I was told Marketplace was the most suitable place for this thread but I've always said it should be in Bitcoin Discussion, so if you moved it back I'd be very pleased.

It's evidence that Bruce Wagner has admitted to being a man who's defrauded vulnerable homeowners out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here's the theory about what happened to MyBitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40417.0

It's undeniably about Bitcoins though, which makes the decision to move it to Off-Topic seem incredibly perverse. If the Marketplace section is the right place, why wasn't it moved there in the first place?

I made an on-topic thread about theories surrounding the collapse of the myBitcoin e-wallet site. It's a matter of clear relevance to bitcoin and something which must surely concern many users - even if they weren't directly involved, the implications of what happened could affect the Bitcoin community for years to come.

I am aware that threads about aspects of Bruce Wagner's private life have been understandably moved to off-topic, and was therefore very careful to purely focus on his involvement in myBitcoin and ensure the thread stayed completely on the topic of bitcoins. Yet despite my best efforts, it's still been moved to off-topic. Perhaps this was an accident, and whichever mod moved it thought it was yet another thread making allegations about Bruce Wagner's private life? Either way, I'd be very grateful if it were moved back into the Bitcoin Discussion forum - where it belongs - or, failing that, it would be nice to get an explanation as to why my thread was off-topic and what I can do to avoid this happening in the future. Thanks.

It has also emerged that Bruce was not only involved in the Ohio fraud lawsuit regarding the aforementioned foreclosure scam, but there's also this summons to the New York Supreme Court demanding Bruce appear to answer accusations of assault and fraud - he did not, thus defaulting on the $514,400 lawsuit. There is no record of him ever having paid up.

You need to consider the circumstantial evidence. A proven fraudster tries to convince people to put their money into an obvious scam, and then it mysteriously vanishes (and suddenly the fraudster can afford a holiday to Tokyo despite having no obvious day job.) I'm having trouble understanding why a man who is obviously fairly proficient in the art of fraud would put any money into something so obviously dodgy unless he actually didn't and was only claiming to have done as part of his shtick.

Bruce Wagner has confessed to running Bold Funding Inc, the company which ran the foreclosure scam.

I don't usually like to get involved in personal drama like this, and I know stuff related to the Bruce situation is being directed to Off-Topic, but the disgusting Mybitcoin scandal is most definitely on-topic, and it is looking increasingly likely that we have found at least one of the person(s) responsible. Here's why:

The First Clue

http://mortgagefraudblog.com/perp-walk/item/10674-illinois_foreclosure_rescue_company_fined_and_shut_down


Somebody called Bruce Wagner is a fraudster, responsible for - at least - a huge foreclosure scam. On its own, this proves nothing and could well be a coincidence, but is the first step in our lengthy trail of evidence.

Edit 2: Not only was Bruce involved in the original Ohio fraud lawsuit regarding the aforementioned foreclosure scam, but he's also in default of a $514,400 lawsuit in New York regarding assault and fraud - there is no record of him ever having paid up.

The Connection

Edit: Bruce Wagner has since confessed to being the same Bruce Wagner as owned Bold Funding, but here's how he was caught:

Whois data from the domain of scam company "Bold Funding." Note the address: 9 E Huron St., Chicago


Next, an online business card from that same physical address. Note the domain name: brucewagner.com

http://www.imarketlive.com/USA/biz/bruce-wagner-omnimedia-inc-MTE2NDIwNDU.html


Finally, the LinkedIn profile of the Bitcoin Show presenter Bruce Wagner, the Bruce Wagner we're interested in.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/brucewagner


He owns the same domain name and company name as the fraudster. There's our connection - both Bruce Wagners are the same. The host of the Bitcoin Show is a convicted fraudster. This is the most visually striking chain of evidence, but other links, such as a correlating date of birth from criminal records, are in the process of being uncovered.

The Shill

So far, we've only proved that Wagner's a dodgy character - however, he could have reformed, and even if he hasn't we've nothing to prove he was anything other than a high-profile victim of a Bitcoin scandal. And we still wouldn't - were it not for the fact that one of Bruce's shills was a little unimaginative in his choice of pseudonym. Here's some of his posts, claiming to be a satisfied customer of Bruce's old company, Bold Funding:







Tod Williams. Doesn't that name sound familiar? It will to victims of the MyBitcoin fiasco - Tom Williams was the man at the helm of MyBitcoin when it went down with half of its clients' money, including, allegedly, 25,000BTC of cash belonging to it's biggest advocate -Bruce Wagner.

From this, we've established two key facts: the first being that Bruce Wagner is a convicted con artist and the second that one of his shills called himself Tod Willlams. In isolation, neither of these conclusively link him to the scam But together, along with our knowledge about Bruce's activities before the collapse, they leave us with very little doubt of what the score is. The specifics aren't exactly clear, but it looks as if Tom/Tod Williams was a shill for Bruce's original foreclosure scam, and when he came to run one of his own - MyBitcoin - Bruce returned the favour using his popular and trusted Bitcoin show. But that might not be all...

Accomplice or Mastermind?

Followers of Bruce's online posting may have noticed he has a distinctive typing style, one which, amongst other things, makes heavy...use...of...ellipses. Though it's pure speculation, these followers have noted a distinct similarity between the style of Bruce Wagner and Tod Williams, the shill in his earlier foreclosure scam. This has led them to believe - again though, I stress that this is purely educated guesswork - that Tod Williams was in fact a pseudonym for Bruce himself, and that Tom Williams, by implication, was a reuse of this same pseudonym, slightly altered. It would certainly be foolish of him to be so careless in leaving connections to his previous life in this manner but, as we've seen, it wouldn't be the first time he's made a mistake like this. This would imply that Bruce wasn't just an accomplice in someone else's scam, but the mastermind behind the whole operation.

The Facts

We know that Bruce Wagner defrauded hundreds of thousands of dollars out of innocent homeowners. We know that he was an avid supporter of MyBitcoin, and claimed to have entrusted, and subsequently lost, huge amounts of money with the company. We're fairly sure he was in fact somehow involved, and may have even been in charge of, the whole operation, which is looking likely to be a fraud.


However, one thing's for sure: Bruce Wagner's got a lot of explaining to do.

He is the MyBitcoin scammer - or at least, an accomplice.

A lot of the users on this forum are technically-minded and often run servers, and it's much larger than any others I frequent, so I thought I'd try out a couple of (fairly specific) questions here about the vsftpd FTP daemon first. It's been provided by my VPS host and I'd rather not switch away from it, but I'm having a couple of problems:

1) I've been trying to set a custom banner message for security, but I'd quite like it to be a few lines long. How do you set a multi-line banner message? I've tried it with the config file option but it can't cope with newlines. Does it use an escape character or something?

2) How do I set a limit on the total download rate? Don't mind about per-user rates, just as long as I can keep the total under control

and finally, not really a problem but...

3) How good is it!? I've never used it, so It'd be good to hear about roughly how easy it is to deal with as a server admin, how reliable it is, if you've had any problems and if possible roughly how many users you have, as I'm interested as to how well it scales.

Thanks!

I'm a programmer myself, and often find that when I come to test my programs they take so long that they don't seem like they're going to finish. Eventually I get bored and kill them, only to discover that there's nothing wrong with the code and it's just taking a while; but other times, I look at the code and realise I've accidentally put in an infinite loop and it wouldn't ever have stopped anyway! It'd be great if you could make me a quick and dirty program to detect whether my programs will ever end - I usually code in Python, but if you'd prefer to do it for C++ that'd be great too.

Thanks!

I have a card of a similar age to that and, after looking around a bit, I've come to the sad conclusion that we're out of luck. I'm not sure mining is cost-effective any more though, so it doesn't really matter.

I like http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ purely because it's the first one I came across and I really like the simplicity of the interface. Absolutely up to you though!

This'll be really useful for me, just the sort of thing I need as I find myself "trapped" away from my computer far too much these days.

Just a humble (and perhaps slightly selfish) suggestion: might you consider open sourcing the code? I'm always wary of 3rd party clients and my personal accounts, especially with something as important as this, and it'd be very reassuring if you did.

Provided both computers are connected to the internet reliably, there should be no issues with the transaction, especially since both partie can be trusted (since they're you!) However, if you're worried about your bitcoins I would strongly recommend keeping your wallet.dat file safe by encrypting it wherever feasible and ensuring the computer it's stored is as secure as possible. I personally use Truecrypt whole-disk encryption, but, as they say, other products are on the market. Don't forget to back it up somewhere too - if your hard drive fails you could lose your coins forever!

Hi, I'm Alan and I find bitcoins really interesting from a computing point of view, both in terms of how the system works and in providing new opportunities for algorithmic trading. I've been reading some interesting stuff here, so I hope I can participate constructively and learn a lot too!