Bitcoin Forum

It's sad that i fell into this scam.

So i generated a Vanity address at BitcoinVanityGen.com about a year ago "1LiMLimy69EEwZUgHGP6XXY4qGFg2vygfZ"

And imported it to my blockchain wallet.

But 2 days back, i found that 0.0075+ BTC has been stolen from that address.

 https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/address/1LiMLimy69EEwZUgHGP6XXY4qGFg2vygfZ/


It was my fault that i Trusted an online address generator and i have understood my fault.

So this is a message to all newbies out there, not to fall into these traps and always go for hardware wallets.

Rest in Piece my 0.0075 BTC.

But that doesn't mean vanity address (customized bitcoin address) is not safe. Generate address being on offline by download vanitysearch in official github [1] or generating using a split key [2] is the safest way to generate vanity address.

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[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144752.msg51114479#msg51114479
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144752.msg51126883#msg51126883

Sadly, you were not the only one.

The scammer behind the website was waiting for the right moment to steal the coins from all the addresses he generated.

https://bitcoinvanitygen.com - not samr7 vanitygen (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5280338.0)

And that was not the first time. Velkro (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=303026) (the website's owner) has been scamming people since 2014 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349635.msg6009509#msg6009509)/2015. At least the website is down (for now).

Yes it was my mistake and i am now regret of it.

But it is even more sad that, when anyone will search on Google about "how to generate Bitcoin vanity address" , the first result they will get is that to go to BitcoinVanityGen.com to generate an address.
You can try yourself and see.
The article is https://www.dummies.com/personal-finance/generate-bitcoin-vanity-address/

But thankfully the domain of BitcoinVanityGen is not working any longer now.
Hope this scam has come to an end.

The said user is tagged by Lutpin in 2016 and later on, a lot of people have taggef hin because of his insecure Vanity Address Generator. You must have check everything related to crypto in bitcointalk first. Anyway, you are lucky that the loss is not that huge.
Generate address by yourself, you can trust LoyceV service as he use the best secure method so that he doesn't have access to the address. Moreover, he is trusted in the community. However, I still suggest to generate your own.

It was reported to their host (I think) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5280338.msg55327706#msg55327706), but he'll probably just move to another hoster.
Amazingly, Velkro's signature (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=303026) got wiped! He's not banned, I wonder (and hope!) he has a permanent signature ban.
Feel free to create a Flag (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;addflag=303026) against this user.

Hey Velkro, I give you $5 for the domain to end this forever ;)

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If you want a new vanity addy, my Pretty Addy Giveaway (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1813624.0) has been running for 4.5 years and ensures I don't know your private key.

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Unfortunately, he mainly posts on the Beginners board, which showed his signature but doesn't show his negative feedback.

Thanks, but there's no need to trust anyone with your private keys, so this really shouldn't matter for my service ;)

looks like he has a new website, the website is new but at the bottom it states "2014-2021"


http:// vanitygenbitcoin . net/

but this site was just registered on 6/29/2020


also this person appears to have quite a bit of background looking into the site

https://ushertechs.com/the-bitcoinvanitygen-scam

The person who recorded this video also seems to have researched a lot about the scam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjGx4JCKcy0
Some day the scammer will be caught.
Criminals always make mistakes or someone always denounces them.

Sorry but I havlve to be a little harsh on my reply..
You were looking for a vanity address.. Right! This means you understand how addresses are being generated, right?
If you understand how addresses are being generated, you will never trust a third party to generate it for you. You understand that if a person give you an address, he certainly knows its private key..
Well, you trusted him, now it's time to assume your responsibilities.. If you want to have a vanity address, either generate it by yourself or use LoyceV's services.

I thought you are saying the one who recorded the video is a scammer also. The worst is it shows in top of the google results. The site works like a charm, it can give you vanitygen address, so those who doesn't know the history of the site will be its future victims.

Ugh, I feel for you and anyone else who got taken by the scammer(s) behind that site.  I'd played around with generating vanity addresses before but never quite trusted the method used to generate them (probably because of my own ignorance even when using a safe one).  The ones that you can generate using a web browser always raised a huge red flag for me.

Yep, sounds fishy as fuck.  I haven't checked out that link Tryninja posted yet, and I'm wondering if the scammer used some kind of SEO to get his site at the top of the search results.  That probably sounds like a noob, naive question but I'm pretty ignorant about such things.  And if the other site was at the top and the scammer just started his robbery spree, I also wonder if other people who've generated addresses from it have recently made horrible discoveries.  Yikes.