How Not To Buy Fake BTC!

[Lucius]

All those members who are active on the forum regularly have certainly noticed a lot of newbie accounts asking the same question over and over again "I sent BTC to my wallet, but nothing appears in the history tab?" Sometimes the cause is just a wallet that is out of sync, but a much more common cause is in fact that completely inexperienced people buy BTC which really isn't Bitcoin.

For those not familiar, there are many forks or better to say copies of the original Bitcoin that have been popping up over the years, for the reason their creators claim that their BTC is actually the right one, all with the goal of making a profit.

One of the most famous copies is definitely BitcoinCash (BCH), which has been advertised for a long time over one known page as only true BTC. All those who go to invest first and then research what they invest in, find themselves in a problem, because after purchase they send the BCH to the BTC wallet. In case the user sent the BCH to the wallet where he has complete control over his private keys (on Legacy address) the matter is solvable by exporting private key of specific addresses to wallet that is support BCH. In case BCH is sent to SeGwit address, only miners can help, and if coins are sent to exchange it will depend only on them (for small amounts they will not do anything).

All those who want to buy BTC should be fully aware of what they are doing, and that there is only one original Bitcoin, and dozens of copies. Although there are many who sell fake BTC, one site stands out especially, and I recommend avoiding it at all costs and warning others not to fall into the trap.

Code:

https://www.bitcoin.com/

Just some recent examples :

1. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5236471.0
2. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5239511.0
3. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5191546.0

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[BIT-BENDER]

Not only buying of fake coin, also watch out on site offering free btc or people asking you to help in collecting btc for them through your wallet by proposing a Greek gift to you for your help.

[Bttzed03]

I can't blame the newbies for falling victim to this buying of fake bitcoin. If you search and type "buy bitcoin" on google or other search engine, it's https://buy*bitcoin*com/ that usually appears at the top instead of https://bitcoin.org/en/buy or other exchanges.

[mk4]

Seriously. I wouldn't really despise Roger Ver and BitcoinCom THIS much if they weren't this scammy. If he actually believed that his fork is the right path for Bitcoin, then at least compete fairly. But instead he had to do some misleading selling to prop up buying pressure of his shitcoin.

[JeromeTash]

That website

Code:

https://www.bitcoin.com

They even go ahead and name  the real bitcoin as "Bitcoin Core" and the claim that " Bitcoin Cash" is the real bitcoin. So annoying 

Just wondering why that domain was never acquired by bitcoin for all those years before the stupid bitcoin cash fork came in?
It's so misleading to newbies.

[dkbit98]

Bcash is still alive?
Still fast, cheap and reliable? Even now when it is halved

Problem is not only with Roger Ver business of taking BTC brand, but regular people are lazy and don't read and learn stuff.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Just wondering why that domain was never acquired by bitcoin for all those years before the stupid bitcoin cash fork came in?

Bitcoin has always used the ".org" domain, which is more suitable to an open source, community driven project. ".com" domains are far more geared towards centralized, profit driven companies, which is exactly what BCH is. The ".com" domain was registered back in 2008, and Ver has had control of it since 2014, long before BCH was forked. You can look on Wayback Machine or archive.today to see that "bitcoin.com" (WARNING: SCAM SITE) used to be a fairly good source of information for newbies before Ver decided to start scamming newbies instead.

It's unrelated.  There wasn't anything there when I started.

The price of .com registrations is lower than it should be, therefore any good name you might think of is always already taken by some domain name speculator.  Fortunately, it's standard for open source projects to be .org.

[mk4]

Bcash is still alive?

Yep, apparently it's still alive technically. The block halving really did them crap though LOL.

https://coin.dance/blocks/hashrate

[Csmiami]

Something that surprises me about all these cases we've seen in the last couple of weeks is that most of the users were using Electrum wallet. Why is this something worth noting? I've done an anonimous search on chrome incognito (I'm going to assume that this users use chrome....) and electrum doesn't show up for "bitcoin wallet" results. In fact, the first result I see is from bitcoin.org on how to choose your wallet!

Another quick search for "buy bitcoin" reveals that the first result is also from bitcoin.org, and coinbase is the runner up here. These 2 facts lead me to believe that even if they went straight tto bitcoinDOTcom because they're are used to that domain; how on earth have they discovered electrum? BitcoinDOTcom has it's own wallet software, so something isn't adding up for me. maybe I'm the only one noticing this and I'm starting to be paranoid and I need some sleep, but who knows

[tranthidung]

It is bad to lose money like that. I talked about it to help newbies with my threads too.

• Bitcoin Testnet. Activate, experience it, but don't trade and get scammed.
• Sending BTC to BCH or whatever coins, vice versa. Don't do this, newbies !

I also read help request from people who get scam by don't understand the difference between Bitcoin and bit (micro-bitcoin). They naively think bits equal to Bitcoin and naively spend same amount of money for one bitcoin to buy one bit.

[KrisAlex18]

Beginners are used with this things because they have no enough knowledge about the crypto world, so this post is really great especially to those beginners out there, this will warn them for every action they will do when buying bitcoins or other crypto currency, actually, scammers are so confident when selling fake bitcoins to the beginners because they know that they have advantage on it and they know that beginners are so easy to be fooled.
For all the beginners out there, always be careful in buying some cryptocurrencies always do double-checking because that is really important if you are going to buy or to sell cryptocurrencies.

[Csmiami]

Incognito on Google Chrome isn't really anonymous and Google search is personalized (usually based on your activity history and region).

Fair point, but the results are pretty much the same on Tor. Bitcoin.org shows up as the same result in both cases.

As for reason they use Electrum, it's possible because they did some research about Bitcoin before buying Bitcoin and they visited bitcoin.org

But that's what I don't really get; if they did infact visit bitcoin.org, they'd see hte "Buy" button, which I doubt will have any links to .com  And it can't be that they downloaded Electrum because they read it on .com, because they would've downloaded Electron wallet

[Lucius]

Something that surprises me about all these cases we've seen in the last couple of weeks is that most of the users were using Electrum wallet. Why is this something worth noting? I've done an anonimous search on chrome incognito (I'm going to assume that this users use chrome....) and electrum doesn't show up for "bitcoin wallet" results. In fact, the first result I see is from bitcoin.org on how to choose your wallet!

I only focus on one wallet, in this case Electrum, but some users also buy fake coin and then send it to BTC address on some online wallet or exchange. Then they ask support about that problem, and in most cases any support will say "sorry we can not recover your coins". In case of Electrum there is no official support, so most people find this forum as a possible source of information, since we have a dedicated Electrum board.

I tried to do an experiment, I searched by keyword "free bitcoin wallet" and it showed me bitcoin.org as the first search result (Firefox+uBlock). On that site I click on Introduction -> Getting-Started -> Choose-Your-Wallet -> Windows -> New -> and based on what you click in next few steps (coin control, 2FA) you will get Electrum as main or only choice.



This is a possible answer to your question, but you should also consider that Electrum is an extremely popular crypto wallet for two reasons, it is free and does not require downloading the entire blockchain.

[SirCharles]

I wasn't aware that there's actually fake BTC out there! This is an eyeopener for me and I thought it's just those scammers I would need to avoid when trading by just sticking with trading via the legit exchanges only.

[Lucius]

~snip~

Well, it's definitely a fake, because it's a copy that someone presents as an original. Some people do not understand the difference, because it only matters to them that coin in the name has Bitcoin, and that they can buy more coin for less money. I remember one member of the forum a few years ago who was happy to have been able to buy BTC at a super affordable price (a few coins), to later reveal that he bought some forked coins (fake) BTC. Imagine someone asks you if you want to buy 1 BTC for $7000 or you want to buy 30 BCH for the same amount?

You can buy forked BTC coins on almost every legit crypto exchange, but you need to know what you are buying  - there is saying : "It is not gold all that shines"

Some of BTC forks can be seen on this list : https://www.forks.net/list/Bitcoin/

[Csmiami]

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If people are lazy (or stupid) enough to not double check what they are buying, I highly doubt they'll check anyhting any further than the first search result on Google

[Baofeng]

Actually my first post in this board was similar to what the OP observed: [Reminder]: Specially for newbies BCH is not BTC. And my post was like one year ago and still many newbies are falling for BCH pretending and misleading them.