Topic: Lost 900$. Block chain compromised or scamming us (Read 319 times)

Who exactly referred you to make use of the Blockchain wallet? You made a mistake mate, you should have used the main wallet you have been using to receive Bitcoin before now and that’s Exodus (I don’t know for the Unocoin you mentioned). If it’s the guy you did business with that referred you to make use of the Blockchain wallet, then maybe he was planning a double spend attack on you.

Apart from that, I think Blockchain wallet is having some kind of bugs, because earlier this year my friend lost $7,000 he stored in a Blockchain wallet (or maybe it was hacked). Since, then I have been careful with using that wallet. I have stopped making use of blockchain we wallet once they upgraded their services in a way we are unable to have access to our privatekeys.

This happened to me this month as well. I inside my blockchain wallet exchanged the USD TO BTC back, should have had 245 bucks worth of Bitcoin, after some technical mumbo jumbo support tickets back and forth I now find my wallet emptied out of the money. I have no idea why blockchain dot com has taken my money lol. I can use other addresses within BLOCKCHAIN DOT COM but this one that had the 245 is now empty. Can anyone explain that? Why are our funds being siphoned off?

It's getting far from losing $900.
Maybe you are just on the wrong blog. Have you thought about that?
Maybe you just didn't read more before making a transaction in cryptocurrencies.

If you preferred fiat then stay that way. You tried to sell your goods in a different way which you are not used to or know nothing about.
You cannot just blame that with your mistakes or lack of knowledge.
Move on, learn from it. There will always be scammers everywhere, in fiat or in cryptocurrencies.

You don't know how many of us have done mistakes too and lose a lot more than that.
The difference is we don't blame the technology.
Sorry for your loss.

I'm sorry from your lost but people take advantage of what is good and makes demon out of it. Crypto offer individuals the possibility of owing, dictate and have full control of what to do with it without anyone holding or performing transaction for you. This is why it is so important to fully understand everything about crypto before start transaction. Just because people dupe you doesn't make crypto a bad thing.

Without enough knowledge, not just crypto but even simple UPI payments have been used to scam people. People have been scammed into giving away their PIN and credit card details.

You are talking about the "black money" issue and crime money. The point is that this is just a convenient excuse for the authorities. Bitcoin is particularly targeted because people see Bitcoin as a method to weaken the control of central banks and the government. Bitcoin is an inflation-free, peer-to-peer asset for the people of the world which cannot be confiscated and cannot be exposed without your permission. It can be moved across borders and between people with just a list of words. This does not mean that it is illegal. If you are a law-abiding citizen who pays his taxes, what right does anybody have to know how much wealth you have? What right does your bank, tax authorities, search engines have to monitor your spending patterns? Yet, keeping law-abiding citizens in fear while letting criminals roam free, even help them get elected, is what happens in reality.

Bitcoin targets high level corruption. Bitcoin transactions are traceable and available to the public. Imagine if government expenditure was done using bitcoin. It would be the end of middlemen and under-handed deal with every transaction up for verification on a public database. It is the perfect solution but it takes power away from our politicians and babus. So, they choose the option to demonize it instead. As an individual, if you fail to see it then it is your problem, not bitcoin's. Bitcoin is a technology based on mathematics, computers science and cryptography. It couldn't care less what we feel. The only important thing is that keeping a part of your wealth as bitcoin is your own insurance.
 
You are right. A lot of those blogs, especially being written by jobless Indians, simply copy verbatim that "i don't trust banks", without even understanding the underlying arguments, some of which i have explained above. Bitcoin gives you the power to be your own bank. A bank keeps your money safe in the form of numbers on their central ledger. Bitcoin is a decentralized method of maintaining that ledger that does not depend on any bank or any governments guarantee. The value of US governments guarantee isn't the same as that of Zimbabwe or Venezuela. When economies collapse, it can happen anywhere. With bitcoin, we have a worldwide system where people are willing to bet money on it and you can exchange it for value in any part of the world, if you can find the right people. It is a system based on people themselves, not on anything else.

When we talk about not trusting banks, its the central banks that follow the policy of printing money to help rich businesses tide over blunders caused by themselves. This system rewards those who exploit it the most. The people who lose are the middle class whose investments lose value as more and more money is pumped into the system.

There is a lot to understand before you can decide whether bitcoin is for you or not.

Before you say crypto is scammer friendly, maybe you should at least learn how it works in the first place. Confirmation are required to prevent double spending attacks as mentioned, if you know this then you would know that spending/sending zero confirmation transaction is risky as hell.

Even your fiat digital wallet will show a pending incoming/outcoming transaction here and there. At least you learned your lesson. Feel free to avoid crypto, don't repeat your mistake of using something you don't understand.

Crypto is a risk and you need to be really careful not to lose your funds. In addition, scammers are very eager to get your funds and are looking for new ways to do so.

This will all be prevented if blockchain did not add the unconfirmed amount in my total wallet balance. also the 1st 50$ transaction is not confirmed either, but somehow blockchain allowed me to send that unconfirmed amount to my another wallet after reducing a fee, but at end that 50$ i tried to move also never got confirmed it stayed as 0/3 confirmation till all the transaction history got wiped at the end. when i had the option to send the 1st 50$ i tought hey its working if its not in my wallet how can they allow me to move to other wallet so i asked him to send further amounts. this whose crypto system is not user friendly, its scammer friendly.

We are talking about personal money not the tax money here. how much money from your pocket did u loose to those crimes? its either tax or money these illegal parties make themself illegally. are u saying crypto is not used for such crimes u listed? from my view apart from some individul investor, it is mainly used for illegal transactions to hide from laws.
im not praising paypal, im saying chargebacks can be reverted by filing a complaint.
i looked around and read some blogs about crypto, the 1st point everyone says is they dont trust their central bank.
where can central bank run with whole countries wealth?, out of this planet? is there a real reasons to not trust central bank or they dont trust because everyone says they dont trust? just like news channels play mindgames on election time. again im not supporting anyone, its a genuine question i want to know why everyone dont trust their central bank.

thing i find strange is how the sender didnt want to pay $900 using your original plan of wait 1 confirm
but he talked you into a lengthy thing of setting up new accounts and sending you a test amount for 1 confirm. and then later lots of different amounts on his non confirmed method he prefers.

seems like he talked you into a lengthy ploy where he could double spend you
knowing it would take a long while to get you to set up another account and do the test.
if it was a time issue. he coulda just paid you $900 in 10 minutes and been done with it. it just seems fishy he talked you into a process/workaround that took longer than 10 minutes just to avoid a confirm.

i think the sender sent you funds with no fee so that he knew it would get held up as pending for hours

while separetly he sent the funds to himself with a fee. thus making your pending/unconfirmed transaction just drop out of mempool because it wasnt the preferred payment worthy of being confirmed

i dont think it was blockchain.com fault. but more of the guy you talked to in discord that coerced you into such a weird process to avoid paying you $900 confirmed

i think the guy you spoke to in discord embellished the "instant" into sounding like he was saying its "guaranteed"

transfers are not guaranteed instantly.
seeing the payment is pending is instant because a blockchain userA pushes their payment into blockchain.coms mempools so blockchain.com mempool sees it instantly AS PENDING
this means instead of an separete service that might only broadcast to the network every 20 seconds and it taking another 10 seconds for full network viewing. ths 300 second delay just to see it as pending
by both you and the sender getting pending data from the same source it saves 30 seconds of waiting before even knowing its pending.
it has nothing to do with having it confirmed instantly

then all the guy had to do was push his pay-to self transaction directly to a mining pools node so that miners see his tx first and that gets allocated to a block. and the pending payment to you gets ignored by the miners 30 seconds later because it already recieved a payment with a higher fee it prefered.

so while your stuck just looking at a mempool thats just showing your payment is pending.
the pay-to-self gets confirmed. and eventually the blockchain.com mempool scrubs your pending payment

Are you trying to say scammers were not there before the birth of cryptocurrencies?
Can you even be able to count how many times have terrorists, drug dealers, warlords and corrupt Government officials have used the US Dollar and other fiat currencies to commit crimes?
Your perception of cryptocurrencies is totally wrong. Even the same PayPal you keep praising has been used by scammers countless times to scam people

Crypto coins are secure,but that doesn't mean that online crypto wallets and websites that accept crypto payments are secure as well.Bitcoin Core and the Bitcoin blockchain don't scam people.The scammers are scamming people.You can't blame Bitcoin or crypto coins in general for the criminal behavior conducted by a bunch of scammers/hackers/criminals.
I know that you are upset for being scammed,but blaming third party is pointless.It's your responsibility to take care of your online security and to do online business with people,that are trustworthy.

Why didn't you do this?

yes unocoin is from india. in that wallet amount will not show up in btc balance until it confirmed. i can see it in transaction as waiting for confirmation. but in this blockchain wallet it was showing in wallet balance. so i thought i actually received the money. it looks like its been around for a while and they did not fix this, so they are allowed such attacks. from what i see from this, they are not into creating healthy business, they will run with people's coin anytime once someone decided to move large amount of coin to their exchange.

so from this what is see is crypto is not really "secure" coin. someone new always going to fall for such scam. Its really not for normal people and business, its the currency for scammers and businesses who do illegal trades and wants to hide transactions from authorities. only reason i wanted to try this because it dont have big transaction fee, currency conversion fee like paypal. atleast in paypal we can win charge backs. im just going to sweep this under rug as unexpected monthly loss and going back to traditional secure currency. im actually glad it learned this early at 900$ not at 900k$.  Thank you to everyone who took time to explain things.

1. Whether BTC is sent from Blockchain wallet to Blockchain wallet or from a different wallet to blockchain wallet. The balance and the transaction details appear almost instantly as soon as the blockchain.com wallet detects an incoming transaction... This does not necessarily mean you have received the bitcoins yet. You have to check if the transaction has been confirmed. It's a common feature with other exchanges and casinos though I don't like it.

2. They make is so clear that they can not assist as an intermediary in payment disputes. Your wallet, Your transactions, Your funds, Your responsibility.
Even if the address is generated, if it doesn't receive any confirmed transaction, it still remains unused.
I also don't like how they show the balance even before the transactions gets a single confirmation.
Here is an example of how another Blockchain wallet user got confused because of the same thing and got scammed off BTC worth $2000 - Help with a missing Bitcoin transaction

The link on blockchain.com shows an Android wallet. If an address was generated on this wallet, how can that address say "This BTC address is unused". If the balance shows up on the "blockchain" wallet for an unconfirmed transaction, that means they should be acting as the escrow or arbitrator for such a transaction. Judging from the fact that the OPs incoming transactions never got confirmed, Blockchain.com effectively "ALLOWS" such a double-spend attack.

If the confirmation count is still zero, hopefully, OP wouldn't have parted with whatever digital good he was giving the other person. He never intended to send the money and expected that a ticket will be raised. Then sent a email to fool you into sharing your wallet mnemonic. Social engineering hack at the most.

Also, can anyone explain how does a transaction that shows up in the blockchain.com wallet (or explorer) can end up being "wiped" clean?? Is this about non-confirmed transaction being reversed if the attacker used a RBF option at the time of creating the transaction??

You used Unocoin, Is this India? Relying on instant settlements in bitcoin or any other PoW cryptocurrency is fraught with risk. So always wait for that 1 confirmation. Blockchain.com doesn't claim to provide instant settlement so accepting an incoming wallet balance with zero confirmation is a decision that the user has to make. They probably just give you the option to "see" an incoming transaction in the mempool without going to the block explorer.

 

for this attack, the btc is being sent internally from another blockchain wallet right? so whoever doing this attack has the coin in his blockchain wallet. their system must registered how many times he did speed spend attack and blockchain can move the available btc(if not fully) to the person who lost in this, after all its their official wallet not other party wallet.


isnt that a security hole other than being called "tricked". money appears in my wallet balance, its a security hole in their system.

They won't give you that amount.

Wallet providers aren't responsible for any amount that was scammed to their users. If the negligence is on their part, they might give a refund but in your case, you were tricked. Sorry with that.

How will they give BTC to someone who never received it in the first place according to blockchain explorer?

It's always important to wait at least for 1 confirmation before proceeding with business. Use bitcoin explorers like Blockchair.com confirm that the transaction sent to your address has been confirmed.