Bitcoin Forum

Just like pirate@40, davout suddenly shutdowns his bitcoin storage service
Just like pirate@40, davout is promising to pay back everyone 'soon' (managers love this word)
Just like pirate@40, davout is disappearing

davout, the owner, just stole everyone's balance on bitcoin-central.com and instawallet.org

50.000 bitcoin theft just happened and people here don't even know it? wtf!

glad I didn't put my money there

oh I received a message from davout:
everyone stay calm and just wait, all is good, nothing to see here (while he's booking a ticket to panama, flipping you the finger)

davout, the first bitcoin staff member (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1929) to scam the community

davout's panama wallet: clicky (http://blockchain.info/address/1LrPYjto3hsLzWJNstghuwdrQXB96KbrCy)

You must be absolutely confident that he will try to pay your bitcoins in euro. At the exchange rate when you have transfered them to bitcoin-central! That's what all scammers do recently starting from BFL, Bitmarket.eu and now bitcoin-central.net


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137026.msg1460962#msg1460962

Wow, that's nearly $10,000,000??

I guess the price rise tempted him too much. Wow :(

Or they were honestly robbed. Ten million dollars is enough to find Davout, get an apartment near him, watch him, watch his friends, befriend him (or get hired by him), seduce him (James bond style), pretend to be his girlfriend (or boyfriend, you know modern world and all) learn his secrets, steal all the BTC.

crazier things have happened.

I think I'll be sticking with the 'He ran off with $10m' story tbh

Are there any actual reasons to think that davout, who provided a service that, unlike pirateat40's obvious scam, made sense and didn't have money coming from nowhere, is scamming instawallet users?

How much has actually been stolen? I was under the impression that the story was simply that a security flaw had been discovered that was such that the service could not be reopened with the same wallets without risking theft.

Presumably all that money has been moved to a different wallet to avoid possible theft from wallets that attackers stored the private keys from, but have not yet transferred the money from.

Is there any actual reason to think that there are any current problems other than uncertainty about determining and fulfilling legitimate claims?

Everything I've seen so far seems to be just as it should be. A vulnerability was discovered that meant that any wallet could have had the private key stored. As a result, any wallet could be vulnerable, even after all service was shut down. So, davout shut down the service and transferred all the coins that hadn't been stolen yet to a different wallet.

What is the problem here so far, other than the obvious problem of the security flaw? Aside from that, everything seems to be handled as it should be.

Yes, balances over 50 BTC may not be fully reclaimed.

IF davout pays out anything at all.

Strong words wopwop.
As far as I can see Bitcoin Central is once again trading normally.
My deposits, both in EUR and BTC are exactly as they were before the site was closed last week.
It's just that my (unfortunately tiny) BTC amount is now worth double what it was.

Haye you tried withdrawing BTC or EUR?

Balances under 50 BTC may not be fully reclaimed either. All they've said is that wallets with more than 50 BTC will be handled differently, which makes sense. They haven't released any information on how exactly they will be handled.


There is are a couple of valid suspicions to hold, one of which is that it's taking oddly long to implement what should be a fairly simple claims process of "give use the details associated with your wallet and if no one else wants it you get it". However, this could be just because davout really really wants to make sure there aren't any security flaws in this claims process, after he fucked up the service itself so royally. So that's not currently a huge suspicion of mine, but time will tell.

The most valid suspicion, I would say, is that davout intentionally did this and intends to do everything legitimately from here on out, but engineered this specifically to make money off the wallets that never get claimed.

In Cyprus they've said that wallets with more than 100 000 EUR will be handled differently. Does it really make sense?

"We're going to be more careful giving back wallets worth 50 BTC or more, instead of just giving them out to someone lucky enough to falsely claim and have the original owner not get to it within 90 days."

Yes, that makes sense.

I've withdrawn all my bitcoins (<5 BTC) from bitcoin-central and the withdrawal was processed today 8:00am (with >24h delay). My balance was correct and I got my bitcoins. So there is no scam at all. Please correct your thread title!

90 days would be enough to buy a 'diplomatic passport' somewhere in the world, and retire to a tropic island. Nobody would ever find him. :\

This is a false accusation, totally unfounded (no one lost money).

wopwop is a paid troll..

Yeah, wopwop's been posting a lot of nonsense around the forums, I've noticed. Was surprised they hadn't yet, but it looks like their Ignore button is starting to gain a lovely color to it.

If noone lost money, why would not all instawallet users get 100% funds back ?

Déjà vu...
The owner of Bitmarket.eu says the same to his customers - Your bitcoins are not lost. They are "frozen". I'll repay them whenever I can in euro... at the exchange rate when you sent them to your account with bitmarket.

Evidence?

When it comes to unfounded accusations, 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander.'

I demand to know who is paying wopwop for trolling!

Thank you from all those who have funds residing in InstaWallet in watching over our money. We honestly believe that the money is not lost and you know what's best, better than us, on how it should be used. Please let us know if you want anything further from us to make your job of oversee our money a more pleasant experience.

Please accept my apologies for not including the words blowjoy, fucktard/turd, etc., in the above, but if you read between the lines I'm sure you'll find them included within.

Way to convince the community that you're a professional business person.  You could easily put these accusations to rest by providing proof that a report was made to law enforcement and by telling your users which firm of auditors you've retained to investigate this incident.

No-one's going to take you seriously when you won't give the most basic information about your company - who you are, who the directors are, etc.  Credible businesses are more than happy to provide that information and you make yourself look sketchy by not doing so, especially when you've tried to cloak Bitcoin-Central in legitimacy.

It would take less than an hour and a few hundred dollars to have your auditors write a public letter to your users confirming that they're investigating this incident and that they'll be overseeing the integrity of the claims process - and if the claims process isn't overseen by accounting professionals, then it has no integrity.

Instawallet may have been a free service, but how you handle this will shape people's opinion of Paymium as a whole. 

Bosack claims that they have filed a police report but refuses to give any details.  There is no reason for this unless he is lying as I see it.  That he would lie about it is, to me, extremely compelling evidence that this is a complete sham.

This means, to me, that they not only have all the coins but also that they could open Instwallet safely and let users reclaim their funds.

I have started the process of moving the ball forward here, and I don't intend to cease until and unless everyone gets their 100% funds back by next Monday(*).  Even if they do get their funds back but it takes longer, I still intend to pursue this matter until it is clear that it has pushed into the French court system(**).  Where it goes from there I have less interest.

I am disappointed to report that I've got no bites yet on my request for and estimate of initial legal services:

  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=171764.0

but if that ends up not going anywhere I'll switch to more mainstream channels.  If anyone knows a suitable candidate for provisioning this service I'd appreciate having them pointed in my direction.

* The Paymium scum is welcome to take the 20BTC from my account for their troubles.  I suggest they do so and call it a win.  I was fully aware of the risks and have nobody to blame but myself for the loss.  I've PM'd them earlier so they know the one account from which theft is authorized.

** I have a short attention span so I cannot make any 100% promises, but as we used to say back in one of my earlier 'jobs': "ESSAYONS"

I thought I was the first scammer staff member.

I find 'untrustworthy' to be completely fitting and appropriate.  I bet you would agree.  Am I right?

I was going to comment, but your post fucked me up. Don't you have a bomb shelter to build or something?  ;D

I'd show you evidence as to why I am not budging, but it's difficult to compile a list of threats of the North when they predate the internet. As long as China doesn't become a literal wildcard, anything the North does will be suicide and we've seen this before.

BTW, I made a post in 'meta' to discover what access ~davout has or had.  Particularly whether he could read my PM's.  ~badbear says no.

Can't be bothered to dig it up atm, but I seem to remember Theymos responding to that same inquiry long ago in regards to Mark Karpeles hosting the forums and said that he (Theymos) was the only one able to read PMs. (And Mark, through phpMyAdmin of course, although I don't remember if that was ever admitted).

This post reminded me of something. Boussac said something about PMs being sent and him not reading (paraphrased to illustrate a point). I know as a fact that PMs here can be setup to alert you via an email where, in turn, the email can be sent to your smartphone. The entire process takes less than a minute to set up. If a company in crisis can't even take the time to calm their customer base in a professional manner, then those fuckers don't need to be in business. At least Mt Gox tries now, better than they used to be.

Meanwhile, I'm glad to see that Pierre's coins are safe: http://blockchain.info/address/1PierreFUi7RuFkkA812MQyRruDZhzzh7Y

Good news, everybody! Our money is safe till after the conference, for we've seen this dance once before in London. It seems that André Boussac a.k.a. Pierre Noizat will be speaking at Bitcoin2013 in San Jose: http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html

Don't bother Googling Pierre-André Boussac, for there's nothing to see there.

He'll be at the Cali conference ? Can you sell enough barn-wood to get there in time to suck his cock ?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8puDtqaLC8/TbWBXxWa10I/AAAAAAAABj4/6vM669R9-hM/s1600/drooling_chocolate_lab.jpg
Bruno be there!

Well I'll be darned...an antiwar.com person.  I've probably used that site more than almost any other since the 2002 timeframe although I don't do it much these days.  Once a week or two when I've exhausted other higher priorities.

antiwar.com is, to me, a jewel in the otherwise highly disappointing world of Libertarianism.  I just looked to see if they took donations in Bitcoin.  Sadly...and oddly...it does not seem so.

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/bonjour/   :P

Going by past bitcoin conferences ypou would be wise to pull your bitcoins out of any service represented there.

Exactly what I thought when I saw the line-up. 

Warning to all those who have asked to see a police report number.


Boussac is one sick motherfucker!

I assume Boussac would be able to respond to the fact why Davout haven't logged in since 2th of April 2013. Prior to this, he was active constantly.

There's an e-mail address listed: david@bitcoin-central.net

I guess anyone concerned could attempt sent an e-mail there, but I doubt it would give any results. Now, in 90 days I would not be surprised if we see Bousac starting to be non-responsive as well. Then everybody might be left in the dark, and the partners in crime are living the good life with hookers and blow in Mexico or wherever.

https://twitter.com/e_ducat


So the bad guys simply gave up. How kind of them. There goes my theory of it being an inside job.

https://angel.co/paymium


I wonder if it was time to pay back them investors.

I'm in the mode of leaving just here:

https://angel.co/ggrandval#activity


http://blockchain.info/address/1CuGnAcQ8R93qhFR9DZfWwS8qtXME6W7pV


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=56121