Topic: [Alert] Someone sending emails "Donate to Bitcoin Forum" (Read 327 times)

This is a shot-in-a-moon attempt by scammers, those receivers will just ask the community about the validity of the email because they have an account here and if they do not have an account here or do not this forum they will just ignore this solicitation because why would they donate to a forum that they do not know, this is a poor attempt and I doubt if he'll get even one victim.

I just made some research and got to find out that Sir "Theymos" did actually asked for donation 12yrs ago, but that was via the forum, and for us to see another donation request via Gmail is kind of suspicious, and I will likely recommend anybody who might have gotten the Gmail to please be security conscious against hack or scam.

Secondly, I just tried to search on the forum if only I could find the usernames/profile of the donators as listed above and when last they visited the forum, but it's sad I couldn't find the profile of any of the top 5, so I stopped.

Thirdly, looking at the amount Sir "Theymos" mentioned above as donation for V.I.P member of the forum on August 19th 2011, I understand that 10 to 50 btc was a reasonable amount most people could afford, since 1btc=$10 back then 12yrs ago (i.e $100 to $500), unlike today 2023 @ 1Btc=$27k for anybody to come ask such same exact amount of btc for just mere a V.I.P membership (i.e $270k to $1.3million), of which I think that will be outrageous and preposterous for the growth of the forum.

We all know and are advised that whenever there is a suspicion or want to check the status of the platform or just about anything, they need to address this to the community, I will be surprised if one of us here even newbies will fall to this.
But we all know scammers are very imaginative they will think of anything and everything just to make money by scamming people.
This one is very simple he need not set up a site or create an application to try to scam people, but since he is targetting Bitcointalk I doubt if he'll have success.
 

Though, I did not receive any email like that, but it's good you have shared this with the community; at least no one here that is reading this will fall for such a scam scheme. Perhaps anyone who will even fall victim to such an email is someone who already has a lot more Bitcoin to spend than to hold; otherwise, someone who receives this kind of email should first make an inquiry here by starting a topic just like the OP, even before going ahead with the donation. Because right now, Bitcoin is very precious to the holder, and knowing how much in dollars that amount of Bitcoin is worth currently, no one would want to make any insensible mistake like that.

I can't remember accessing the forum through an email while registering as a member. So I wonder how myself or any other forum members that knows how the forum works will then give a serious attention to such GMAIL message for a donation of 50BTC. That's not small amount of money for anyone to fall victim for by email except such members have not really being paying attention to the forum activities.

Anything such as this would be made known in the forum and not through some email. What was the scammer thinking  

It's funny how scammers are going about looking for ways to scam people. Who knows the means they use in acquiring all these emails, and I believe they target people they actually think can make some donations. And another mistake they made is that, back then, when all this huge donation was made to the forum, the price of Bitcoin was not even half of where it is today.

Let me ask the scammer some questions: who do you think right now will be able to donate 10–50 bitcoins again with the current Bitcoin price?

The scammer should have at least made some minor edits to the original donation page and reduced the amount to be donated this time around.

I didn't get the mail maybe it was a targeted mail for some specific users in other for them to fall victim of their scam. As I believe too well that you and I know that this forum would never asked for any donations secretly or privately from their users and for getting any position or customized title it should come from the members to either request for it and not the forum requesting members to occupy those positions.

This is a pure scam mail and I believe only those who don't know their way about that may fall for this cheap scammers, hence I may urge those that received the mail to quickly change their password and email address that was originally associated with the account otherwise there's every possibility for their account to get hacked.
We all have to be very careful and mindful with some forms of mails or even pm we received everyday by day.

I did not receive any such email either but the scam attempt is probably one of those in which the scammer sends a message to a group of email addresses in the hope of getting even one from the lot to send him some Bitcoin. It is almost akin to a hit and miss type.

This also shows laziness on the part of whoever sent out that mail as they couldn't edit it. It should be a mail from way back when donating 50 BTC would seem like giving out like 50 Dogecoin in today's world. In the present reality no one will dare ask anyone to donate ⅒ of such.

I guess that's the case because I haven't received any too.

In any case, I would not underestimate the hacker. Anyone who has received emails like this should probably check for holes in their security system and change their password and email. If we see that the hacker is naive, then perhaps he was counting on this, seeing how people click on links in letters. Working with Windows, some undetectable malware can easily be installed on user's computers, which does not manifest itself for a long time.
I am writing this not from an influx of paranoia but from the fact that today's hackers are also growing, along with the growing information security of users.
And of course, in this case, we meet with an idiot who sends spam and nonsense, not with a skilled social engineering hacker.

This is pure scam, desist from having anything to do with such user and if possible block him, the forum does not partake in doing anything related to this kind nasty act.

I will also advise you to make sure that you go to your forum profile and disable your email address from public view, this will prevent others seing your email address whenever they check through your profile, also you have to be very careful of the sites you visit while online, where you made registration and fill some sort of google forms and google ads prompts that request for your email address, don't be too open for them to target you as their next victim.

LOL. They just copied and pasted the official bitcointalk donation banner and just replaced the address, using some no-name @gmail address.

And a big chunk of the Donators and VIPs also happen to be scammers. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence 

very clear, important point that the forum no longer collects donations for any reason or purpose.

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But I will reveal some indications of scammer messages for the purpose of fake donations, phishing, malware, and others, especially from the email message above it can be concluded that there are indications that have been found:

1. Check the senders email address, scammers create a new email related to the source name to convince the recipient. Usually scammers will send bulk messages to targeted recipient email lists.

2. Narrative, the scammer will gather information from various sources to compose the first paragraph message about the history of bitcointalk, many beginners may feel convinced that way so continue reading the instructions from the next paragraph.

.3. Purpose and Evidence, the point of the second paragraph is the main goal of scammers, they ask for donations according to the amount of donations on the official forum, but they can change the donation lower to get funds from the victim, they also add proof that the user has donated to the forum so that the victim will be interested in donating to contribute to the forum.

So be careful trusting messages from unofficial sources, the main thing is to always check the sender's email address, if it is not an official source email then ignore the message without reading the message content.

Yeah, if you look at the template of the Bitcointalk donation page back then, this is how it looked like - https://archive.is/qpHjb

So I believe the hacker just copied and pasted the information from the page while changing the address only.

This can be a good start - https://haveibeenpwned.com

Here is an excerpt from Donations page that I think you might have read from that reads as:

I have also never received such an e-mail, which only goes to the fact that someone is using the database of accounts that were hacked somewhere around 2015, and considering that many changed their e-mails after that and that many from that period are no longer active, I think that this "hacker" just wasted his time.

In addition, everyone who is active on the forum should know that donations of this type are no longer possible, or it just seems to me that I read that somewhere?

Yeah lot of things are off about the email like mention of Badbear (who isn't active), the email address from it was sent and the content of it and plus forums not asking for donations so it is someone asking for donation under forum's name. I feel it is likely that he acquired my email ID through the database hack perhaps.



Those were the old donations upon which one would get a tag. If memory serves me right then someone actually donated around 10 BTC last in 2016-18 (around). There were lot of questions about 10 BTC-50 BTC donation amount but now it is removed and they are somehow working it out with fee revenue and advertising as mentioned in donations page.

BTW its funny that the impersonator is hoping that someone with deep pockets will get fooled easily. 



Good point, I need to check if I had revealed my email-id public somewhere and will change to a new one.



I hardly think anyone will get fooled by him. No body in his right mind will go around donating significant amount of money without confirming things.



And that will be hard to come by. I don't think most people have that kind of amount which they feel free to donate. Still it's true that its only one person falling into trap can make their life. Best we can do is aware others so I just hope nobody falls for this.



Interesting, that's really a good read actually.

The email address is invalid and a signal of scam, phishing.

If any email is sent by the Bitcointalk.org forum, it will be anything but with @bitcoin.org at the end, like donation [dot] bitcoin.org. I don't know the forum has that email address and it is my example.

Using Google gmail, yahoo mail, proton mail is signal of scam.

If you see donation [dot] bitcoin.org, you must be careful and check more. Scammers can use Homograph attack too.
Homograph phishing attacks. When user awareness is not enough
Out of character: Homograph attacks explained

That's what I thought, I don't think that people who today have 10 or 50 Bitcoins to donate, which means they have many more, are so stupid as to fall for such a crude scam.

The bad thing about scams is that if only one person falls, it is very profitable for them. Sending one of those emails does not cost them much, and although in this case I don't think anyone will fall, in others there is usually a clueless person who does not realize the scam. Only with one person, or a few, falling into the trap they have achieved their goal.

GMail address, this scammer is so lazy that even some of the information in the message is very old and has not been updated.
Who will donate 10 bitcoins to get membership in the forum? Is there a forum member this stupid to believe this fraud.

He still using old Legacy (P2PKH) addresses and zero balance https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1LEaMgzwd7ESndfXRT3BUR5rDgKwSxmKbp

It seems that no one was fooled by this scam.