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Two Canadian were imprisoned for 2 years after being caught from stealing 23.2 bitcoin in Twitter for scamming someone back in 2017. According to the US Department of Justice, 23-year-old Karanjit Khatar and 24-year-olds Jagroop Khatkar are two Canadian that were sentenced to imprisonment for laundering money and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Back in 2017 using the Twitter platform, scammers impersonated customer service of HitBTC (a Hong Kong-based crypto exchange) with a username of @HitBTCAssist. They responded to a question concerning the withdrawal process and the two were able to convince the Oregon resident to forward sensitive information which leads the scammers to transfer an amount of 23.2 bitcoin to their wallet. During the time of the theft, the amount was about $130,000.

After receiving that amount of bitcoin, the two divided the money into equal parts and within just two days, Karanjit was able to purchase a luxury car of Mercedes Benz and was able to gamble in high-end casinos in Las Vegas. Karanjit was arrested in the airport in July 2019 and the two pleaded guilty in December.

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This is a lesson for each and every one of us that we shouldn't be trusting everyone here on the internet. It's easy to create a Twitter account and act as if you're a legit account so we should really be careful when sharing private information (we shouldn't do that in the first place). They may look like a real account but of course, it's what they need to fool people. There is a high risk of getting scammed on the internet especially if they know that you have cryptocurrency. Scam and fraud are very common in this field so we should really be careful with our assets. We should know whether to trust someone or not.

I have already seen a lot of news like this and I'm sharing it with everyone to avoid being one of them. We wouldn't want to lose big amounts and our hard-earned money, right? If we were able to learn how to earn money, we should also learn how to keep that money safe from scammers. Let's learn from what kind of news we are seeing.

It's just sad to think that the scammer used the money for his own good. He manages to buy and do the things he wants. He lives in a luxury life using the money he didn't earn. If that was my money, I don't know what to do anymore. But gladly that they were already caught. Although I don't know if two years was enough as a punishment (aside from the fine). After two years they can still repeat scamming others.

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PS: I'm not posting this to promote the site, I just want to share the news with everyone. Thank you!

oh wow that is the story of 2 year. Taking so long for a fair desicions

I think it is some how funny how some people fall for some of these scammers. if I have an issue with an exchange they do have customer support, why not contact them, when someone from an exchange contact you asking for your coin, then you should run from that exchange, because something doesn't add up

Its social engineering. They are not asking for your coin, they fish people in social media to impersonate "official support", then they proceed to ask things like Account name (login), and try for example a lost password recovery (rather than asking you for the password), so if you have one of those dreaded "security questions" the impersonator will tell you something to the lines of "to verify your account, you have to answer our security question" (which happens to be the one the system is asking them real time).

They can also keep inventing excuses like that to reach all your important things like email, etc. Or use malware exploits or a combination.

I find more colorful what they did with the stolen money: Buy a luxury car, and gamble the money in Las Vegas... I would say very very stupid of them, its the only reason they got caught in the first place. They failed some money laundering checks (where did the money came from).

Of course, you should also not fall to social engineering tricks.

This is like sending private message to someone informing them of winning an award, price or gift and then asking you to send send personal details to confirm or redeem it. In such situation, you should know it is scam.
Personally, I have received such message and the best thing to do is to ignore such message.

Oh man, I've been very close to being scammed recently. Sometimes they impersonate the support accounts so well (especially on Telegram where you don't have "verified" ticks) you just can't make a difference.

In my case, I've posted a question in the Telegram group of an exchange and someone from the "Support Team" has contacted me asking me if I needed help. While talking to him, I had a little break of ~20 minutes from the phone but I had absolutely no suspicion the guy was a scammer because it impersonated one of the Admin accounts on the exchange group very well. However, 20 minutes later, I had the exact same message received from more than 5 different accounts acting as the moderators. Ironically, I still had 0 suspicions but I did not proceed to give them any details as my issue was fortunately already solved.

Weeks later, I opened up Telegram and all these accounts were banned and had a "SCAM" flair next to them.

It's quite easy to be scammed even if you're experienced. YouTube and Twitter "giveaways" aside, this is an easy thing to do and in my case never made me suspect something fishy is going on.

Take care and triple-check who you're talking with every time. You never know who truly is behind the screen. :)

I think this is old news: Canadian Bitcoin Scammer to Face Two Years Jail for $140k Twitter Fraud (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5210512.0).

I am glad they got caught, the number of scams in this market is very high and this is because scammers think they can get away with their crimes and they are not going to suffer negative consequence for their actions, and unfortunately for the most part they are right since most scammers get away with their crimes for years, they only got caught because they were careless and while their sentence is not really that long at least they now know they cannot scam people with impunity over the Internet.

2 years for that amount if Bitcoin ? Wow they will be extremely rich when they get out of prison that is for sure ( this if they didn't return the Bitcoin which I doubt they did ). This is a good example for scammers but what about Bigvern or mtgox guys ? Those should be 10 years in prison for what they did, am I not right ?

I have read this news article before, but didn't read the whole content, and I was wondering how on earth does this two have been caught when Bitcoin is completely decentralized and transactions are anonymous. I guess they made some stupid mistakes and exposed themselves as the two responsible for the theft.

There are really people who are easy to believe and was careless, but there were also people who are very convincing that you'd fall to their dirty tricks and get scammed.




Yes, It is. Took them 2 years to track down this thieves. Kudos to the police investigators.

i think the person got scammed were amazed by this persons offer, well i can't blame him/her if this two promised is  an eye opener, but this should be a lesson for those who will try to do this kind of scheme, find a job or be in jail for this kind of mess, for those who will be a next victim or if you feel that the offer or promised is too good to be true , stay away , or just don't trust people who you don't know personally, but hey sometimes personally know person are scammers too , beware and keep safe

Dude, did you even read the whole news? this scam isn't about victims getting an offer, it is about 2 scammers pretending to be a tech support for HitBTC. The victims aren't offered anything but instead got fooled to the point where they gave out their personal information to the fake support team.


It's 2 years ago, they probably didn't know that anyone asking for personal information is not a member of the real team since they are probably new to cryptocurrency at the time when Bitcoin was still booming. Maybe it was recommended to them by someone? maybe they googled HitBTC customer support and the first to came up with is that twitter account? because sometimes SEO is a really good help with this kind of things. Though it's 2 years after, at least justice is served.

Time and time again, people are always getting their money swindled in the Internet but we don't learn for a long time this scam has been a problem. If people had been using their common sense then there will be no one who will be fooling you, this must be a mantra in the cyberspace, don't give away your information on the Internet.

Still, there are a lot of people having trouble because of the cryptocurrency and especially the bitcoin because we all know that this coin is one of the most profitable coin among all time and many people today are using this to make a trasaction like transferring of funds, sending to other people, and paying bills and today there are a lot of way to be secured because the internet is full of source if the information and one of the things we need just to do is learn and study those concepts but still we have some trouble regarding with this because some of the users are still getting scam by the other people we cannot blame them because all we want is to earn more and some of the scammers are offering help but they have an intention to get your information and your account, some of them are really knowledgeable in computer and there is some way of having phishing just to steal your personal information. Again be safe into the cyberworld because we do not know if they are really true person, avoid having interaction with other people if you can just to secure your self too.

This is why everyone should always take cautious when dealing online. I am bit shocked as the victim lost a very huge money. Imagine 23.2 btc is already huge asset. How come the they didnt recognize that those impersonators are fraud.

Twitter should strict their process on using username and or even registration. Did they know how many cases of scams are recorded using their platform? This is alarming and should be change.

2 years of investigation and just caught those fucktards, I hope government can somehow return the loss money of the victim.

This is an important point that I marked from this thread. Lack of knowledge and desire to quickly get profits and wealth makes most people ignore the process of adapting to the crypto ecosystem. So they can be easily trapped by fraudsters who commit impersonates. It's a good idea, before sending any funds or coins, make sure you check whether it's an official account or not, and don't easily trust any news or instructions before checking.

Funny, such cases still abound till date. I don't know why people won't email support for delicate inquiry rather than going on a social media to expose themselves. One can't even submit sensitive information to binance online customer representatives on the chat session. People need to treat online personal as a potential risk and follow due process in trying to resolve issues.

These kind of thefts have really dragged the reputation of this industry in mud for a very long time and it's high time people get to know some of these basic tactics used by hackers. First of all, never resort to chatting with any body trying to offer you support if the person did not contact you in the official group of the particular project or exchange. Moreover, even don't hand over details of your account to anybody on the internet trying to help you.

As soon as bitcoin began to have at least some value, there were thieves and scammers who wanted to make money on it , no wonder.

No wonder there are so many people on telegram always acting like intermediary and assistant to many exchange websites. They will always want dev to pm them to assist in listing their project. They must have developed such a method of scamming just because they heard some people that the op describe stealing BTC using the same method. This is a wake-up call for everyone to always be careful in dealing with people especially on the internet

We can't really blame them. The victim had a question or concern about withdrawal. So it means he or she lacks knowledge about it. So the thing he/she did was understandable. He asks the official page but it's the impersonator who replied and responded to the victim. Perhaps they messaged the victim so the real twitter account of the exchange wouldn't be able to know that someone is impersonating them as a customer service. Since the two suspects saw that as an opportunity because they knew that, that person doesn't have enough knowledge and that they can fool the victim. Although the victim also has a mistake because he easily trusted them and gave personal information which is a big no-no here on the internet.

What a great strategy they have there. How old was the Oregon resident again?
But it is sad since those Canadian peeps are too young to grab bars. If they just used their talents in the right way, I wouldn't imagine how far would they take.

Maybe they just became too impulsive so they rushed things and committed to fraudulent activities. I myself have the ability to do social engineering. It's just that I will never do it. So, we must be careful about dealing with people on the internet. Don't be naive that you can easily fool by them.

this is very obvious and sounds like stupidity,buying luxurious car after doing a scam will really lead you to imprisonment ,and also these 2 are not professionals for doing such careless move.
back then in 2017 the twitter scamming is not that common and also newbies that time are really careless because scammers are using almost legit ways to victimized ,not like today that there are so many ways to find if the transaction are legit or scams.

It's really important to verify first whoever you are interacting with before entrusting your money, that amount of Bitcoin is big enough and the two scammers live a luxurious life after getting it from other people's  wallet. It's a high time for everyone to be more responsible and always be well aware of any situation. Instead of getting the help that they've need it's adding another problem as they've suffer from scammed.

Yes we need to be sure about everything specially in those sensitive case.
We could always check in their website if we need some help don't go into social media or any platform just to get some help about your problem on a certain site.
Good thing that the scammers got arrested but the money that they took could never be returned to thw owner since they already spend it.

Of course its old news, you posted it last year, and we had a discussion on this topic. Unfortunately reposting of old news from time to time is nothing new in the world of crypto media, because they obviously think that we have very short-term memory. It would be very useful to use the forum search option before posting, it would certainly help to avoid multiple threads on the same topic.

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I have already commented on the case, but I will reiterate that in my opinion the punishment is not appropriate in relation to the crime, only 2 years and very likely coming out after 2/3 of the sentence served is a ridiculous sentence. This sends the wrong message to the whole society that the crime is actually worth it, but you still need to be the more intelligent than the two brothers who buy Mercedes-Benz only 2 days after they stole BTC, and gamble most of the money in Las Vegas.

Those Canadians have pretty Indian sounding names. ;D
Anyway,how stupid is someone,who thinks that a big Crypto exchange platform like HitBTC would have their customer support working on the social media?The only legit way to contact customer support representatives of any legit website and platform is via email (and maybe via phone).
I'm glad that those two scammers are punished for their deeds.The trial was very slow,but there's justice at the end.Twitter accounts that are legit have a verification badge.We should deal only with verified Twitter users.

So the US Department of Justice did its job perfectly, so I was able to arrest these two thieves and impose a penalty on them. I see that it is necessary to impose electronic censorship on the cyber crooks because they are on the increase and many of them are still deceiving people in various ways to attract their money and disgrace them by luring something Little by little, to give their personal information or their account details, it is necessary to stop such farces to maintain the security of users and prevent the continuation of this catastrophe.