Bitcoin Forum

Today a fake news about "A Hong Kong based exchanger mycoin.hk run off with 3 billion HKD (around 380 million US dollar)" came out in public, however the number of money lost in this news are FAKE!

Remember the $10 dollar fake bitcoins sold at Mtgox's last life cycle? If you took the risk to buy 1000 of them, can you say you lost 1000 * $220 current market price = 220,000 dollars? Well Hong Kong media definitely do so, same thing is happening again with mycoin.hk. Most bitcoins lost at there were bought at less than $20 US dollars!


news link:
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1707565/investors-fear-hk3b-losses-closure-bitcoin-trading-company
http://money.udn.com/storypage.php?sub_id=5603&art_id=696371
http://cablenews.i-cable.com/webapps/news_video/index.php?news_id=451648
....

These news are ALL USING THE FAKE NUMBER


Most Hong Kong local news reporters don't understand the whole thing or just make up this huge number to create the "big lost" story in the name of bitcoin(new tech + big lost always take eye-balls),

I will show you how this "3 billion Hong Kong dollars" was made out:

Mycoin.hk is the runoff exchanger here (NOT mycoin.com, some media reporters mistaken reporting the exchanger's website domain), This exchanger has a really small market share, even smaller than kraken.com, it used to have around 500 btcs trades per day but about a half year ago it started to delay and stop processing client's withdrawals, since it's too small not many people even know about it, only some of their clients talked about it at months ago.

Mycoin.hk also set the daily bitcoin withdraw limit to 0.5 btc per day(since 3-5 months ago), then 0.1 per day(since about 2-3 months ago), then 0.01 per day(since 1-2 months ago), during this crazy time, bitcoin price traded on their exchange market dropped from market price to $500HKD $200HKD $100HKD $50HKD $20HKD $10HKD.. There are two reasons of this drop: First, the exchanger was trying to attract fiat deposits and stop clients from asking withdrawals like the Mtgox did, almost every Chinese including Hong Kong citizens kept warning/laughing at this old trick, however there are always some people would take the risk and made deposits to buy their "super cheap coins" and hoping may be they can withdraw again someday, Second, the exchanger was trying to pretend everything is fine and their trading activity is still high.

Most people in Mainland China and Hong Kong SAR know about this situation at long long time ago (people talked about this at many Chinese bitcoin forum since the end of 2014), Now today the exchanger finally gone down as everyone's expected.

The interesting thing is now the media journalists sum all the bitcoins in mycoin.hk's clients accounts and get the 3 billions HKD number from:
Amount of fake and super cheap bitcoin * current market price = 3 billions HKD <-- well, this is fake because most of bitcoins there never existed and were "bought" by risk takers and existing desperate clients at a price from $500hkd(60 USD) to $100hkd(16 USD) to $10hkd(1.2 USD) in recent months.

In conclusion, A really small exchanger gone down, less than may be let's say half million HKD(including real bitcoins deposited at there) is lost (because mycoin.hk stop processing withdrawals at long time ago, some real clients must have lost something), "100000000+" or whatever fake bicoins bought at there at a super discount price (99.9% off) are also gone, a so call "3 billions HKD (300 millions USD) lost" was added up by media reporters with a formula "never existed & super cheap fake coins" * current market price = "fake 3 billions HKD"

If you are waiting for those "never existed & super cheap fake coins" dump into the market, not gonna happen,
If you are waiting for Chinese market to panic, give it up, most Chinese know the mycoin.hk exchanger would runoff at a half year ago

That's it, thank you for reading, and please, if someone know or connected to the Hong Kong news  media please ask them to correct this outrageous howler.

Tell that to my aunt who lost her life savings....


http://i59.tinypic.com/15i0ze8.jpg

None of the newssites clams that they calculated the missing money with BTC/CNY prices. They don´t a say a word about the number of missing bitcoins. They say that people paid on average 400k$ KH for some contracts.
"Investors said they were lured by promises of a HK$1 million return in four months for buying a HK$400,000 bitcoin contract "
Most of this story has nothing to with real Bitcoins. It´s just a typical ponzi that has chosen to use Bitcoin for it´s marketing. But still, bad news is bad news(for Bitcoin) and missing FIAT money is still missing.

Stop bullscamming, no one will buy your overpriced coins. No sane chinese will ever put fresh money into anything that is related to Bitcoin!

if this number is real i gonna make a freaking ponzi site tommorow  >:(

same style just with better looks, $1 billion here i come  8)

I suspected it was some kind of FAKE news. Or at least misinformed one

If it were totally true  prices would be sub 150 by now

For this to be real, the average amount per investor would be = ~$127,000 USD
It is fake.

You guys really are into that word, aren't you?

"Investor"

The proper term is "Sucker"

Its obviously fake news.
Dont know what this dude is trying to pull off from trying this, but by the style of his writing i think its some 15yo that sold too early, or just a random troll for that matter.

To be honest, bitcoin price is declining slowly all by itself, there is no need to push it down :]

This is real news. I know someone who's family gambled on mycoin. I can't say anything about the amounts, however.

3 billion HKD that means 3,000 clients who had invested HK$1m ($12,890) each, 130,000 dollars each, just for investment? Well, I don't think we Chinese are so wealthy like that.

This could be a real new, but the number or the calculation method of that number might be wrong, I guess.

1 million HKD is 128'000 USD not 12'890 USD.

Their cloud mining contracts were 400'000 HKD each, and there are testimonials of people buying 8 contracts; so an average of 2.5 contracts per client seems reasonable.

The only questionable number is 3000 clients; it may be inflated, but it is not too high for an MLM scheme in a place like Hong Kong.

EDIT: Hong Kong has 7 million inhabitants and a median income of over 20'000 HKD/month.

Wow... Really everyone seems to believe this news and people are citing it for the decline earlier today. It's interesting how easily people can be manipulated in the Bitcoin world. There's simply no way of knowing what's true or legitimate...

http://www.coindesk.com/hong-kong-exchange-mycoin-disappears-387m-reports-claim/

Ok, so it seams the news are kind of real, but only one half.
"exchange" existed and did scam people for large sum of money, but didnt actualy trade bitcoins, users were only promissed bitcoins after a certan amount of time.
So i highly doubt this will have much negative impact on price.

cheers

I call it "ponzi scheme" , or am I wrong ? "The aggrieved clients, who claim MyCoin is a pyramid scheme packaged as bitcoin trading, said they had been unable to contact the company’s management, while sales staff at higher levels claimed they too had been the victims of deception."


Source : http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1708308/mycoin-director-quit-one-month-bitcoin-platform-changed-trading-rules

Yes , it was a classical ponzi, where they even asked clients to bring in new members in order to be paid out.
It doent get any clearer than this.
I fail to understand what those people were thinking, if you want bitcoin , then just go and buy them and send to your wallet, everything else is pointless and insecure.

cheers

The people saw "free money" and join (also if they know it is a ponzi). However maybe this will not affect the bitcoin price, but let us wait 48-72 hours.

3 billions HKD? It's nothing more than fake number. if it was real, than this exchange could be the large exchange as MtGox or Bitstamp. But the truth is many people including Chinese do not seem to know about this exchange.

It is not clear whether mycoin.hk also included an exchange, there are conflicting reports on that.  If they did have an exchange, it was a small one.  The big scam was their cloud mining operation, which apparently was just a ponzi scheme and had no real bitcoins and no real mining.

Nevertheless, the latest small drop in price (from 1380 CNY to 1350 in a few minutes, with a recovery to 1360) happened just after 8pm in China local time.  It may have been a reaction to the news showing on TV, perhaps.

Bullish!

The amount is seemingly based on figures that the site gave out which were obviously bullshit. It would be interesting to see how much they actually took in though.

I'm not sure this story will turn out fake, but I'm pretty confident it has been over-exaggerated with the reported losses.

If the figures were true the bitcoin exchanges in China would have re-acted more violently which in itself is a sign that they are not taking the story seriously.

Its actually not fake news, but the story involves fiat, and is just simply related to bitcoin. The loss was incurred in fiat, and the company was relted to bitcoin.

cough cough

Where does it say, that the amount was in bitcoin that was stolen ?

The quote shouldn´t refer to your reply. It was directed @cashtraderuk, and the dozens of other people who tried to deny the figure yesterday and today.

Thats a pretty large amount scam. How did they get away with this ?

So what if it involves fiat?
is it fake or not?
If it wasn't a fake the price would have crashed a bit..

http://www.coindesk.com/hong-kong-exchange-mycoin-disappears-387m-reports-claim/


I wonder if mycoin claimed they had 30,000 clients, would all the news portals dumbly announce 'one of the biggest frauds in the history' or would they do their homework and present some reliable info.

Even at today's exchange rate, they would need 1.5 million coins to get those number, definitely a scam.

I guess this is a planned money laundering scheme: Make money transfer to mycoin.hk account and claim the money is lost, get some tax return from government and later receive transfered money at an offshore bank account

http://www.coindesk.com/mycoin-hong-kong-police-8-1-million/

$8millions loss estimated and not >$300millions :)

Yeah, 43 victims so far, may not get to 100.

Mark claimed that MtGOX had more than a million users, but when the leaked database was analyzed, it was found that only 70'000 accounts were minimally active.  So his numbers were bloated by a factor of 15 at least.   If the same factor holds here, it would be 200 accounts.

By the way, here is a video that seems to be a 2014-03-12 congress of MyCoin.hk clients:
http://my.tv.sohu.com/us/201860874/69946081.shtml

The Westerner with grey hair presumably is William Dennis Atwood, the vanished CEO of MyCoin.kh's parent company.

EDIT: I counted 7x8 tables with 8-10 chairs each, so there were about 450 people in that event.

i can confirm it...

i have read this news in other place too!

we will finally find that it was not stolen anything!!!

 ::) ::) ::)

This video has been posted to reddit as being another MyCoin.hk convention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGT3QL5VWPk

It says "MyBitCoin" in the opening shots and many places, but on T-Shirts (mostly in the second half) it says "MyCoin" only.  

There are a lot more than 30 (or 43) people there.  One of the overhead shots shows some large amounts, over 300 M (HKD, USD, CNY, or what?)

If it is MyCoin.hk, there may be a lot more than 43 victims.

If it is not MyCoin.hk, what venture is that?  The overhead texts are in Chinese...

After watching the video, I was like... what the heck were they smoking?


Probably most of the people were paid actors, common tactics used by ponzi schemers.

A new Reuters video about MyCoin.hk:
http://www.reuters.com/video/2015/02/12/hong-kong-bitcoin-scandal-leaves-investo?videoId=363168348

The previous video (convention in Thailand) was MyCoin.hk allright, the same logo.

They say "about 400 million US dollars"

Why don't they mention the names of the scammers?

Bitcoiners are trying to claim that "it has nothing to do with bitcoin".  But they are not innocent:

* Bitcoiners keep talking about price "going to the moon", "gains of 1000% per year" because of the "exponential trend" etc.  Because of these claims, when MyCoin promised 300% returns per year, people believed it.

* MyCoin has been operating for some time.  The real bitcoiners in HongKong must have known of its existence, and must have seen that it was a ponzi.  Why didn't they alert the police?  Because "anything bitcoin is good"?