Vanity address scam rising - page 2.

TryNinja

legendary

Activity: 2758

Merit: 6830

Quote from: bitmover on March 04, 2021, 06:07:12 PM

Those addresses are also risky to use, even if the mining pools are legit.

As they already have the private key they shared with you, your address is already considered exposed since day1.

It actually depends. There are ways of generating vanity addresses through the split-key method, which doesn't give anyone (expect you) access to the final private key: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Split-key_vanity_address

Loyce has (or at least had) a thread where he offers this service: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/pretty-addy-giveaway-part-2-1813624
And so do I (on the portuguese board): https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/gratuito-endereco-btc-customizado-vanity-de-forma-segura-segwitbechlegacy-5282110

bitmover

legendary

Activity: 2212

Merit: 5622

Non-custodial BTC Wallet

Quote from: aysg76 on March 04, 2021, 10:30:07 AM

There are many mining pools who take fees from you for you desired Bitcoin addresses as they have more computing power dedicated to the network instead of individuals computing power

Those addresses are also risky to use, even if the mining pools are legit.

As they already have the private key they shared with you, your address is already considered exposed since day1.

And a hacker may intercept their message, or even hack their database.

So, the best would be to avoid those services at all costs.

btc_angela

hero member

Activity: 2590

Merit: 542

Yes, it's very easy to create this kind of Vanity address, and once their done they are going to spread it in Twitter and Discord and just wait for some noobs to fall from their scheme.

I still remember this address:

Code:

1KanyevWspyHgwFxGm67ZDynoNHdWCrZwU

Used by scammers last year to take advantage of supposedly "Kanye West" running for the US Presidency.

dothebeats

legendary

Activity: 3542

Merit: 1352

Excel is fun

Not really surprising considering that bots and other shill accounts with the same name as Elon's twitter handle and profile picture are all over the place. Plus, people are too greedy to the point that they actually believe some of these double your money schemes that are literally everywhere, even if the scheme is actually perpetrated by scammers.

The scam will always be there. The scammed, however, can be prevented if only people use due diligence and common sense.

ranochigo

legendary

Activity: 2954

Merit: 4158

Quote from: aysg76 on March 04, 2021, 10:30:07 AM

So is it profitable for hackers and how much easy it is generate such vanity address?

Not even hard. 1Musk has a difficulty of 4553521 on vanitysearch. I've generated about 11 in the span of 3 seconds. In addition, 1ELonMusk takes roughly a day or two on my single 1080TI.

Quote from: aysg76 on March 04, 2021, 10:30:07 AM

And its cannot be done by a single individual because it's require much processing power and other things.So what are your thoughts on this?

It can definitely be done by an indivdiual. Processing power has gotten so much faster, that wiki is obviously outdated.

I'm not really sure how people think Elon Musk needs donation. Probably the same way as a Nigerian Prince scam.

aysg76

legendary

Activity: 1960

Merit: 2124

The idea of generating Bitcoin address with some character or string of your choice instead of generating random string of characters is known as Vanity address which was first introduced by Vanitygen who produces address taking inputs from you and giving results on that basis.The amount of time required to find a given pattern depends on how complex the pattern is, the speed of the computer, whether it is using CPU or GPU, and if you get lucky.

There are many mining pools who take fees from you for you desired Bitcoin addresses as they have more computing power dedicated to the network instead of individuals computing power

It is a costly and time consuming process :

Average time taken to crack address

But in recent time these type of scams has grown and hacker are fooling people by generating fake vanity address in name of big organisations and people to lure people to donate to that particular address as most of them don't remember full length of address as its mixture of lower and upper case and integers. A recent report states such scam

Fake vanity address in name of Elon Musk and Spacex accused of
$2 million scam

So is it profitable for hackers and how much easy it is generate such vanity address? And its cannot be done by a single individual because it's require much processing power and other things.So what are your thoughts on this?

Topic: Vanity address scam rising - page 2. (Read 361 times)