds as we think, they are actually still regulating the industry too in their own little way.

All we just need is full regulation, so that the rate of the arrest can increase, at least with this, the cryptocurrency market will gradual get cleaned of scammers and will be safe place for investors again. Those fund that has been recorded, have they been recovered, and if yes, will they be returning it back to investors or that is going into government purse because if it does, it still would not change anything then.

this is huge indeed.im not talking about the hack but investment to scam projects is mistake of investors. i really cant believe it how can people waste their money that easily. bankrupt is ok as well but some projects are very clear that they are scam.

I agree that we need some sort of regulations but I believe having companies like Ciphertrace could be even more beneficial to bridge government regulators and the crypto community. We want to be sure we are preserving the ultimate goal of crypto

This is one of the main reasons why Bitcoin is stalling and not moving forward, right now Bitcoin's price just drop 4% from $10000 level it drop to $9700, and we are all hoping for another all-time high this year, which I doubt will happen, because this kind of news keeps popping to the community.

does this company (CipherTrace) do anything useful other than releasing nonsense statistics every couple of days? i mean we get it, they have started a new company and working on blockchain analysis but advertising their services like this with meaningless numbers that most of the times are wrong (like their stats on usage of bitcoin for illegal activities) is only going to be bad for their business.

The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars.
Source : https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/globalization.html

You are saying, " Just this year $4.26 billion dollars were stolen from users and exchanges according to a report published by CipherTrace. "

Globally, fraud is costing £3.24 trillion each year, a sum equal to the combined GDP of the UK and Italy. Source : https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/fraud-epidemic-costs-the-uk-110-billion-and-3-2-trillion-globally/

So, looking at those statistics, do you still think Bitcoin is the biggest problem in the bigger global context?

That is why after binance's hacked people are still trading there. Binance is an exceptional exchange and innovative exchange and they have many ways of handling problem. I have been trading in binance after the hacking with confidence that it is going to survive no matter what happens and what happened to binance if it other exchange especially the new one it could have been very difficult for them to handle it.

Hacking is a big business that is why perpetrators focused a lot of time, patience and resources because the ROI can be so huge and if hackers are good enough they can be actually untouchable and the assets they snatched can all be easily laundered even in many legit cryptocurrency exchanges...while the authorities are watching the movement of the assets. Let's hope that solutions can be formulated with this problem. This is actually one of the many reasons why instead of the industry directly fighting the government there is instead a form of critical cooperation as the whole industry is almost helpless in the face of the problem.

All I have seen from them are just statistics that are creating fud news too and when I talked about regulation, I am not talking of all these private regulations that will always be biased in their judgment, we are talking of government regulation here, and look at the arrest that has been made on some of these hackers by the government without even regulation, now imagine how they will be able to clean the space of cryptocurrency off scammers if they really regulate it. We need this regulation financially and legally.

The financial part of it is just to control the way that people just dump these coins and then crashes the market which they can never try this in stock market because it well regulated and which is why it is still one of the most stable market till date.

This number is enormous, and this scam has become a great crime. Some time ago, we knew that Binance also experienced hacking. But it only takes a while, the problem can be done. There is panic of investors who have assets on Binance Exchange.

We should always be cautious because if we lose money will surely be very disappointed.

although they have the same subject in focus, the OP is saying that this has made a big noise that businessinsider is talking about it, so in this sense there is no reason for OP to block this thread because the discussion has become different from the Press section


this company that is doing this research is just doing this research to promote itself. and I wonder how long they kept doing that and what impact it will have on the crypto world.

I remember the news about the guy coming from the Baltic countries. A fraudster lured $ 123 million from Google and Facebook. At the end of March 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a Lithuanian citizen who hacked $ 123 million from Google and FB. The scammer who pleaded guilty tricked American companies by compromising his corporate email address.
It was almost a perfect scheme worked out by 1 person.

i don't think they can affect this world that much specially since there is a lot of them nowadays and they usually are full of hot air. if they actually offer decent services and lead to capture of some thieves, hackers or something like that then it could be considered useful for example helping exchanges get the money they lost back. and that could help a lot but usually most of them are incompetent and so far we haven't seen anything useful out of them either.

I also wondered why this kind of news suddenly pops up with the price of bitcoin is going down. Do this media sites trying to create FUD to really pull the price?

CipherTrace is doing a lot of noise lately, I wonder what can they say about this one?

"The Chinese State Is Allegedly Sponsoring Attacks on Cryptocurrency Firms"


https://beincrypto.com/the-chinese-state-is-allegedly-sponsoring-attacks-on-cryptocurrency-firms/

Can they validate this report at some point in their investigation of crypto exchange hacking?

One of the reason of why investors are afraid of cryptos is because of scam so if this updated figure is true then this shows that the current regulation is not enough to neutralize those thieves. If the numbers of scam ICOs will continue to rise then i'm afraid that some countries will continue to ban Cryptos because there are still no reliable solution to control this problem.