They even have a fraud policy.  LOL.

http://btcquick.com/ocart/index.php?route=information/information&information_id=7

These guys are as relentless as 419 scammers.

How dare people reap the benefits of their own work instead of indulging the whims of their entitled offspring.

Nice of them to include a link to the forums at the bottom of the page.

Shit.  Just noticed this on their "About Us" page.


They've ripped that off the Mr Bitcoins website.

Time to try to get in touch with Ken and let him know about this, I guess.

I'm waiting for it to spawn a Posies for pirate offshoot.

Yeah, I only used "make" because it was the word used by the poster to whom I was responding.

I do think that there's a kind of "cult of Bitcoin" which enables incompetence - and not just technical incompetence - and that you're right when you say that losses to date haven't been catastrophic enough to discourage that.

 

Here we are all these months after you claim to have involved lawyers in this and you're still trying to transfer documents?  Why haven't your lawyers taken legal action to recover your funds yet?  You claim to have plenty of evidence as well as the money to take legal action, why hasn't this been taken to court already?

Your lawyers aren't very good if they don't know that all legal documents can (and most should) be sent to the registered office of a company and that a simple search of ASIC records provides the address of the registered office.

You're asking us to believe that your lawyers can't locate someone in a town of 40,000 people.  Someone who is very well known in that community.  Why the hell are you still paying these apparently inept lawyers?

A new flash drive might be more appropriate given that KnightMB "lost" one.

I have to agree with the point about needing to make an account in order to view user profiles.  It's up to you to convince us that you have users with projects worth investing in.  We'll join in order to lend to them if you can do that.  There are some pretty shitty listings on there anyway from what I can see and that makes me even less inclined to join to find out more information about the few that just might be worth considering. 

You need to make the site as lender friendly as possible, especially given that you're essentially asking people to trust your ability to sort things out if the borrower defaults.  Making lenders join in order to obtain more information about those seeking funds is just creating a reason for them to look elsewhere for borrowers. 

Not to mention that a sexual orientation and a paraphilia are not the same thing.  Perhaps you believe that because gay people were otherised in recent times that they were always persecuted throughout the whole of recorded history.  Historically, such persecution has been episodic and often correlated with times of religious power and oppression of sexuality in general.  The emergence of psychology as a field also created oppressive attitudes towards human sexuality for a very long time, with an increasing focus on "curing" what were regarded as sexual aberrations.  The "diseasing" of homosexuality (a term which was only coined in the late 19th century) helped entrench negative attitudes towards same-sex attraction.  It was no longer regarded as a chosen path but as an illness to be prevented if at all possible (and a lot of negative attitudes towards masturbation stem from the time when psychology believed that "excessive" masturbation would bring out "latent" homosexual tendencies) and to be "cured" if it couldn't be prevented.

We cannot now imagine a return to times when sexuality is oppressed - and yet throughout history that has happened time and time again.

This is concerning.  Absent AML issues, it shouldn't take more than a couple of days for a direct deposit to hit your Australian bank account - and that's if it has to be done manually, you're not with their bank and it's the first withdrawal to that account.  Two weeks is unacceptable even if there are AML issues - they should have at least contacted you to obtain whatever they needed and there's no excuse for them not responding to helpdesk requests (this seems to be a common complaint lately).

It's a bit worrying that we no longer hear anything about them these days unless it's people posting about unreasonable delays in withdrawals.

I'm definitely having trouble believing that someone obtained his USB stick and decided to set him up, much less that they went out of their way to obtain one of his USB sticks with the specific intention of setting him up.

I have no trouble whatsoever, though, in believing that when news stories about the extortion attempt broke and people who had an already existing grudge against KnightMB read of the Franklin and BTC connection they decided to connect the authorities and say "look into this guy" - not necessarily because they believed he had anything to do with it, but because they knew that a Secret Service investigation into an extortion attempt against a presidential candidate would make his life difficult.  That the USB drive actually did turn out to have belonged to KnightMB wasn't something anyone needed to have known or even suspected if the intention was purely to fuck up his shit. 

Maybe there was something else entirely that directed the suspicion of the SS towards KnightMB - I just wouldn't be surprised if they got tip-offs naming his as a possible suspect given that he'd screwed people over in the past and the recent past at that.  If you want to fuck up someone's shit out of spite, report them to a government agency for something you know will be investigated.  Whether or not they've actually done it doesn't matter if the investigation itself would make their life difficult.

Nope.  KnightMB did questionable things that didn't involve Bitcoin at all.  Anything which offers an opportunity to part fools and their money is going to attract its fair share of opportunists.  Anything which is perceived as offering anonymity is also going to attract its fair share of opportunists.  Bitcoin is just another tool they're going to use.

What I was addressing was the assumption that because people are in a position where they could do something to benefit Bitcoin as a whole or "make a contribution" to Bitcoin they have some obligation to do so.  I think any such assumption greatly over-estimates the number of people who have some kind of ideological loyalty to Bitcoin.  People aren't spending tens of thousands of dollars on mining rigs "to maintain the blockchain".  The didn't invest with pirate because it was "good for Bitcoin".  They don't speculate on Bitcoin prices for ideological reasons.  A lot of people don't give a shit about Bitcoin per se - it's purely a means to an end for them.

Bitcoin doesn't make people do bad things but in the short-term it has some characteristics which are appealing to those who want to do certain types of shitty things.  There's certainly no deterrent to using this community to perpetrate scams when the community response is pretty much always "let's stop talking about it, put it behind us and move forward".  Any community - Bitcoin related or not - where there's a critical mass of people looking to get rich quick who also have a distaste for regulation and other government intervention is a scammer haven and this community is no exception.

If Bitcoin isn't robust enough to withstand negative publicity and negative events then it is ultimately doomed to remain a niche technology used only by Satoshi fanboys.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.  His early posts show that he thought a great deal about the development of Bitcoin and actively made suggestions to the devs and Satoshi.  He also recognised early on that an "arms race" may eventuate and perceived that as a "flaw", which is what led to him trying to develop a decentralised digital currency which wouldn't rely on high end processors.  To that extent, he's made a contribution to both Bitcoin and to peer to peer digital currencies in general whether or not TimeKoin succeeds.

While there are certainly Bitcoin fan-boys who regard Satoshi as some kind of messiah, Satoshi himself recognised the potential for the emergence of an alt currency which would be more successful than Bitcoin.  I think that a lot of people are committed to a decentralised, peer to peer currency rather than to Bitcoin per se and putting their time, energy and resources into the development is an alt currency is just as valid as devoting their energy to Bitcoin.  The idea that there should be one, true decentralised currency and that everyone should worship at its altar is ridiculous.

That KnightMb has an ego is readily apparent and his inability to keep that ego in check has certainly invited trouble, but it's unrealistic to expect that everyone who acquires wealth or influence through their involvement with Bitcoin is or should be a nice person or an altruist.  Some people involved with Bitcoin are going to be shitty human beings.  Some of them will make meaningful contributions to Bitcoin and/or make money out of it despite being shitty human beings. 

 

Jesus wept.  People say exactly the same thing about anything negative which happens in the Bitcoin world.  "It's not good for Bitcoin", "let's put it behind us and move forward".  It's one of the reasons why there are no meaningful consequences for scammers.

Like it or not, Bitcoin is going to be used for things which attract the attention of the authorities, whether it's Silk Road, extortion attempts or trading child porn.  "lalalala I can't hear you" is not the best way to respond to things which bring negative attention to Bitcoin.

You're also forgetting that many people in the community thought that the ransom attempt was a good thing in that it got Bitcoin mentioned in the mainstream media in a big way.  For once, it wasn't only those who read the technology pages who were reading about Bitcoin - anyone following the US election campaign could have learned about Bitcoin for the first time because of the coverage the extortion attempt received.

It wouldn't be a receivership situation like Zeek, so it might not.  But there'd also be nothing left to recover so it might not be worth the expense of suing him to obtain an unenforceable judgement.

There's also the question of how many people would be able to sue him directly.  Many people gave their funds to the PPT operators rather than pirate and they have no way to actually prove that their deposits were actually given to pirate unless the PPT operators are willing and able to provide that proof.

People on the Endless-sphere forum did think that it might be KnightMB because he's located in Franklin and had previously acquired BTC under dubious circumstances.  They posted that in one of their locked forums on 6 September and the raid happened on 14 September. I have no doubt whatsoever that the SS chased down any and all tip-offs they received even if they seemed tenuous at first glance.

This guy had a way of pissing people off.  It's possible that he pissed off someone who just happened to be in possession of a USB drive he'd discarded and they just waited for an opportunity to use it to set him up, but it seems more likely that when this story broke people he'd pissed off previously decided to contact investigators and say "you might want to take a look at this guy, he had 371,000 BTC and now he says he's broke".  Making such a tip-off didn't require people to actually believe that he'd sent the ransom demands - it only required a desire to make his life difficult (which is what the Endless-sphere posters were hoping to do when they talked about reporting him to the IRS).

If a flash drive of mine turned up somewhere, my first thought wouldn't be that someone had gone through my garbage to get it.  It would be either that I'd left it somewhere by accident or that I'd loaded stuff onto it for someone and given it to them.  In order for someone to set KnightMB up with that flashdrive, they had to know of his association with Bitcoins.

It's also a good thing that he didn't post about some of his back ups being in a safe deposit box because otherwise the Endless-sphere posters who were reading about how he acquired his 371,000 BTC might have passed that information on to the government as well.

You don't need to look to Atlas.  The people over on Endless-sphere were extremely pissed off when they discovered he'd acquired the 371,000 BTC and were talking about reporting him to government agencies.  They almost certainly made his former employers aware that they'd been screwed over, too.  It's possible, and perhaps even likely, that people who already had a grudge against KnightMB contacted the SS to suggest him as a likely suspect when news of the Romney tax return thing broke.  

It is possible that someone from this message-board reported him.  Not everyone thought that the way he acquired his 371,000 BTC was "clever".

The FAQ isn't dated so it's difficult to know when he's talking about.  Where are the receipts for the stuff the SS supposedly took before?  He's posted the documents related to the September seizure, why not for the other stuff?

As I've said before, he's appealing to the anti-government brigade and he knows his audience well.