Topic: scam spam (Read 338 times)

Even if they have the idea they chooses to disregard the fact that there is a huge possibility that it can happen to them, they don't choose to do things that can prevent them experiencing the same thing. They still trust and believe anything without even having some assurance that it's legit and worth it that's why they end up getting scammed because they don't allow themselves to do some exploration to avoid it. They don't open their minds for new learning, they don't even make some time and effort learning things to protect their funds that's why they always make some mistakes and regret any decisions they had made.

He will be asked to send a little BTC to a given address. Thus, there is no chance of his wallet getting compromised or hacked.

In noncustodial wallet, like coinbase, the address you use to deposit BTC will have nothing. Moreover, on your site, you can code as you wish. A newbie with less aware of such a scam method would get the impression that he has 3 BTC in the wallet.

So the person who get involved in it will lose only the few dollars which he sent to the scammer ? There will be no harm to his original wallets on the system ?
Secondly how will he sees a 3 Bitcoins in a wallet ? Can't he verify if the wallet actually contains 3 bitcoins by checking it through block explorer ?

This is a real temptation of getting 12000$ with only spending a couple of bucks. I wonder each day people come up with the new idea to scam other. It seems every other person is looking to scam others 
I usually do not use my primary email ID on majority of the sites as it is recommended that do not use the email which holds your exchanges account for other purposes.

Because people are lazy and they keep finding the easy way to earn money, and glad to see this type of warning since this scheme are existing these days and specially on emails and in telegram.

And people need to be vigilant on this since I agree with you any offer that will exceed to our expectation is totally a 100% scam.

I have never seen this trick before although I am here for a long time. In this way, it's very easy to trick a newbie who has no idea about scammers. I was targeted several times through my email but now I am not anymore using that email. Had to change a lot of things.
We have a one-time mail service to sign up for any temporary site. I think everyone must use temporary mail service to register in the shit sites.

It's great that you raised awareness for this type of scam, but unfortunately some people will keep falling for scams like this no matter how many times they read about scams - there can be countless variations, and the only thing that can prevent them is distrusting every unsolicited message as the default policy. The general rule is, if someone wants you to send them money and promises you more money in return, it's 100% a scam.

A lot of replies since i left the office yesterday... I do have some additional remarks/answers...

• I've been around for a while, i did not fall for this trap nor did i intend to steal the 3 BTC. I immediately saw this mail for what it was: scam spam. I logged in over VPN using a secure client using a non privileged user so i could learn a thing or two about the method in order to post a warning.
• This thread has been created because i googled for the ip and some sentences of the mail i received and could not find a hit right away. By making this thread, i hope it gets indexed by google, so when a new user gets the same mail but decides to DYOR, at least he'll find my warning when he googles part of the mail he/she received. That's all there is to it. This thread is made to protect unknowing users from getting scammed
• If you connect to an unknown ssh server, there are some attack vectors, but if you use a secure client as an unprivileged used, no X forewarding, VPN,... The risks are rather limited. AFAIK, an attacker has to find a vulnerability in your client in order to do anything malicious. In this case, i'm pretty sure this guy was only after the deposit that was asked in order to "activate" a withdrawal address
• If there's a russian speaker on this forum, it would be nice of him/her to contact the host of this scammer and get his account suspended (the hosting company seems to be https://thehost.ua/, the client has a VPS with ip176.114.8.35)

Old way of scamming people of their money. It is known to all that a scheme like that asking couple of bucks before you can get your money and it is much better to stay away from people who offer money but in real  we don't receive any money at all.

I would also do that using two devices for cryptocurrency and for storing bitcoin. In that way, viruses and malwares won't affect your other device and the other one is not safe. They are also right, changing password will keep us safe from scammers and making our accounts hard to get hacked.

More than that, I have one computer to use for storing my bitcoin. It only is used for downloading, installing and upgrading wallets to store my bitcoin. I don't do anything further that wallet upgrade and make bitcoin transactions.

If I have demands to do the other things: trading, web surfing, email checking, etc. I use the other devices to do all of the other things.

This preventive approach help to secure my device better, especially the one I use to store my bitcoin.

Well, this kind of scam is purely for noobs if done recklessly then the chance is big to be a victim, it's always better not to click any links passed through emails or even logging in to a SSH is really not that secure too. GMAIL nowadays is some kind of annoying really because I experienced sometimes too that even a spam email is connecting with me but it didn't even filter the mail. So I look for an alternative email platform especially for the important emails I want to receive, you may try protonmail I guess.

Change your password regularly to avoid the same case. Tough luck for you mate that they inform you first and haven't them change it maybe you have better security on your emails like 2FA.

i received the same email like that but what makes me surprised that they know the password of my email then after i read that i immediatly change my password for all my email.

then i confused why they can know my email password?

My first e-mail is a very scary place to go back to. Whenever I log in there I only see emails with subjects like "DEAR BENEFICIARY". I don't know how the hell I managed to get my first address to so many places but although I moved to another service, 10 years layer it's still getting +5 scam mails a day.

Falling into a trap like the mail OP has received, unless there has been a coincidence at just the right time and someone spoke to a stranger on Skype right before receiving this email, most likely means the victim wanted to steal the +3BTC.

If you never spoke to someone on Skype and you randomly receive a mail like that, why would you try to log in to the server? I know, there are people (probably OP is one of them) who would want to either debunk a scam or alert the owner of the address about the mistake. However, that's probably going to happen in under 20% of the cases.

I had a Yahoo! Mail address and I used to get fake emails from someone pretending to be the Yahoo Support Team. I always check the recipients before replying to a post, and that's the easiest way to see whether it's coming from a legit source or you may be a potential victim of a scam. Stranger e-mails aren't a joke, nor are the strange domain links and random files. Don't open something you aren't sure is safe unless you've checked it thoroughly enough.

Yeah, true... I did connect trough VPN tough, so i'm not worried... And even if you didn't use a vpn, the scammer knows your ip, but that's about it... If he scans a couple of subnets that belong to some more popular isp's he'll find hundred's of ip's belonging to endusers, so logging the ip from somebody he tried to scam doesn't seem that dangerous to me.
Offcourse, it's bad for your privacy, since the scammer does know your email and ip.

btw: if somebody that understands the dangers of these kinds of scams wants to have a look at this scammer's setup, you can always ask the password in PM. I won't post it publicly, nor will i send it to somebody i feel might end up getting scammed if i give him/her the password.

I don't use my main email address to anything realted to bitcoin. I'll see if something pops up. My other mails are full of spam so I don't really check them.
Another thing to be aware of.
Even if you try to login using SSH it will reveail you IP not to say what other damage could make.
Then you can be a targed for furhter attacs.

Just a quick heads-up for any newbies that are likely to fall for this new scam method i just got confronted with.

Somebody got his hands on my private email and sent me a message that was not stopped by gmail's filters, nor did it look like any of that bulk scam crap you get every day. The pretense of this scammer is that he mistakenly sent an email containing login details to a server that is running some kind of "wallet". If you log in trough ssh, you are shown some kind of menu and you immediately see the wallet contains +3BTC. Offcourse, in order to withdraw the 3 BTC you need to "activate" a withdrawal address by sending the scammer a couple bucks...  
He's hiding a classic scam behind something that might be technically difficult for unexperienced users. This way, i think he hopes the unexperienced user will stare at the technical difficult task and doesn't notice it's just an old scam method with a new coat of paint.

Anybody reading this post after receiving such an email: if you send any money to "activate" your address, you'll get robbed... It might seem like a good deal to send somebody a couple bucks in order to receive ~$12000, but in reality you'll just lose a couple bucks. Don't get scammed!

I got a mail in my mailbox with following text:


btw: my name isn't James

I have the full mail headers aswell, in case somebody wants to try to track this scammer down.

A simple nslookup already pointed to https://thehost.ua/ as hosting company. However, this host's page doesn't have an english, dutch or french translation (only russian?), so if somebody speaks russian, it would be nice if they could open a complaint to the hosting company... One of their users is scamming people using their services.