Bitcoin Forum

I've come into "some funds" that were once lost, I was contacted by someone from a bank in the UK to open an electrum account to see the funds and withdraw them too. In my default account it 1st showed me the lump sum I was told I would withdraw then Bitcoin went up and the money increased, once it increased it showed me a minus on my balance but was told the money is still there. So I opened another account as a "holding/personal account" to use between Electrum and Luno and practice moving the money. when it was time to withdraw I was told to put in a large amount of money to create a history between my accounts and once I move the money to Electrum "Holding/Personal wallet" the balance from the Default wallet would appear. Can someone assist on the legitimacy of this please.

Also in my personal research it shows Electrum doesn't have a support/email account but I recently received an email from contact@supportelectrum.co about the funds. is this also a legitimate account from electrum?
your advice will be highly appreciated, thank you.

No, this is definitely a scam and you shouldn't send any money. Electrum doesn't have a support email, and it shouldn't have yours either because it's a non-custodial wallet.

I'm curious though, were you asked to download software, or this was all done on a website?

I was told to download the software.
The account says “watch only” which didn’t make sense.

Then when they told me about sending money further made me more cautious.

As the name suggests, a watch-only wallet is used for watching transactions. There is no way to spend fund from a watch-only wallet.
Of course, even if it wasn't watch-only, you still shouldn't have sent any money to them. As stated by OmegaStarScream above, electrum has no support at all and they are trying to scam you.

Thank you for your help. :)

This is a 100% a total scam.

I really hope you have not deposited any cash or bitcoin anywhere that these people told you to. If you did, you can be 110% sure that the money/coins are lost and you will not be able to recover any of it. :-\

It's a similar situation to the "casino scam", where you get a "freeroll" and supposedly win 0.1 BTC but you have to deposit 0.01 BTC to activate your account so you can withdraw. This "creating a history" thing is totally bogus and unnecessary.

Obvious scam.  If it's your money, why would you need send money to recover it?

Not to mention, people don't just "come into some bitcoin."  You either earned it, mined it, or purchased it.  If you've never done any of those things you can safely assume that you have no bitcoin whatsoever.  This is just a phishing expedition, hoping to snag a whale.

Yeah, there are many red flags that make this a scam attempt:

1 - Banks will never call you first about anything that is not related to your bank
2 - Banks won't talk to you about Electrum, let alone sending them money.
3 - "supportelectrum.co" is not a domain name that belongs to Electrum at all.
4 - If you were told to download Electrum then it is possible that it is bugged, and that when you withdraw anything, it will send it to the scammer's address.

God most really love you. It's either that or it's magic.

Sounds very legit. Banks call people every day and tell them the locations of bags full of money. I got 4 bags in the last two years alone. It's more money than I can spend and I have stopped responding to their requests of giving me more bags. I am like, stop the harassment, I am not taking possession of your money any more for free.

The story sounds ridiculous right? It is. Anytime someone wants to give you "magic money", remember my ridiculous story. Whenever you need to pay a fee to get money, remember my story. Think of it this way: If I wanted to give you $20,000, but you had to pay me $100 to get it, why can't I just take the fee from the $20k I intend to give to you?

I am glad you didn't fall for the scam. I am also curious, how did you stumble upon this forum?   

Because there were way to many red flags with what I was told.
I’d lost the funds they talking about with “trading” a couple of years ago that’s how they initially got an in with talking to me.

So I had to do my research about the whole story they were telling me before I made any crazy moves.
So Twitter and Google led me here.

Also the person can’t stop contacting me.
Thank you all for your input (I saved me from losing money)

If it's only about contacting via e-mail messages, then you just need to mark one of those messages as spam and all messages should automatically go there. In case you think that the whole matter should be raised to a higher level, perhaps reporting to the police would be a logical step, because this is an attempted fraud that could have resulted in financial loss - so even though you did not become a victim, that does not mean that someone else will not believe and fall into a trap.

Think about how scammers could get your email. Is this a public email? How can people know that you have any assets in bitcoin? The more open you are with your information, the more often you will be targeted by scammers. Also, check your computer. From your post, it is clear that someone is periodically watching you since you write that you are advised to perform some kind of operation. Alternatively, to avoid further drama, change your email.

You downloaded some foreign software from those scammers on your computer and executed it? Seriously??
In the best case that was a genuine version of some remote control software like Anydesk. In the worst case consider your computer as infected (you might have some nasty hidden and silent harvesting malware to grab as much data like passwords, seed recovery words, wallet passwords or clipboard trojans; later some ransomware payload might give the final punch).

I don't know if those scammers can do hidden nasty things on your device while you had a remote session with them. I'd be careful if I were you.

Of course, I can't be sure if this actually happened to your device. If I were a criminal I wouldn't miss the opportunity to do such nasty things once I convinced my targets to download some foreign software.

This scam scheme is so old and still people fall for it, unbelievable.

The only one who sent you an email for me is a questionable move, it is obvious that you are talking to a scammer and he took advantage of your absence and lack of knowledge because he saw that you are not aware of these situations.

       From the beginning of what you said, the scammer has a bit of a mindset of what he wants to happen, you should be careful because that's not the correct process of using electrum in reality.

If the OP is still here, I hope he didn’t take the bait. The whole thing is a scam, OP should have realized that when he received an email from this address contact@supportelectrum.co Electrum wallet doesn’t require users to register with an email address so how did they get his email? That’s a big red flag to show OP that something’s not right. This is a rookie mistake that works on greedy people who want to make easy money. I don’t think the scammers were expecting OP to seek for help here.