Bitcoin Forum

What happened::
I saw this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5439652.0 and thought I'd buy a bitcointalk account.

I contacted them on Telegram and suggested using escrow...
 

Scammers Profile Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3534609

Reference Link:
Amount Scammed: 105 USD in BTC
Payment Method: BTC
Proof of Payment: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/6044896d116b6f23ad218ceac7b2333728b148d6e64f149ddbf00f05bcad7742
PM/Chat Logs:
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/R6SOJ.png
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/R6nCC.png
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/R6Cvb.png
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/R6MwH.png
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/R6mNg.png

As you can see I picked a trusted bitcointalk profile as escrow but he invited his own scammy lookalike account into the escrow group chat.
I'm an idiot for sending him 105$ in BTC like this... His fraud is revealed now I hope more is found out and he's fully exposed.
Greatful for any help.

To the scammer, please return my money...

The only verifiably true part of this accusation. You learned a lesson the hard way. As for your screenshot evidence, everything can be fabricated, so it doesn't really do any good, even if I am inclined to believe you are honest about being scammed.


I have added a Type 1 flag to his account; feel free to open a Type 3 flag against him if you want, but I don't think it will matter so much.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=3224

Posted a flag here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;flag=3225

Dunno what's gonna happen, probably not much. But worth a shot.

This is one of the disadvantages of buying Bitcointalk account.

Another disadvantage is if the person that was controlling the account before has used it to plagiarized before but not known to moderators but later known or reported, the account will be banned.

The seller can still deny after it after you bought it, that it is an hack.

Another thing is that you can buy an account but plagiarized mistakenly or thinking no one will know and your account can be banned. It is better to start new than to be a newbie legendary. Start from group up than to be disappointed.

My advice is that you should register a new account and use it instead.

Quoting so images appear, also supporting your flag. If choosing an escrow, always choose 1 from the forum if they will do account sales. Only other advice I can give is do not buy an account.

this is why never trust someone who is selling an account and never really understand why people want to buy an account from someone, it is just too risky. also, if you ask me, $105 for a hero member account is too good to be true.

just so you know, it is possible to pinpoint who is the account on the screenshot.

I doubt that'll happen, from the looks of it, the whole purpose for "selling" accounts is most likely just to scam people.

Just for future reference, I found one of his alt accounts, who uses the same Telegram:



Archives (does not show up on Ninjastic Space b/c he added them later):

https://archive.ph/IytZT
https://archive.ph/PL4ZQ

This is a rare instance where the forum search actually works better than Google or Ninjastic Space.

And this entire conversation happened today? Which means he recovered his password only today? Hmm... something that might be interesting and worth to point out is that the seller probably planned to scam you from the beginning. He claimed he reset the password once he noticed the "scammer" changed his credential? Seclog (https://bitcointalk.org/seclog.php) didn't show any hero member with above criteria resetting their password.

Though... I am quite sure the account being offered is this one (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=563816).

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/R6SOJ.png https://talkimg.com/images/2023/10/11/RREdj.jpeg

Aside from the perfect match of date of registration down to the minute,
1. We can see the ghost of a "G" under the censored username
2. He made 717 forum-counted posts (https://archive.fo/wXQVF) since he made the screenshot on 16 April, 2023 [36 pages of 20 posts each, minus three posts made before the screenshot], which matched his current post count.
3. His merit count matched the profile [549 up to April, given his 550th (https://loyce.club/Merit/history/563816.html) merit happened on 09 June]

---

edit: Got a PM from Google+, verifying his account's email address, and it's different from the one above. The scammers stole his identity without his knowledge.

Well, I have supported both flags but I have also left negative feedback to the OP for confessing that I had bought an account. With the profile he has and on top of that wanting to buy accounts, it's hard to trust him. The bad thing is that he will end up buying an account in the end.

Removing the first mistake that you committed which is to trust someone that is account seller here. I believe the most valuable lesson on your experience here is don’t deal outside the forum especially telegram. No trusted Bitcointalk escrow will deal outside the forum since their reputation was built here not on telegram. Dealing someone on the telegram including escrows is equivalent to trusting new set of user especially if they don’t acknowledgment the telegram account through the use of their Bitcointalk account.

This scam scheme is not knew either and there’s a lot of scammer keeps impersonating trusted user telegram here by changing some letters to make it looks like identical so it’s better to deal only inside the forum rather than the telegram.

I just want to add, just in case Google+ might counter that someone just took a screenshot of his profile info. if you check the "additional information" at the bottom of the profile, you won't see the "Send this member a personal message." which tells you that the screenshot was made by whoever logged in to that account. the "Send this member a personal message." is only shown if you are visiting someone else's profile account(at least as far as I know).

OP, I guess now you understand why account sellers can never be trusted, and my DT members tag them at first sight. Big lesson learned and at a cost.
I am interested in seeing why Google+ has to say here. If all is true, I don't think Google+ can be trusted at all. Why would someone want to sell such an old Hero member account for such an amount?
Stupid move in my opinion.

This is a good observation. Thanks everyone for looking into this further.
With your help at least it's possible to taint the scammer's image.

Because I don't think he has any intention to sell it at all. This thread kinda prove it, he offered the account, then faked an escrow to steal the fund. He'll gain extra fund and never have to part with the hero account. Maybe it's not the first time he's done this, given the screenshot was made in April, never have guessed someone will sacrifice their account to be tagged as account buyer to report his scam attempt.

I will just say that those who sell and those who buy BTT accounts are equally guilty, especially when someone buys such an account and has a clear warning of what can happen to him. I tagged that account at the beginning of the year, like many others who still sell BTT accounts on this forum.

I think it's always easy to speculate about what other people might be doing wrong, but it's still hard to verify the truth. I'm not sure how real the screenshot of the account being sold to the OP is without being faked, did anyone notice this in the first place?

I noticed something strange in the picture the OP posted that the scammer sent him, I mean look at the authenticity of those screenshots carefully. The scammer seems to have succeeded in deceiving the OP by falsifying the account identity by editing the image without paying attention to small things such as the vertical layout of profile information. If you are confused about what I mean, then look at the image once again. So I think it's possible that OP was scammed by someone who didn't actually have an account to sell. Fraudsters get another user's account at random and fake their image. I'm not completely sure about that, but it's a possibility when I noticed the screenshot of the account the scammer offered him.

Here's the comparison:

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/12/RFVWl.png

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/12/RF1fm.jpeg

You are right, most likely this is the account that was offered to the OP. Some time ago I also researched a similar matter and came across the same evidence. There was a similar accusation here, after which I tried to contact the seller under a neutral nickname. He sent me this same screenshot, but he never managed to prove ownership of the account. Without sufficient evidence, I did not want to start the accusation process.
That was in March-April '23 if I remember correctly connected to @Alex2012 on Telegram. It is possible that I have screenshots of part of that discussion somewhere, I changed my computer in the meantime, so I would have to look for it.

What we have to clarify is that there is no evidence that the original owner of this account is selling that account. In fact, I am sure that the @Markdoy6 Telegram user is not the original owner, but a scammer who offers this account to naive people.
What if someone like him offered my account for sale, or yours holydarkness?

Here I want to invite nutildah and Little Mouse to withdraw their feedback because they have no obvious proof. Especially since the OP (@brace the mace) started a revenge hunt on this user asking Stake managers to remove them from their campaign.

Interesting finding. That explains what I've been wondering since yesterday by a lot: how he removed the neutral tag given by actmyname. I initially thought he temporarily distrust AMN, I checked his trust list during the time to confirm this, and [as there were no info of such] I thought he did it for about minutes, just enough to make a screenshot, and then delete his list, so the weekly record didn't archive that.

But editing the upper part of the page [or the lower part] made way much sense.

I happen to have screenshots of profile pages around the same time of that screenshot [in April 2023] in my gallery, and indeed, the forum didn't change layout or the likes, layout shown on the profile page during April should also shows what we see right now: all text aligned between each rows.


I guess there were no easy way to prove the ownership, even if Google+ come and answer here, it'll be a classic he-said-she-said.

I can think of two ways to prove or debunk the allegation, but it'll be quite... inconvenient. One is proving the connection by wallet transaction and see if the scammers wallet of which OP send the fund to is connected to Google+. The other is to debunk it [and it'll be very annoying, and I can understand if Google+ refuses to do so] I guess Google+ can ask for a trusted member to verify the dis-connection between his account and this mess by sending them a PM containing a screenshot of his profile from his page.

The screenshot bounds to show his email address and the member who got trusted with this task can match if the email written on his profile matched with the one being offered. I'll say again that it'll be very inconvenient as Google+ will reveal his real email address, if we suppose the screenshot above isn't his and the email address truly registered to him was not as above, so I can understand if he doesn't want to go with this method. Might worth to mention that it is not a sure fire, especially if the email was changed few weeks ago past seclog's data [is there a way to get a log way back for months?].

Buying account and selling of account is against the forum rules, and I don't see any reason one will want to buy an account that he doesn't even know anything about the seller, if he is selling the account due to some bad reputation on the account. Lazy and greedy people are the ones that are always after account buying because they don't want to learn and grow but they want to start earning immediately from the forum. If not I don't see why a newbie wants to pose as a Legendary member with nothing upstairs. OP, you deserve all the negative tags and I will advice you to learn from your mistake and create a new account. There is no short cut to success. You gotcscammed because you wanted to reap from where you did not sow.

I contacted Google+ via PM pointing to this discussion and since he replied, I assume he knows about this thread.
He always can sign messages on some of his previously used BTC addresses to prove ownership of his account.


Where did you see that rule?

OP is not newbie at this forum - so I'm not sure if this advice is useful to him because I think he already knows a lot of things even though he posted this scam case with a newbie account. Moreover, I'm sure he had been completely scammed because of his inability to verify the account being sold because he only focuses on high rankings and screenshots - but he forgets that scammers have a million tricks to trick their victims.

I think BITCOIN4X has told us one thing with a comparison of those two screenshots - but if any of us need something more convincing, ask Google+ to sign the message or perhaps display the account email. I don't need to force him to do that – but maybe he needs to clear his name.

There's some history of password changes Google+ has made so far based on bpip - but I don't see him having changed email in the last few months. But since email is private for some users - then I'm not sure we need to require them to post it publicly.

https://i.ibb.co/svXRRGg/Google.png

I just PMed by Google+. He shared a screenshot of his profile with me, showing his account's email address to me. It is different from the one shown by @alex2012. Given seclog didn't show a change of email from his account recently, I can vouch that he's not part of this scam-attempt/account-selling.

I'd also like to use this chance to publicly apologize for the inconvenience Google+ experienced because I jumped too fast and didn't notice the signs of doctored image.

nutildah and Little Mouse, do you both mind to remove the neutral tag against Google+? I apologize to you both too for any inconvenience happened from your side.

---

He did sign a message (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=996318.msg54872617#msg54872617) at one point, but I am not sure if the address is still accessible to him.

Google+, if you read this [as I didn't write this on my reply to his PM, stupid me], can you confirm if you still has access to bc1qr40dwlh5wywg99967j0fc02es97mf0luzgvf3j or not? If you don't, it might be useful for you to... re-stake your address.

Signing a bitcoin message does not prove on whether, he tried to sell the account or not. It only proves that he is still in control of the account. So if he a ttempted to sell the account and then failed to do so. He can easily sign the message.

Otherwise, the screeshoot seems doctored though the way Google+'s profile lay out appears is different from how most profiles appear including Theymos' simply because his profile contains no Bitcoin address.

BPIP does not record email address changes.

Also, look what I just did with in a minute and satoshi@gmail.com is not even my email address  ;D

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/10/12/REalH.png

It's almost certain that the account is opperated by the scammer.

If you try to reset pasword by entering this emai, you get a message that a mail has been sent. You only get this for valid emails entered into a bitcointalk account. So there's no other way.

OK done. I suppose it is too easy to fake a screenshot.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/10/13/REhxv.png

Has anyone thought of another option? The OP's account has been registered for quite some time. I can assume that this account of his was also bought, and then a story was invented about falsifying screenshots.

If you look at his reviews, you can conclude that he has experience in buying and selling accounts.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=740982
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=406909
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=326007

Are you disregarding the fact that the email in the screenshot is actually a valid bitcointalk account email account? This can be easily checked.

You can substitute any email that remains open for any account, and when asked, you will be given a response that a password has been sent to you.

At this point, it does not matter whether the email address is valid or not, the screenshot appears to be doctored if you carefully look at it (Please refer to BITCOIN4X's reply (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5469946.msg62985162#msg62985162))

And he was also trying to show you that someone can easily alter the details in the screenshot without breaking a sweat.

His pictures weren't at scale. This is an irrelevant comparison by BITCOIN4X tbh.

Do you mind tell me how? I don't even know there is a way to check an email address belongs and registered to whose account, forum doesn't allow a search by email address and won't show someone's registered email without their consent.


Scaled or not scaled will not be a different, the format will still shows that each columns are aligned. For added information, the screenshot I made was from a tablet, so it's a "scaled" version.

I don't have time to argue with you, let alone convince you. Accept the consequences of what you did greedily, the fact is that you believe the scammer more than the people who fight him.

Everything is clear and there is nothing to argue about. Google+ was not sold by the original owner, but the account was sold by someone else who faked his identity. The email in the image appears to be valid from an account, but I'm not sure who the owner is. Email searches are not allowed, so there is no way to find out who the owner is.

Kindly take my words personally, you deserve to get lose your money because you did something which is totally unacceptable in this forum. You can see that you get some negative trust because of your actions. It's really not fair to buy an account from an account farmer and then use it in order to participate in signature campaigns. You both have similar mindset because you were trying to scam other by getting a ranked account and he scammed because he knew about you greed.

If he's a scammer and you're also not less than a scammer, and I believe a scammer scammed another scammer and in this scamming game an escrow was also added which turned out to be a scammer. I don't feel bad for you because you were doing a wrong thing, however you have done a good job by reporting that scammer so other newbie member will get awareness about such scams.

Scammer scammed the scammer- then the scammer responsible for being in escrow also scammed the scammer. So this is a scammer deceptive a scammer and the scammer succeed scammed. Did I conclude it correctly?

I'm not sure how I could have said it clearly - but it sounds like you said it right; scammer succeed scammed scammer. I checked his trust page and I agree that he probably hasn't repented for his mistakes since 2018.

Buying or aelling account is not good as it can increase spam or scam. The evidence you have provided which is conversation on the telegram and those type of chat can  be manipulated and also it is easy to show the same name and it is too hard to know who is the real or not. So never rely on telegram chat.

The worst place ever to deal with someone as chats can be deleted and manipulated that is why if someone asked me of my telegram handle I prefer handling the business here or WhatsApp instead of telegram and I will never believe any telegram chats because few people had tried to force themselves on me when I just lodged a complaint about my coin not quickly delivered on the exchange and I got series of feedback in my inbox as admin which to me I know that no admin would pm first. So judging through that I can say message from TG can be scam attempts.