Finding scammers

[sarannah]

Is there anyway to track scammers who scammed bitcoins and ethereum? Google search for public addresses don't find a thing.

Is there any tool where i can input addresses and it analyses it? I know there is block explorers but is there anything better?

[mocacinno]

Is there anyway to track scammers who scammed bitcoins and ethereum? Google search for public addresses don't find a thing.

Is there any tool where i can input addresses and it analyses it? I know there is block explorers but is there anything better?

you can use walletexplorer to link addresses to wallets
https://www.walletexplorer.com/

IIRC, these guys also have commercial products that dig deeper into the data..

If i'm not mistaking, this tool works by tracking when unspent outputs that funded different addresses are combined as input for a new transaction. However, if your attacker is smart enough, or used a mixer (or equivalent), this tool won't work... I don't think there are tools that are able to track attackers that actually know what they're doing, and cover their tracks...

[buwaytress]

If you're willing to pay, or if your business requires it, there are quite a number of blockchain analysis tools out there... think the field of blockchain forensics is quietly being developed for enforcement and regulatory use, actually. Saw a couple of proposals bidding for professional work and it's worth a lot of money. Think the guys at Chainalysis and Cointeliigence have been aggressively promoting their services. Then there are upcoming courses like: http://courses.dfironlinetraining.com/bitcoin-forensics

See BitFury's new tool launched a few weeks ago: https://medium.com/@BitFuryGroup/bitfury-launches-crystal-a-blockchain-investigative-tool-for-law-enforcement-and-financial-3d7712dd5dce

If you'd like to try an open source tool, there's one called BlockSci on github: https://github.com/citp/BlockSci

There are also Blockparser and BTCSpark. Since I'm no techie, I've never been able to try any!

[Kakmakr]

There are so many ways of hiding the destination of the scammers coins that it is virtually impossible to trace it. A lot of sites on the internet will allow you to register without KYC/AML requirements and you can push those coins through these services. They also allow you to change the sender address, to withdraw from their services and some even mix your coins.

A lot of these sites goes down and then resurface under a new domain, so you cannot trace any logs, because they are destroyed or not even logged by these sites. A lot of people open multiple accounts, which makes this even more difficult to follow. 

[nizamcc]

Is there anyway to track scammers who scammed bitcoins and ethereum? Google search for public addresses don't find a thing.

Is there any tool where i can input addresses and it analyses it? I know there is block explorers but is there anything better?

At the moment, nothing!
That is due to the fact that there are many tools for them to hide their funds and you won't even know.
They can hide it with the use of mixers and these mixers have a privacy policy, so you can't really do anything in finding them.
They can use someone else's identity (like a friend or relative) and get their KYC done, and redeem their coins thereafter which, finding the culprit would be impossible. They may also use some dark coins which are least traceable like - Monero, Dash (mostly Cryptonight).
All I can say is, nobody is a perfect thief in this world but this is also the bitter truth that you can't beat these fools unless they leave something behind that could really help you out in catching them. And don't mind, even if you try to find them, you will only be able to chase them till their footprints are delved. After they have vanished, you will not get anything but heave.

[onnz423]

There are network analysis companies out there that track payments across the blockchain and align them with KYC data, however I really doubt you will have the funds to acquire this sort of information, as the fee is usually quite hefty.

Check out the following;

https://www.chainalysis.com/

And google blockchain analysis, or blockchain identity mapping to find out more similar sites.

[vit05]

There is a difference between identifying, finding and following. Identifying a scammer having only a random address is very difficult. This address would have to have a tag on some other service.

Finding the address used by a scammer depends on others to identify the address that was used by him.

Now, following an address you already know that has been used by a scammer is very simple. Just search for an explorer of your choice.

[Seetheummerallyeah]

There are so many ways of hiding the destination of the scammers coins that it is virtually impossible to trace it. A lot of sites on the internet will allow you to register without KYC/AML requirements and you can push those coins through these services. They also allow you to change the sender address, to withdraw from their services and some even mix your coins.

A lot of these sites goes down and then resurface under a new domain, so you cannot trace any logs, because they are destroyed or not even logged by these sites. A lot of people open multiple accounts, which makes this even more difficult to follow. 

False. This may have been the case back in the Silk Road days but Bitcoin can definitely be traced now. This is why many deep web markets have switched over to Monero.

If you ONLY deal from bitcoin to bitcoin it is possible to remain anonymous... the problem is that most people, at some point, buy bitcoin with fiat. If the government/someone really wanted to track down a transaction, they can do so even through bitcoin mixers and whatnot.

[BenOnceAgain]

False. This may have been the case back in the Silk Road days but Bitcoin can definitely be traced now. This is why many deep web markets have switched over to Monero.

If you ONLY deal from bitcoin to bitcoin it is possible to remain anonymous... the problem is that most people, at some point, buy bitcoin with fiat. If the government/someone really wanted to track down a transaction, they can do so even through bitcoin mixers and whatnot.

If you want to be completely untraceable, you must procure your bitcoin in an anonymous way and never deal with a fiat/bitcoin conversion business or any other entity that is tied to your identity.

Once you have a business such as Coinbase in a transaction chain, they must respond to lawful subpoenas for customer information.  If they do not, they will face serious consequences.  Some bitcoin businesses also have in their terms and conditions that they can choose to voluntarily comply with a request from a law enforcement organization for information, rather than requiring a subpoena.

Best regards,
Ben

[Kakmakr]

There are so many ways of hiding the destination of the scammers coins that it is virtually impossible to trace it. A lot of sites on the internet will allow you to register without KYC/AML requirements and you can push those coins through these services. They also allow you to change the sender address, to withdraw from their services and some even mix your coins.

A lot of these sites goes down and then resurface under a new domain, so you cannot trace any logs, because they are destroyed or not even logged by these sites. A lot of people open multiple accounts, which makes this even more difficult to follow. 

False. This may have been the case back in the Silk Road days but Bitcoin can definitely be traced now. This is why many deep web markets have switched over to Monero.

If you ONLY deal from bitcoin to bitcoin it is possible to remain anonymous... the problem is that most people, at some point, buy bitcoin with fiat. If the government/someone really wanted to track down a transaction, they can do so even through bitcoin mixers and whatnot.

Wow, so if that is true... Why are we not seeing government agencies arresting all the people who bought drugs on Silkroad or why are most of the money still untraceable that were hacked on the many exchanges that was exploited over the years?

Why did they not arrest the owner of the biggest Bitcoin mixer service that closed down a while ago? < Bitmixer.io > 

Bitcoin is for the most part anonymous, if you use it correctly and that is why government agencies are so against it. You can use other Alt coins like Monero and ZCash and Dash, but a lot of those coins are sold for Bitcoin in the end. 

[mocacinno]

There are so many ways of hiding the destination of the scammers coins that it is virtually impossible to trace it. A lot of sites on the internet will allow you to register without KYC/AML requirements and you can push those coins through these services. They also allow you to change the sender address, to withdraw from their services and some even mix your coins.

A lot of these sites goes down and then resurface under a new domain, so you cannot trace any logs, because they are destroyed or not even logged by these sites. A lot of people open multiple accounts, which makes this even more difficult to follow.  

False. This may have been the case back in the Silk Road days but Bitcoin can definitely be traced now. This is why many deep web markets have switched over to Monero.

If you ONLY deal from bitcoin to bitcoin it is possible to remain anonymous... the problem is that most people, at some point, buy bitcoin with fiat. If the government/someone really wanted to track down a transaction, they can do so even through bitcoin mixers and whatnot.

Wow, so if that is true... Why are we not seeing government agencies arresting all the people who bought drugs on Silkroad or why are most of the money still untraceable that were hacked on the many exchanges that was exploited over the years?

Why did they not arrest the owner of the biggest Bitcoin mixer service that closed down a while ago? < Bitmixer.io >  

Bitcoin is for the most part anonymous, if you use it correctly and that is why government agencies are so against it. You can use other Alt coins like Monero and ZCash and Dash, but a lot of those coins are sold for Bitcoin in the end.  

I think there is a fine line between what a high-level, over-funded governement agency like the NSA, the NKVD or the mossad *could potentially* do, and what they *will* do...
It's not a tale of what's technically possible, but about which level of paranoid you are, and about the odds of being the victim of a (mostly) 3 letter agency.

For example, take this article from 2014, written after a journalist dug into snowden's documents: https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/16/nsa-bugged-cisco-routers/
Combine the fact that a gov agency *could* bug the routers at your datacenter, they *could* have backdoors in the drivers on your servers, they *could* have bugs in your house, they *could* have installed spyware on your pc, they *could* have planted 50% of the current network's nodes (including the one on the darknet), they *could* be running the marjority of the mixers themselfs, they *could* have written algorithms running on big supercomputers having loaded all kind of blockchains in order to find links, they *could* have penetrated the dev groups of many opensource security tools to install backdoors, they *could* analyse all data from all ISPs and datacenters of the US and the EU if they use the proper legal channels,....

However, you should ask yourself "am i interesting enough for them to go trough all this effort in order to reveil my identity".

I truely believe that if they really, really, really wanted to find the person behind, for example, bitmixer.io, they could *probably* do this... However, the cost would probably be enormous... It would probably take them thousands of manhours, external contractors, bugging hardware, illegally entering houses, asking for searchwarrants, cooperating with or forcing other governements to allow access to certain data,....
In the end, the cost vs the outcome would probably not be in balance.

I also think that if you want privacy, and you use a combination of at least 3 anonimizing methods over tor and/or VPN, the odds of a governement agency deciding it's worth their effort to unmask you are really low, especially if you're not doing anything wrong to begin with. Personally, i sometimes use 1 mixing service... Even if it would eventually turn out this service is owned by the governement, i wouldn't be worried anyways... Mixing my coins is just a way to make sure nobody knows how much BTC i own (hint: not a lot)

BTW: a last remark: the way i understand it, bitcoin was never meant to be 100% anonymous to begin with, Satoshi left it up to the user to make sure he used bitcoin in a way that improved his/her privacy.... Satoshi actually wrote this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8.msg34#msg34

[bob123]

False. This may have been the case back in the Silk Road days but Bitcoin can definitely be traced now. This is why many deep web markets have switched over to Monero.

Bitcoin has always been traceable. This is nothing new.
Just because it was not known that it is traceable 5 years ago, this doesn't mean that it wasn't.

If the government/someone really wanted to track down a transaction, they can do so even through bitcoin mixers and whatnot.

This only works under some circumstances:
1) The mixer keeps logfiles
2) The mixers location is in the same country as the authorities
3) There has to be a court decision

If one of these points doesn't apply, this is not possible for governments.

Wow, so if that is true... Why are we not seeing government agencies arresting all the people who bought drugs on Silkroad or why are most of the money still untraceable that were hacked on the many exchanges that was exploited over the years? 

Governments arrested a lot of people for selling drugs on silkroad. The majority has been traced via btc exchanges.
The (from exchanges) stolen coins, have already been laundered. You can't trace them further if they have already been sold.
Like it is the case with NEM. The majority of coins got laundered, therefore the foundation stopped tracing them.

Why did they not arrest the owner of the biggest Bitcoin mixer service that closed down a while ago? < Bitmixer.io >   

Why should they? It is not illegal to run a mixing service.

Bitcoin is for the most part anonymous, if you use it correctly and that is why government agencies are so against it. You can use other Alt coins like Monero and ZCash and Dash, but a lot of those coins are sold for Bitcoin in the end. 

Bitcoin is not anynomous. It is pseudonymous.
In the end the majority of pseudonyms (addresses) can be linked together. Thats by far not anonymous.

[samputin]

Bitcoin is so popular that it attracted people because of its advantages and value. But its sad that this brings out not only the good side of human nature, but also the bad one. And one is scamming. It's not new though. Since bitcoin became very well known, some people takes advantage of others. They create fake wallets, and other frauds and scams. With the question regarding tools on how to spot a scam, there are websites out there that offers services and ways on how to avoid one. Bitcoin.com, in particular, advises to visit their exchange portal to make sure that you are going to a real bitcoin exchange, wallet portal to make sure you are going to a real bitcoin wallet, and other guides. They also provide informations about different kinds of scam. But with the question about tracking the scammer, I am not sure if there is something that can lead you to the person because some people are really good at cleaning their mess especially when they really don't want to be hunt down. Maybe there is some tool that can help but I'm not just aware of it because I am not inclined to that kind of technology.

In the long run, it still better to have enough information so we can avoid frauds and scams. And as a saying goes, "prevention is better than cure."

[max fray]

I would suggest to make a "black list" of people (namely, accounts, wallets, addresses, websites) who were engaged in scam.
There is such topic in the Russian thread related to unfair bounties (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2317295.0)/
There is also the list of exchangers that were caught with fraud (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2461288.msg%msg_id%)
So why can't the other threads do the same? Or there could be a separate site dedicated to scammers.

[gurang]

Is there anyway to track scammers who scammed bitcoins and ethereum? Google search for public addresses don't find a thing.

Is there any tool where i can input addresses and it analyses it? I know there is block explorers but is there anything better?

finding scammers? you can do a look at google and find that link or adresses, because many people have scored a bit of scam especially with bitcoin because it's a great job / bitcoin job so they attracted about it

[TucoRamirez]

there is currently a reward of > 40BTC for anyone who can provide information / recovery of this : https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/0553bf662200ad5d?from_address=1BaEJquitskdXcTj53Uy6PuUtJ5a8ETWpA

stolen from a big indian btc exchange.

[cellard]

I think there is a fine line between what a high-level, over-funded governement agency like the NSA, the NKVD or the mossad *could potentially* do, and what they *will* do...
It's not a tale of what's technically possible, but about which level of paranoid you are, and about the odds of being the victim of a (mostly) 3 letter agency.

I remember reading some leaked documents by Snowden, apparently the NSA hates Tor because they can't do much about it. Google "Tor stinks". Unless they have advanced in their methods to de-anonymize people, last time we know their opinion was that they had huge problems with it. As far as I know, there is no evidence of someone using Tails with all scripts disabled behind deanonymized ever.

M personally im not worried, since I don't do anything illegal, I just use Tor to hide my IP from the huge amount of scammers in the Bitcoin world constantly trying to dox and steal your coins.

Like you said, for small things they will not bother... if the owner of a mixer is not moving a lot of money they may not bother, but if in 10 years there's a mixing service moving $billions then he better have perfect anonymity because I doubt governments will just sit and watch as huge amounts are mixed.

[MrCrank]

Is there anyway to track scammers who scammed bitcoins and ethereum? Google search for public addresses don't find a thing.

Is there any tool where i can input addresses and it analyses it? I know there is block explorers but is there anything better?

I think it's impossible.
Do you know about Bitcoin mixer?
If scammers used btc mixer, you can't track moving fund.
This is difficult.

[desioner]

Having been scammed myself before it's very difficult to get anything done and extrememly frustrating. In the end you are the master of your decisions both good & bad. I only have myself to blame but I highly recommed everyone to NEVER send anyone BTC without complete confidence! Even if you know you're being scammed you can stop yourself… albiet a very difficult task.
After the fact I had a look around and found this resource. Of course I'm sure that the scammer will never use the address again but if others use and know about it can prove to be a somewhat useful resource.

[picostocks]

There are some companies like coinfirm: https://www.coinfirm.io/about which lists the stolen/frauded BTC addresses then estimate the frauded/stolen bitcoin in your wallett.