St. Petersburg police closed scam cryptocurrency exchanger

[Dana888]

The St. Petersburg police closed a cryptocurrency exchanger belonging to an organized group of scammers. They stole money from bank cards and transferred it into bitcoins.

Fraudsters under the guise of bank employees phoned citizens and convinced them to transfer money to bank cards issued for dummy persons. Money was cashed through ATMs and transferred to bitcoin exchanges.

10 members of the criminal group have been identified. Seven of them were detained in Yalta, Kaliningrad, Ulan-Ude, Khabarovsk and St. Petersburg.
The police received statements from at least 15 victims who transferred more than 2 million rubles to the fraudsters.

To cover up their activities, the attackers launched a cryptocurrency exchanger. The police identified organizers, coordinators and operators of an underground office located in a business center on the Moika River embankment.

https://forklog.com/v-sankt-peterburge-zaderzhany-organizatory-bitkoin-otmyvochnoj-na-milliony-rublej/

Translation from Russian.

I don't understand how this could happen. Are people really going to exchange large amounts of money in exchanges without work experience? On the same bestchange there is a huge pile of exchangers and all of them are guaranteed by the service itself. There were never any problems, and if there were, sooner or later, the administration helped.

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[(o)(o)ilikeboobs(o)(o)]

The scam was very obvious, someone impersonating advised them to transfer their money to a bank address and they followed suit. These things are not in the bank's work regulations, they stick to the seven.
The police shutting down this exchange was right because it was operating against the law.

[davis196]

That's great,but do you think that this news have something to do with Bitcoin?
Those scammers can be considered as fiat/bank scammers and not cryptocurrency scammers.The fact that they have created a crypto exchange to launder their stolen fiat money doesn't prove that they are Bitcoin/crypto scammers.Anyway,the Russian police is going a great job,which surprises me sometimes.
Forum threads about fiat scammers should be moved to another sub-forum.

[Twinkledoe]

The scam was very obvious, someone impersonating advised them to transfer their money to a bank address and they followed suit. These things are not in the bank's work regulations, they stick to the seven.
The police shutting down this exchange was right because it was operating against the law.

I guess there are more of them. I don't think they are the only one operating with such scheme. I hope this kind of scam will be stopped by their authorities. Remember for a time before, if it is a Russian project, somehow expect that it is a possible scam.

With the operations in South Korea like seizing Bithumb, and now in Russia, I hope there will be more coming in the next coming days. We need to eradicate these scammers in the crypto space.

[Yaunfitda]

That's great,but do you think that this news have something to do with Bitcoin?
Those scammers can be considered as fiat/bank scammers and not cryptocurrency scammers.The fact that they have created a crypto exchange to launder their stolen fiat money doesn't prove that they are Bitcoin/crypto scammers.Anyway,the Russian police is going a great job,which surprises me sometimes.
Forum threads about fiat scammers should be moved to another sub-forum.

But the fact that this criminals do put up an illegal crypto exchange site, and mix their laundered money and resulted in bitcoin or other crypto, then it make sense that this news will attract or correlated to bitcoin in general. Why it's very surprising though, government agencies are really haunting down those crypto scam artist or criminals, might take a lot of investigative work though through blockchain and cooperation from a lot of sources as well.

[Ridwan Fauzi]

Maybe the victims should have a reason why they send money to the scammer. They will not send the money without apparent reason, there must be something that the scammers promised. I just don't understand, why there still a people who fall to this scam, receives a call from a stranger and they ask for money to be sent to their bank, even though they offer lots of things that promise they shouldn't take it seriously.

[Igor17Krik]

Unfortunately, this is very much practiced in Russia. People are little told how to behave in such situations.
There are a lot of poor people. It is very easy to cheat them for money.

[Yatsan]

I just cannot truly believe how the people in Russia fall for an obvious and the most common scamming scheme that most scammers do which is to guise as a banking attendant and asking you to send money into a certain account. Before they do such actions, they must just call up their designated banks to confirm is such actions being asked on the line is legitimate or true most specially if it is coming from a strange number that is introducing himself as a banking accountant. This was duly not a direct assault on cryptocurrencies for the fact that it comes from a fiat bank account and used up the money they have laundered to execute a crypto exchange which is also another scam scheme.

Well, good thing that the police officers have discovered this scam cryptocurrency exchange and have put behind bars some of the members of the group but then at least they have recognized before it have gone too far out of their range. It is just bad that the scamming actions of those individuals are putting the bad impression towards cryptocurrency making it so hard not just for Russia but as well as into other countries to accept and adapt into crypto usage for they think that this is being used as a channel for money laundering activities and will serve no good which in reality people must be blamed for such actions not cryptocurrency.

[CarnagexD]

We are definitely getting closer to regulation; that's my take away on the whole issue. For the state to get interested in fraud arising from crypto deceit shows a level of interest on sanitizing that industry.

I think so, as there will be incident to happen government will be more have eyes on the industry which they should have done a few years back but now they are handling it with regulation. And as there will be gullible people, fraud and scams will not be over and image of the cryptocurrency will be slowly in mud full of dirt. Believe it or not, even if there is a regulation scammers will easily cope those fences that they fronted.

Before now, it used to be government placing an outright ban on all crypto activities. We are getting there gradually. Frankly, I hope the identified scammers all get to face the wrath of the law and face punishment for it.

That has a low chance to happen, the identities of these scammers are alphanumberic addresses, it is hard to track these people with a single clue and obviously scammers know how to get away with it. Scams are all planned.

[MCobian]

Scams like this don't just happen in Russia, but in several other countries too. And events like this create a Bitcoin image it looks
even worse, even though illegal activities like the one that happened in St. Louis. Petersburg is not because Bitcoin is bad. But many
people who want instant money through Bitcoin investment. Therefore I don't really blame the scammers, but the victims too not
careful. It is easy to transfer money to unknown accounts, without verification first. A careless person like this should be given a lot of
education and not blame Bitcoin for their losses.

[(o)(o)ilikeboobs(o)(o)]

The scam was very obvious, someone impersonating advised them to transfer their money to a bank address and they followed suit. These things are not in the bank's work regulations, they stick to the seven.
The police shutting down this exchange was right because it was operating against the law.

I guess there are more of them. I don't think they are the only one operating with such scheme. I hope this kind of scam will be stopped by their authorities. Remember for a time before, if it is a Russian project, somehow expect that it is a possible scam.

With the operations in South Korea like seizing Bithumb, and now in Russia, I hope there will be more coming in the next coming days. We need to eradicate these scammers in the crypto space.

Currently, cryptocurrency regulations are being built and developed in several countries. In countries that do not have a cryptocurrency regulation this kind of crime will be more active and harder to handle. The incident has also shown that human exploitation of cryptocurrencies in criminal activities is clear. Preventing crypto-related crime will make the cryptocurrencies ecosystem healthier, cleaner, and change people's perception of this environment.

[lepbagong]

The scam was very obvious, someone impersonating advised them to transfer their money to a bank address and they followed suit. These things are not in the bank's work regulations, they stick to the seven.
The police shutting down this exchange was right because it was operating against the law.

I guess there are more of them. I don't think they are the only one operating with such scheme. I hope this kind of scam will be stopped by their authorities. Remember for a time before, if it is a Russian project, somehow expect that it is a possible scam.

With the operations in South Korea like seizing Bithumb, and now in Russia, I hope there will be more coming in the next coming days. We need to eradicate these scammers in the crypto space.

Currently, cryptocurrency regulations are being built and developed in several countries. In countries that do not have a cryptocurrency regulation this kind of crime will be more active and harder to handle. The incident has also shown that human exploitation of cryptocurrencies in criminal activities is clear. Preventing crypto-related crime will make the cryptocurrencies ecosystem healthier, cleaner, and change people's perception of this environment.

totally agree that preventing crypto crime is very good and can improve the perception that has been built so far that crypto is identical to fraud. So it is indeed necessary to clean up from this practice the apparatus should be able to cooperate. but there is also the problem that not all countries accept and recognize crypto so that if something happens it will collide with the rules and usually cannot be resolved which makes people do bad things to keep doing it again.