Bitcoin Forum

7 BTC so far, and I feel embarrassed  :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[ :-[

1 BTC loss -- the now infamous StackCoin IPO scam where I was one of the victims.

6 BTC loss -- even more embarrassing.. I got greedy and decided to buy some newly released altcoin (name withheld) from a fellow bitcointalk members... We made a deal to trade 1 BTC for 1 mil at a time.. Then I got greedy after he promised to cut me a deal if I sent him all 6 BTC at once...

Well, I did.. And this guy disappeared right after I sent the payment.

How naive can I be? You ask? I'm gullible i suppose  :-[ :'( :'( :'(

A while ago scams were extremely rare, a huge amount of coins have come in. You really need to do alot of research. There is a large majority of players out there who are trying to further technological development in both services and coin development. Learn from your mistakes, everyone has lost money from bad investment.

the easiest way to not lose money is to not invest in IPOs, how many IPO coins actually came out worth more than the btc that was put in? Has there even been a single IPO coin worth it?

0 btc ;)

That was his giveaway. You just need to think about people's motives all of the time, every day in your life. This is a life lesson you learned its not just about investing. Everyone has motives and every human's primary motivation is self interest.

Kind sir, thank you for the kind words *sob*  Thanks for not laughing at this noob. :'( :'( It kind of makes me feel better to know I'm prolly not the gullible fool I thought I was.

Anyways, as scams are becoming more and more frequent & sophisticated (as I've just witness in the Radix Foundation thread:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=500209.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=500209.0)), I'd say that it's becoming rather difficult for a noob who's new to the altcoin scene to detect & tell a scam from the real thing. big SIGH* 

I think the prevalence of scams is what brought the price of altcoin down these days. 

So true, and thanks for the advice. I'd say that I'm probably a very naive and trusting person by nature. It's rather easy to gain my trust and confidence even though this is the internet and people are protected by anonymity.

Case in point: I was trading with this guy from a certain eastern european country. After providing me with several tips (ie. showing me those secret onion sites where I can find the best deal on the web), I started to compliment this guy on how helpful and trustworthy he was. LOL... There were a lot of warning signs (ie. He gave me a tormail address and refused to give me his primary bitcointalk acct among other things). So we started trading 1 BTC - 1 MIL, and the first trade went smoothly. And then right after I agreed to his deal and sent him my precious BTCs, BANG!  His bitcointalk account got banned right away (I believe he did that on purpose although I have no clue how he did it).

So, I'm starting this thread to warn you my fellow noobs..  :D :D :D  Next time if you run into the same guy, don't give him your BTCs like I did..  :-[ :o ;D ;D


Yes, sir. NXT comes to mind... I think that's the real problem. A lot of people like myself who have missed the NXT boat don't really want to miss the next big thing.

That's part of the reason why IPO scams are so successful nowadays.

Always use escrow services.

Even escrow providers get played these days (the famous Anon comes to mind) Sigh..

It's really up to any individual to do his own due diligence before investing. But as I said, it's getting more and more difficult for a noob like me to do that since scams are becoming rather sophisticated (take Radix scam for instance), as most scammers seem to buy into the motto - you gotta spend money to make money.. lol.. Screenshots, nice web sites, even working demos are no guarantee that a project is legit.

Even those shitty scrypt coins can be considered scam in some sense (I also happen to be a victim of LeafCoin scam).. LOL

The future of altcoin is not bright, I'd say...  :(

Hi Mis069,

I came back to say THANK YOU.  I know I need to change my way of thinking and I've decided to do that starting today. I guess I might appear to be overtly gullible because I really feel that this would be a sad world if people cannot trust each other. That's why I was always the one who sent the payment first.  ;D

But the reality is that it's a sad world we live in, and there's nothing I can do about it. So I'm the one who needs to change. I got that now. Lesson learned.  :)

The truth is I've got hurt & used a lot in real life too.. not just online.. by people I knew and thought i could trust. What u said really makes a whole lota sense, and I really wish someone had said something like this to me earlier.

It really got me thinking. So thanks.  :)

Scammers are everywhere , but you should have used reputed escrow before sending anyone 6 BTC .

Zero lost, but I'm interested in which scamcoins you bought into and got scammed.


John K is currently MIA with coins.

Ok im very new in the cryptocommunity but what i can say after 3 months is:

Cryptoworld is not quite different from "Realworld" both are very scammy ;)

and most just want the best from you: your money!

We have to look out for the exceptions, and for me i'm also ignoring most
of the Nonsense- and Shitcoins which appearing every week.
In most cases only a small group around the dev(s) are profiting from the
coins and soon this coins are gone.
Also this shitwaves of copy & paste coins scaring newbies and damaging
the reputation also of most of the other coins (especially for non-crypto
enthusiasts).
Avoid IPO's from Shitcoins, avoid Premined Coins (if there is no real idea
or concept) avoid whatever smells fishy :)

and keep smilling that is the best medicine ;)
and of course never ever go all-in with something you are not sure about!

Hi Guys,

Yeap I feel the pain!   its hurting the crypto world badly and is stopping new people from getting getting into it.

Mining is my hobby so I started a website www.miningcryptocurrency.com.au to Help Aussies get into it as we are a bit behind, plus our power costs are high!  anyway I was sick of the online scammers and setup my site to help people do it as safe as possible and also ensure its done as ethical as possible.

These people are the lowest of scum as they are ripping off people who are trusting and trying to make a dollar so to loose $1000 is devastating!

I have also been ripped by Cryptorush as they in my opinion are misleading, they won't reply to emails!  and they are not clear about their website as what they are really saying is if you transfer in BTC or LTc we are keeping it!  the only way to get your money out is to trade it for alt coins but the alt coins are at least 33% to 50% higher to buy, so if you do and then transfer out when you sell you loose out!

Then I also seen they were selling off their hugh gpu mining rigs! I could not believe it that they had a hugh mining farm and running a exchange!  they can pump and dump, delay orders or make sure their coins are sold at higher prices etc, its so wrong.

If only we could unite world wide to have a central point for all facts to be listed clearly as a one stop place, it will make it so easy for us to review scammers etc, the forums are too spread out and watered down.

I even just got banned from the Australia coin forum as I kept asking to know who they are and if they are in Australia as they kept avoiding any questions, they banned me for abuse yet I did not abuse them or swear but they certainly attacked me,I only kept asking who they are, they also locked their forum on here and started another one instead of answering the questions so now they can edit and delete anyone who questions them by the looks, their website www.auscoins.org is also hidden so you can't see who or where its actually owned!  you have to pay extra for that! the weird part is they made the coin red/blue/white and that is not Australia at all.

3.75 btc here.

Someone just went offline with his account and never came back.

Shouldn't have switched without an escrow. :(

You are not alone my friend. I got burned hundreds of times before finally learning that people cannot be trusted. Its a sad world we live in.

I have been robbed about 15k euro plus 31 bitcoins by mtgox.

Best regards,
ilpirata79

0BTC  ;D

I lost 2 BTC in early November on a silver bullion deal gone sour. Dude never sent the silver after I sent the BTC. This was when BTC was trading at $200. A week later the price BTC exploded so that sucked even more.

I have lost another 1 BTC aprox. to scam pools and to exchanges like Cryptorush.

You really have to learn to shrug shit like this off, after all this is the wild west.

Scammers have always been around. Two years ago I tried to buy some bitcoins for $20 each, after the scammer posted an offer here. Sent payment by paypal and never got any bitcoins. No harm done though, as Paypal refunded me. It put me off bitcoin for two years though :/

14 BTC, I got scam by NineLives (MiningHardware.co.uk)  >:(

8.8 BTC at Coinex.

it is help for him to buy new Scrypt miner farm from KNC.

Coinex has kept some of my Doge in withdrawal limbo, but otherwise no real loss to scams for me. It wasn't much Doge, but still... annoys me they have it (or lost it).

I am curious what types of scams people have lost money on. Although people seem to complain a ton about shitcoins as 'scams' here, most of the real loss would logically be from bad IPOs, bad exchanges and flat out thieves.

Coinmarket.io: a fraction less than 2 BTC and it turned on the proverbial dime. When it was flickering in and out of 521 Land, I test-withdrew 0.01 BTC and it got through. So, I waited until it was online again and withdrew the rest: about 1.989 BTC. Just my luck, it withdrew back into Area 521 as I clicked the Email confirm link. Since then, I've had a recorded withdrawal with no tx id.

If only I had withdrawn 1 BTC instead of 0.01...

0 and a bit.

Yet to be scammed but lost a reasonable amount of BTC in PC death and the recent price falls haven't helped. I have only invested a portion of what I've made from Gold appreciation since 2007 therefore nothing to cry about (but crypto has been nasty).

The last four months must have created a shed load of Bagholders.

FYI, I prefer Gold as it's the only thing in the World that is actually money (most other things will eventually return to zero).

Sorry to hear it.  If you didn't contact the site admins, and the account went away anyhow, It's a strong indication that you were not the only victim.  The scammer's got to figure that if she scams people from her account, the admins are going to hear about it and she will lose the account within hours  (or get it marked as a scammer, which would be just as bad for scamming).  Therefore, once she makes her move she only has a few hours of active scamming before she loses the ability to abuse whatever trust people have in the person behind that account.

So, to make the most of a few hours of active scamming, she'd spend weeks and weeks on the setup, with as many targets as she could handle.  Heck, she might even have operated tor sites giving the very best prices for bitcoin (at a slight loss) in order to "earn" the marks' trust.  All of that ... unfortunately for you ... is bait.

But once the active scam starts, she has to move on all the targets and move fast before the account gets marked scammer and the targets notice.   If she  can get all of them to trust her with a few BTC, on the same day, then she walks away with a tidy profit.

Think back...  was there a big looming deadline or brief window of opportunity that the scammer (or one of those onion sites whom you don't actually know wasn't her) told you you were about to miss out on?  I'd almost bet that there was. 

$3000

But I learned from the experience, was that really a loss?

If this site was moderated properly we would have fewer scams and more faith in cryptocoins. The positive feedback is lost and therefore you can't trust anyone.

I made a bunch off DOGE :D ;)

I've lost about 20BTC in scams though over my bitcoin career. Mostly from being a dumb fuck.

An update guys.

The Australia coin Dev just emailed me over night with this.



Strange behaviour !  banned me for asking to know who they are as I am Australian, stated I was abusive etc, yet if you read their posts they were abusive and aggressive from what I can see.

Now the email above quote, thats the only PM they sent me and I find in my opinion that this is a form of intimidation!

Just a pity he got it wrong as its not me!  lol  I don't use Facebook!  haha ::)

As I kept saying to them they are digging their own hole and are their own undoing as they won't be upfront and declare who is on the team!  they state on their web page your getting a part of Australia crypto coin!  yet we still can't find out who or where they are!  they also state that the DEV team s Australians yet I think it is only one person doing the posts.

Whats the world coming to ……

Don't buy pre-mined country coins! FFS! Not Iceland, brazil or any other shitty country! If their president endorses it... maybe... but till then. Fuck em

Well lets see:

1 BTC - buying QRK, pretty much worthless now
1 BTC - buying NXT, not worth as much as before
1 BTC - buying EAC, pretty much worthless now
1 BTC - buying WDC, pretty much worthless now
1 BTC - buying MZC, pretty much worthless now

Buy shit before other people are buying it and sell a bit when the buyers start coming.  Be a capitalist.

Calling losses like that a scam is something I've wondered about, as many here use the term rather loosely. Why do people tend to call unwise coin purchases a 'scam'? Is it looking for someone to blame? Or do you feel that a fault with the coin that lowers its value somehow denotes it as a scam?

All the scammers reading this thread

https://i.imgur.com/JepIwLq.gif

Why not?

I haven't been scammed, I have made alot of btc recently trading country coins and surely some others as well

I guess I'm a smart fuck then

Most likely. In the stock brokerage trade, complaints like that are called "sour grapes." You see that kind of hurt all the time in the penny-stock forums.

But...as the behavioural-finance experts have shown, buying low and selling high is profoundly "inhuman" and hard to pick up unless you're practically raised from childhood to do it. The people who master the skill (to the extent which anyone can) tend to become really cynical as a result.

That's life in the salt mines. So it's not all that hard to see where a complainer is coming from: buy low and sell high is much harder than it looks.

The best thing to do is to get into a coin with a long-term future, hope for the best, and pitch in if you can. There were Bitcoin "bagholders" riding a 90% loss in the tail end of 2011...when Bitcoin was selling at $2. A rising tide bails out people who bought at the top of an interim bubble and have the faith to hold on.

The funny thing about Bitcoin is that some "Bitcoin millionaires" picked up their BTC on a lark in '09 and '10 and then forgot about Bitcoin completely. Strangely, forgetting about it means there's no temptation to sell early on in the bull wave to snap up a nice profit. If there's a journalist around here, the story of the "accidental millionaires" would make a great human-interest-type man-bites-dog item.   

That would certainly explain the overuse of the word scam in this forum. I'm not saying there aren't a ton of real scams, but I see it being used to describe pretty regular coins way too often. I guess it is easier to say a coin is a scam, than a person simply made a bad investment.

I did read about one fellow who was one of those bitcoin millionaires in some article ... I think he paid $25 for btc while he was researching cryptocurrency for a paper. Then forgot about it, and years later found out it was worth like a million or so. It was mentioned a lot, so I expect many here saw it too.

If I had invested in btc, I think the only way I would be a millionaire now if I was one of those people... bought some really cheap and forgot about it. It's so tempting to sell off once a decent profit is made. Instead I vaguely heard about btc around 2010-11ish (I think), didn't know much about it, except for the fact my PC at the time was insanely underpowered, so I had no chance to mine any. Then I forgot about it. I guess the lesson learned for me is, you can't win the lottery if you don't even enter it.

Well said. I heard about BTC in mid-2011 and got interested, but I got scared off by those keylogger malware tales. Every security issue but that was surmountable, but the keylogger one seemed insurmountable. So I chickened out.  ;D

especially on the forum where many threads promise to make you rich.

Heh.  Some of us found the skill relatively easy to master because we were terrifyingly cynical people in the first place.

In fact, I was too cynical to buy bitcoin back when it was really low.  I figured Satoshi was just running a scam, you know?  In fact, I still think he might have been running a scam, but at this point it doesn't matter anymore.  At least not to me.

The nice side is that I find it fairly easy to make money in open markets. 

The not-so-nice side is that the rare artist whose work I actually like usually either commits suicide or becomes an inpatient at a mental institution with a few years of starting his or her "best" work.  Either way, of course, they stop making art.

Already cynical...I shoulda known. As you probably figured out, I'm not at heart. Live long and prosper...especially the first  :o

Well, it's not as though you really need to be hugely cynical to have greater than average success in the marketplace.  You just need to be a little more cynical than the average for the people around you. 

It's kind of like that old joke about hikers getting chased by a bear.  Nobody can outrun the bear, but the ones that outrun the other hikers survive.

A bit of doublethink helps too.  ;)

+1

Doesnt anyone here remember e-gold or learned from it or is everyone too young to remember the mass scamming and chaos that went on back in the mid 2000's with e-gold and exchanges. Bitcoin is a breath of fresh air for those scammers.
Its like deja vu ALL OVER AGAIN except with bitcoin now and the insane amount of alt coins

There is so much of this cryptocurreny mirrors the e-gold currency, HYIP investment scams of the last 10 yrs. Now, the altcoins are the new HYIPs and the exchanges are like the HYIP monitors that would advertise their buddies scam sites and rip you off. Fake stats and the whole shebang, exactly like the e-coin market we have now. So much is the same and
One thing that never changed= the scamming

Not too much so far. Depending on what happens with cryptorush, I may have lost about 0.5 btc or so - the rest I was able to get off as altcoins without really taking a bath. I jumped ship from coinmarket the second they started getting fishy - I was one of those people who kept trying to get on the site like 10000 times a day and managed to get a withdrawal while the site was up for a minute or two.

That's why never hold coins on anonymous exhanges/sites.   All these new shady exchanges are only good for dumping some coin no wants and running with the BTC.

For a reliable, trustworthy exchange I use Atomic-Trade.  FINCEN Licensed MSB, Owner is totally honest and transparent.  Doesn't get any better.   People should be flocking there in droves to get away from all the scams and do some honest trading.  Maybe they didn't spend a ton for advertising.   Anyway, try it and if you like it recommend it to friends.

 If not, I would definitely like to know why?   Seems everyone is looking to get ripped off and want it that way.

I gave someone a loan of 0.0011BTC and never seen it again, I do have their email and other information but its not worth it to me.

Probably because they don't have many coins, many of the ones they do are obscure/unwanted, and they have low volume.