Topic: 59 BTC around $ 3,352,000 stolen from hot wallet by Bitcoin atm Manufacturer (Read 220 times)

As I said in my post I was thinking in a totally different scenario. Around here a lot of stores rent space to vendors. Be it a regular ATM or those DVD rental machines or whatever.
The contracts differ based on what it is and what the store owner wants and other factors. Usually it's a base fee and a cut of the profits.
If some BATM operator was saying that last week this BATM moved 1BTC in and out when really it's 2BTC in and out. And the profit was .1 instead of .2 (since most are in the 10% above and below range) so here is your .05BTC instead of .1BTC After a few months did they go with a even higher skim since the OP was obviously not paying attention?

Busy locations, I could see that happening. He is saying that it "lost"1721 59BTC transactions . I could see them just not being told about them.
Or to put it another way they were only skimming about .25BTC a week. In 2021 that is a lot of money. Even at the highs of 2017 it was only $5000 spread between 3 locations.
If you don't know how much you are supposed to be getting but are still making money, in the $1000s per week I could see it happening. Especially if he was not keeping tabs on them.

There was a news story around here a few months ago about a bar / restaurant operator who was being ripped off by his manager who (and I do think this was an epic scam) swapped one of the POS registers with one of his own. So they had 4 terminals, 3 went to the owner 1 went to the manager. Because COVID and the drop off in business it took a while for the owner to catch on.

-Dave

It doesn't work like that, the average was well below 10k for that time and poeple who buy BTC don't buy the same amount no matter the price, you can check LB volume for example, and see how in 2016 was 10k BTC a week and after the spike in price went down to 1k although in $ terms it went up.
So probably most of those coins were bought in 2016 and far less in 2020, with the same ratio as the price.


It can be possible, a vulnerability in the code or a backdoor installed by the manufacturer or somebody that had access to either the machine or the wallet so it constantly grabbed deposited coins, not impossible that the thief himself came and sold coins for $ knowing he could get his coins back from the compromised machine. As for the time and length of the "hack", MtGox went for months with half a million coins missing from their wallets.

That aside, the story is weird not because of the theft but because of how things went.
So he wants to sell the stores, somebody comes with an offer, asks for the hot wallet? Neah! How has this buyer already identified who's done the transactions, why would a buyer buy the shops and the coins, OP knows he has at least 59 coins but never bothered to check his balance although already for a year he would have been a multi-millionaire by the amount he thought he had in coins alone?
Too many things that don't make sense.

I am not even talking about 3 Million, let's say he used the average price between 2016-2020 was $10000, this would still translate to $590000, a person who would be having revenues entirely from a particular stream would never let it go untouched because eventually, he has to do expenses for this store. If this person was able to forget such high receipts and never noticed any difference this means, this must be less than even 10% of his total revenues. Which is why I am saying this situation is very difficult to be believed in these circumstances.

The $3 million price he quoted was the value today. Depending on the times the transactions were made, it could be less then $150000.
Which is still a significant amount, but depending on the circumstances not unbelievable.

If these machines were getting a lot of use in a major city scraping some money off the top would not be impossible. Depending on how the machines were setup and used.
Lets face it, if the ATM operator is just renting space and giving the OP a cut of the profits then it's not impossible that they were vastly under reporting the amounts.

-Dave

First surprise is that you get revenue of around 59BTC in your "three small Stores" and then this much revenue might be so insignificant to you that you didn't even notice them, This means you must be having revenue of at least 10 million or more, anyways, not my business. But for sure you must immediately sue these criminals, you must be having invoices of all the customers that have used the POS, this means you will be able to reconcile the inputs in the address, and similarly reconcile the outputs with some other sort of withdrawals that you might have done. Complain the police that the balance doesn't reconcile and file a complain against the POS terminal company.

All possible angles on which you could see that they could able to snatch off those transactions without even you knowing or you arent aware wit hthose.

As a business owner or something like that then it is really impossible that you wouldnt really notice if you do actively make out some audits of your investments.

Its already 5 years and out of those number of transactions then i wont really expect much for a retrieval and its true that
if you do see some holes then better sue them out.

Seems like you also need to ask your people, especially those who handle the audits of your ATM. I can't wrap my head around the fact that you've lost that much in a span of 4 years, yet you weren't notified even once by your people about what's really happening with your funds.

If you have strong evidence on your ATM manufacturer stealing those money from you, no other option exists but to sue them.

Sounds very sketchy to me.

If you are sure that these transactions aren't normal, then definitely get a lawyer and get advice from them as to what to proceed with. This is theft regardless of whether or not the transactions were carried on the bitcoin blockchain.

But I find it hard to believe (as others) that you would miss such a high amount of transactions.

Really weird story, I don't know how 59 BTC gets stolen over five years without you noticing? I know that companies do a monthly inventory to see the monthly entries and outputs and to know the remaining balance, is it possible that you have not done such things before?
How can you prove that the Bitcoin ATM manufacturer is the one who stole Bitcoin from you after all these years!! You have no real evidence to prove it!!!
In any case, you cannot leave all this money. You should try and it is best to consult a lawyer who specializes in such legal issues to prosecute the manufacturer if you are sure that it was the theft.

Can you tell us what is the name of this Bitcoin ATM manufacturer?
I recently heard a story of one guy from Europe who lost few bitcoins few years ago in similar way, there was one employee who robbed him and ATM wallet was custodial.
Even more suspicious is that guy who stole those Bitcoin was reported dead after that.

I would talk with your lawyer and see if you could get something back, but better don't have high expectations.

The price in 2016 was between $400 and just under $1000 at the end of the year, and if the OP then had some significant traffic on the ATM, he might have overlooked that someone stole a few BTCs from him. Anything more than that only makes sense if the OP was completely unaware of how the whole thing works and the manufacturers of that ATM took advantage of it.

However, if in 4 years you do not notice that you are missing as many as 59 BTC, then I wonder if the OP is doing this business legally and does it have bookkeeping at all.

Certainly you should sue the scammer. However, people will definitely ask how you didn't notice that someone stole your BTC. and they stole it very slowly. 1721 transactions? This doesn't look like what a scammer woudl do.

A scammer would just make one transaction to steal all your money. Something is wrong in this story. And you realized only 5 years later??



I think this is a good point. They didn't stole you 3 million USD, but much less. In 2016 bitcoin was not even 2k USD... anyway, that is still a lot of money.

I know that 59 BTC didn't have the same value as today during 2016, but at the end of 2017 the value of 1 BTC was as high as $20k - so it's not clear to me how you didn't notice that you missed so much BTC over 4 years?


If someone had stolen so much BTC from me, I would have sued him for sure, I don't know why you doubt it at all. An open scam accusation is certainly desirable because it can protect others from having the same thing happen to them, and also warn others who use their devices to check if they are missing BTC.

You can post your scam accusation here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0 -  but do it correctly by following the scam accusation format.

Hello!
i need advice,  i have three small  stores  where i sell Phone, TV,PC  and sell cash for bitcoin using a Pos Hardward.
One month ago, Someone wanted to buy my stores and he  asked me to sign a LOI, and after he made a deposit to my account . After one week he asked alot of papers , Bank statement and Hot wallet.

Two weeks ago ,he told me that he discovered that my hot wallet lost 59.788 bitcoin within 1721 transactions  between 2016 to 2020 and the scammer is the Bitcoin ATM manufacturer that sold me the POS terminals.

I contacted the company that sold me the POS , i shared with them the 1721 transactions with TXT iD
They replied and told me that they dont have access to server from 2016 to 2020.

What i should i do? can i sue these criminals for scamming 59 BTC or open an scam accusation againts them?