bitcoinblackfriday.info - Do NOT use their website.

[theymos]

i am honestly thinking of going to the police with all of my screenshots of his fake bitmain website along with screenshots of all the bitmain addresses. i am just not sure it would do me any good, i wouldnt know where to begin to explain to them what happened.

Wouldn't hurt, at least. One time I worked with some police in Germany who actually managed to catch a scammer. If the police want the person's IPs, you can give them my email address (theymos <at> mm.st) and I'll give them the info.

[1714860459]

1714860459

[1714860459]

1714860459

[1714860459]

1714860459

[1714860459]

1714860459

[jdh015232]

i am honestly thinking of going to the police with all of my screenshots of his fake bitmain website along with screenshots of all the bitmain addresses. i am just not sure it would do me any good, i wouldnt know where to begin to explain to them what happened.

Wouldn't hurt, at least. One time I worked with some police in Germany who actually managed to catch a scammer. If the police want the person's IPs, you can give them my email address (theymos <at> mm.st) and I'll give them the info.

thank you very much. i will keep the post updated. thanks again for everyones help, you are all awesome!

[lorylore]

hi i am lorylore and i am sorry that people got hurt by the scammer. i bought this account from SmartIphone and i would be glad to provide more evidence if there is a need arises. hope no more victim will surface.

[Lutpin]

e-coin
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=917350.0;topicseen
sent out an email 16 hours ago that included a link:

Code:

We recommend exploring other deals for Bitcoin Black Friday at bitcoinblackfriday.info 
Save on hundreds of items using bitcoin. Find out more by visiting the site.

I guess they didn't mean any harm.
They also listed a deal themselves:
http://deals.bitcoinblackfriday.info/offer/e-coin-io-bitcoin-debit-card/

[JonHolmquist]

They did spend around 4BTC for their signature campaign, so I guess they earned scammed a little bit less than anticipated.

Fixed..

Hi, this is my real name. I founded and run BitcoinBlackFriday.com. I am legit, 4 years in business and I've never scammed anyone.

How did you not notice this?
They were advertising your site, what everyone thought was your site but rather a clone of, all this time, you had nothing to do with it, and you didn't notice them doing it or find it suspicious that they were advertising your site for you and paying to do it themselves?

I'm confused..

I have been watching them closely but until today they didn't do anything that would have allowed me to raise a red flag.

Every time I brought up how shady they were people claimed that 'competition was healthy'

I've mentioned multiple times, over and over again that they are a copy cat site and that I had nothing to do with them. They repeatedly brigaded my reddit posts and made it extremely difficult for me to run the campaign this year.

But, past shady marketing, they didn't show their hand until today, when it was too late.

[quentincole32]

Thankyou nico, thankyou shorena for pm me regarding this issue.
It was shocked everyone even theymos.
Glad to catch that scammer user before its too late.
Removed the signature. Thanks once again.

[Quickseller]

I will need to find out the txid's of the forum advertisements

ffb0cf99d315417d6c26feb7fc4916ecfda93384a18a7904429a82a3ac2e8ab5

The txid appears to be a dead end unfortunately. The smaller input to the address/wallet that paid for the forum ad was most likely from a mixer (I would guess bitmixer considering they are the only company that I know that actually uses Bitcoin properly, uses exactly one input for every transaction and has >100 transactions over the course of ~20 hours). The larger input to the address that paid for the forum ad was likely from some kind of exchange/service, although I am not sure which one - it would be one that has had at least 127k transactions since July https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/0000903c384305d7/addresses

Based on how well this person has covered his tracks so far, I would be doubtful that anything could be found with his IP addresses, although I don't think it would hurt anything to look into them. Unfortunately looking into his IP addresses would be beyond my expertise.

Regarding BIP 47, the only concern about this would be that it would force the receiver to protect their wallet file even if it does not contain any Bitcoin, and it would be easy to continue to lose money after your wallet is somehow compromised.

[JonHolmquist]

I'm surprised that theymos issued warnings about this, I thought the forum doesn't moderate scams or does anything about them.

Folks from Gyft reached out to me and I sent out a newsletter warning people not to use .info.

So,

The 'founder' of .info is 'Thomas Silva'

No prior history in Bitcoin, released a couple press releases. Used some really shady shit to downvote almost all of my social media posts and upvote his own.

Listed this as his phone number: +1 (424) 241-3613

Listed his first address on his press release as 3370 E Pershing Ave, Orlando, Florida, 32806 which was up for rent some time ago, you can get the property owner's info if you look for it, I didn't bother calling and verifying if a Thomas Silva lives there.

The next address he put up was in his newsletters:

Bloomspring Avenue 122
Seattle, Wa 98144

Which just doesn't exist.

Whois is privacy protected, we're sending in a request to namecheap to take down the website.

"Thomas" sent me an email on November 12th:

"Hello Jon,

My name is Thomas Silva and I'm the owner of bitcoinblackfriday.info. I
have seen a hostile reaction from you in some of our posts so I would like
to reach out to you and offer my apologies regarding the similarity
between our two domains and to express my sincere regret that you are
upset with us offering our expertise to help bitcoiners reach the best
bitcoin black friday deals on November 27th. Me and my team have the
utmost respect for you and your website, it has been of great help so far
but please understand that we feel we can do a great job also and we do
not want to compete with your website. We only want to help Bitcoin and
advertise this big day for the greater good of the community and spread
the word as best as possible.

I hope you understand that we do not want to hold grudges and maybe we can
work togheter to make Bitcoin Black Friday as successful as possible.

Sincerely,

Thomas Silva
BitcoinBlackFriday.info
contact@bitcoinblackfriday.info"

I have the headers information if someone who's trusted in the community wants to take a look at it and parse out the relevant bits so I don't give out my IP.

I'm mad that this happened, I knew he was shady since people who actually exist aren't that hard to find, but I just thought he was going to sell people's emails or some crap, never expected it to go so bad.

Are you able to post all of the headers and just scrub out your ip address? Just replace all instances of your ip with an xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Sent you a PM with the full headers, I'm assuming it's ok to post publicly since it's through gmail, but please confirm then post it.

[lama-hunter]

Oh, damn...  First i really liked the atractive concept but afterwards u really see what this good Egine brings to you..
Really sorry for the Guyss out there lost a Coin or more.. When thoose scammers will do something helpfull for the Community. Then they can also earn Money i dont get it...
Anyways dont be mad Guys and become also One of thoose People.. Shame for thoose souls and there family.. its the same like isis..  little bit..


regards
lama-hunter

[sebungkus]

BadNews Maybe

[boopy265420]

Thank you to send me pm and drawing my attention towards this campaign.You work to disclose this scam is appreciable.If work like this will continue this will help to minimize scams and fraudlent schemes in future too.

[Surge_PR]

Anyone got scammed?

[Lutpin]

Anyone got scammed?

Judging from the bitcoinaddresses the copy-sites provided, NLNico made a rough calculation:

6.43370775+2.941+2.941+2.941+2.33645 +1.16822+1.16822+1.07196+0.23364 = total 21.23
Potentially more with CoinPayments.

[AhmedAshraf]

All address used by fake bitmain site are stored at /add.txt directory path. Can anyone check if this is the case with the fake gyft and other sites?
http://www.bitmain-tech.com/add.txt

[Lutpin]

All address used by fake bitmain site are stored at /add.txt directory path. Can anyone check if this is the case with the fake gyft and other sites?
http://www.bitmain-tech.com/add.txt

http://primedice.io/add.txt
https://appgyft.com/bitcoin-black-friday/add.txt

Bitmain
Gyft
Primedice

This list is complete regarding the addresses from bitmain, gyft and primedice fake sites.

@AhmedAshraf: Balances are already checked, click the quote from NLN or check first post on site 7.
As just confirmed, NLNico already provided a complete list there.

[AhmedAshraf]

So here are all the addresses used by the scammer.
Bitmain:
1HyVFLUewenfqkKkaMkQE2wuqSHkvw5AyE
18jXhWToqix3jybpCNGTB75gFQULuV6guX
1NbA3NtMtt39mQxSEr55Ai1VhHWehNukj5
18jP3xv6cEx3nvf3bdnVVm4tXHNzyAYyju
14Jgcr7wWx2C9nmTW5jLSasVrgFvsHrvjt
16kLWoe8yab4dbTR3h26d9eJARBfueC3cY
1Nx7m1q2DuPtA6ZtuhcDxBJa2CPfBEErDx

Primedice:
1A8At7MSthUmt1cWfSGS35UvwHY5KcTEjv
1EeKpzVDPygc5wSPSRJp1Ra3anVo4dJRY7
1NNaeZwb4Jz5A4bwVKgvQBd6VEdjgNeU7g
18GHPQ81vw2WmMCXMGwQJh5DoNWBjpHGtH
1CMpZDNfAdhV6LZ1dCkmrPHLfP6qemATUC
1DLUj39TFwPhEsvZLdAE7mXQVW6TXNx7VY
1oigkZNjaSocPVY9VUgN1v1v7PKzrLJUW
14kMnWT8a7hRAHF29VQPCRRu1GXz5KwMzM
1MTnmDsajxLjsJ5CH3zcRTWgZAXoujM5wT
1DTZdAZWMy7wXoGmG1txF3sbaL8QJvaBmd
12rzdeuaAtBThVi6ZDXPjdvVfumWCLoou5

Appgyft:
1K3cJFmCb2NJ7UnxF75Q4b71YoUmyWrP3h
1NTxoRjw5TkjTz268f5UZy1qnAcQ4tsFnW
13yefnodG4ykWCRGXkdbX6N1zXcg4cuGZE
14Dk3WffwCc3f5km8np2EcsFHdo8dFq5ts
1by1bz5gMe7Bprz2hMDQK3YibvjscjaxP
15ePGqNtSibc9gnubJnSigQxdPp9bTjkYq
1GSsawawzuzdUj8EkAoa16i3qNro9WxCup
1Egkp39fM2NPnD5d1MhTRTHgpC4ybfzyx6

Can someone make a spreadsheet with all the addresses balances and report them to all BTC-USD Exchanges?

[Tstar]

This whole story should be used as a reference: I can't believe they managed to run this so smoothly. It's good that there are some very clever users around who tagged this scam. I'm sorry for you guys who got basically scammed by these criminals. Another lesson learned.

[Mickeyb]

This whole story should be used as a reference: I can't believe they managed to run this so smoothly. It's good that there are some very clever users around who tagged this scam. I'm sorry for you guys who got basically scammed by these criminals. Another lesson learned.

I am drinking my morning coffee, reading through the thread and I can't believe this crap! 21 BTCs scammed as we are speaking and probably even more!

Are we ever gonna move past the stuff like this as a community? Or will ever gonna be this easy to scam the people around here?

[james.lent]

This whole story should be used as a reference: I can't believe they managed to run this so smoothly. It's good that there are some very clever users around who tagged this scam. I'm sorry for you guys who got basically scammed by these criminals. Another lesson learned.

I am drinking my morning coffee, reading through the thread and I can't believe this crap! 21 BTCs scammed as we are speaking and probably even more!

Are we ever gonna move past the stuff like this as a community? Or will ever gonna be this easy to scam the people around here?

Guess scamming will never end. As time passes by, more and more schemes will pop up, some more evolved than the other rendering some of us blind. All we can do is be more vigilant and i guess now triple check any sale.

[dollarneed]

Thanks for the warning, i did not know that i'm promoting scam site,It was shocked me, i've changed my signature btw, thanks for NLNico especially for this best investigation
best regards