Topic: Someone is sending out 0.001 BTC's to hundreds of random people. Who and why? (Read 11226 times)

Someone tipped over $4000 on reddit, in one tip. So yes, really.

You mean you think someone pays me to call out criminal actors?   Tell me TF, why would any legitimate person who is not a criminal need to "wash" their bitcoins?   But don't do it here, come to my thread and defend yourself like a real man.


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-tradefortress-breaking-the-law-256008

FYI, you can say Viceroy aka buyer is bought.

I'm not fond of his lending service, I think that it is dangerous, but that's just a difference of opinion.
He's a little harsh sometimes but I suspect he's a straight-up guy.

Some people don't like him because he was kind enough to use his own funds to spread the truth about ripple - in a way that some consider astro-turfing. But he's right about ripple and I'm glad that message was spread.

And for the record, I've not received anything from him, this post is not bought.

I can confirm, I got that same PM but I just ignored it.

Actually, re-thinking the de-anonymization attack theory, 0.001 BTC would actually need to be sent to addresses that have already spent bitcoins in order to restore traceability of transactions. If no transaction happened from that address, then there is nothing to de-anonymize. So far, all Bitcoin addresses receiving 0.001 BTC that I have looked seems to have never sent any bitcoins. So, unless I'm missing something, it's probably not meant to be used for network analysis. But this could have been the case.

Dude, TradeFortress is a suspected criminal actor:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-tradefortress-breaking-the-law-256008

he is welcome

1. I was right (read two posts above) about a guy asking for his wallet to be "brute-forced" having a sinister agenda (while many called me crazy and paranoid... well, who is the "crazy" one now?).

2. Why in the world would you pay me 80 USD just to get me to stop talking? It is reasonable to believe, that you have an agenda too.

3. You said that "If it was $800 or $8000 then you may have a point."... well, user "keystroke" confirmed that he/she received 0.001BTC in a similar transaction, but it was a different transaction than the one in which I received it, that means there are MANY such transactions, and that means that it IS $800 or $8000 or even more spent, and that means that even YOU agree that I DO have a point.

Now that's fun!

Actually, I was RIGHT.

Look at this message from "binaryFate" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=254422.20:
"For everyone to know: acs26 just replied to my PM, giving me a link to download is wallet.dat. Which happends to be only a windows executable starting with "wallet.dat". You propose to help and then...  Sad
As a side note to you acs26, you're really dumb trying to trick someone like that. Because when claiming you have such technical problems, you have significant chances to reach somebody not using windows (I'm on linux and don't care about your .exe), and anyway very significant chance that the person is not a moron as you might expect."

So, I was right when I warned everyone that it was a fake post, and that the poster had some sinister agenda.

If people who have some of these want to get together and jointly spend them, ala  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/i-taint-rich-raw-txn-fun-and-disrupting-taint-analysis-51kbtc-linked-139581  that might sound fun.

These 0.001 BTC transactions indeed randomly restore traceability of transactions once they are spent, regardless of the real motivation of the sender. Not very nice.

And given the number of transactions that have already spent these 0.001, it is apparently working well.

It's an interesting point -

If I were going to write a wallet stealing software, I'd think it would be hilarious to just distribute the balance to random people.

~

What if there's a clandestine service designed to 'clean' coins. What does the turn around time on a laundry service need to be? What would be the fee incurred (what if it isn't a service but code developed for personal use).

Lets assume it's a service.
Lets assume they take btc and distribute it in tiny pieces to 10000 different change addresses. Lets assume some percentage of those addresses (10%?) are randomly selected off the block chain and not controlled by the client or the service.

Now you've broken up the clients bitcoin into 10000 pieces, and introduced a 1000 false leads for LE to follow.
Now you do it again with different source address using say... 9000 new client controlled addresses and 1000 false leads.
You run this all at the same time (cycling through groups of false leads for 10 different clients) for 10 cycles.
Now you've muddied it even further. aka everything links to everyone. . . if you got enough big enough clients you could literally spam every address with some amount of coin (over time).

If you did the payments over a long enough period of time... the client addresses would eventually accumulate enough of a balance to be 'spent' probably used to buy some good or service that could then be resold (or cashed out) in some way.

Then you can get really diabolical and trade private keys off the blockchain and obfuscate the trail even more.

In summary, you've got some clients 'cleaning' bitcoin (but it takes a long time) - you've got a bunch of random people being investigated if the client is ever investigated - you've got the service making a tiny fee by owning some addresses that are somehow included in the above process - and anyone who investigates it, ends up wasting time investigating thousands of nerds who just buy bitcoin and use it for stuff like gyft cards, alpaca socks and silver.

lol, where is the embeded messages then? would you like me to embed some more for you?

It's scotaloo, he is sending out hundreds or thousands of .0001's with messages embedded in them to try and extort people or to just f**k with them.

Really? I remember getting a few mBTC here and there, but a party?

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. - Tom Clancy

/thread

Or it is a psych experiment to see if a thread like this one pops up and the reactions.

I was also going to suggest this.

Some researchers at some economics department have probably sent out multiple transactions like this and are mapping where the money is going.

Perhaps they choose the 'random' addresses in the list to be change addresses on purpose (easy enough to find).