Topic: Vanity address scam rising (Read 361 times)

Man reading this thread title sure brings back memories.

Basically nobody will use an address if they know someone else has the private key. But there is a way how one party can generate a vanity address for you and the private key will still be in your possession and only your possession.

I forgot the name but there was a company that did this. I think you provided half the key and the other half was private and in some way it was safe to get a 3rd party to generate a key for you.

I generated 1AtbigzwifNVeP5HikDcKtpBuv1crpGTTq

Big Z Wifn Hik Dck why wouldn't you want that?

but on a serious note how could someone else ever want to use it if I know the private key?

It's not, and probably will never be.

What we are seeing is a lack of basic education and common sense that could've been fostered if websites and YouTube media actually started giving their viewers fact-checks about bitcoin:

"People's bitcoin cannot be doubled"

"People cannot hack the blockchain to make free bitcoin"

"If you see a guy trying to give away bitcoin to you, he's usually trying to rob you - RUN THE OTHER DIRECTION!"

With all that I have read here now, I don't know what to make of this vanity address voluntarily generated by a wallet app I use which has the first three letters unique to me.

1KEnUFrUZmMK6CfyCGdFex8uByJyDeVB1z

I didn't do anything to generate that. I just saw it that way and felt cool about it but I haven't used it since then. Now reading all this here makes me skeptical using it. Is my wallet compromised already?

I do not really use social media as I do not have a need for it so I find interesting how they can justify asking for money in a scam when the person they are impersonating does not need money at all, this is why I have always thought that while it is important to protect yourself from hackers at the same time you need to make a greater effort to protect yourself from scammers as they are the ones that can really get to your coins easily by convincing people to give them away to them.

It is not that hard and there is a step by step Guide to create your customized Vanity Bitcoin-Address and Guide How To Create Vanity Address with Vanitysearch.
There is also VanityPool for requesting vanity address, and websites like Originaladdress.net that can generate it but not sure how legit and safe it is to use.
To create address starting with musk it takes about 20 hours, with sat takes 20 minutes, and I created address starting with 69 in 1 minute.

I have no idea why people like Vanity addresses so much that they are even willing to send Bitcoin to scammers like it happened few days ago when someone sent 5 BTC to fake giveaway address starting with 1EMusk...

WhaleAlert reported it and they probably used youtube and fake websites Elon Musk websites like this:


https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1366510689720803330

I did not know it only takes 1 week to hack something that looks just a bit easy like 1Bitcoin!

I guess as computers get even more advanced and cheaper now that 1 week can become even a few days eventually.

I also keep some vanity address but nothing so easy like that, just with recognized phrases in between every now and then:)

Sometimes hackers surprises me. People ready to donate to beatiful address, hah

i use vanity gen only use 3 digit character and work pretty fast tho as you mentioned but i dont pretty believe when using 3rd party to make my new address 


and about the hacker who acquisition $2M that is crazy and risky for new user who believe that address is valid  my advice to new user is always DYOR (Do Your Own Research ) before investing in any platform scammer is everywhere twitter youtube almost all social media 

Yep, and while we’re on the topic of vanity addresses I thought I’d just drop this here: https://ushertechs.com/the-bitcoinvanitygen-scam

I remeber stumbling into a website sometime in 2017, where you have a Barcode that just requires you to hover your cursor and then it comes out with some random private key and wallet address and then you save it as a paper wallet and you can actually use it to spend your bitcoin anytime you want, although, bitccoin was way below $3000 but the risk was lesser as such projects might be genuine but today, such will be a disaster as fraudsters have infiltrated all projects that creates avenue for easy useage of bitcoin. I do not advise anyone to use such these days as you might entirely loose your assets.

Not just this, twitter had been a hot ground for ongoing crypto scams. There are tons of accounts which has 10k+ followers who are scammers trying to rob people's money by doing fake giveaways and promoting scams. While considering Bitcointalk (a community which is being run by the community) it is much easier to spot the scammers and they would be tagged sooner. Not just that, there are indeed way more celebrity shillers like Lindsay who are being bribed to promote TRX knowing its a shitcoin and Marques Brownlee video has put a pause on these shills! Justin Sun has been trying to promote Tron as much as he can   and newbies fall for it.

There were various instances from known people of mine, who invested in the shitcoin citing the reason for the tweets. At the time of this writing, TRX is trading at a $3.5 billion marketcap and DOGE at $6.3 billion and this shows how poor the investor's brains are!

Quite often, newbies fall for these since they are into the space to make instant profits in short span of time, hence more or less they would either be losing their btc in trading shitcoins or vanity address scams like these.

I did create a few vanity addresses back in 2019 for experimental purposes but stayed away from them as they consumed too much of my processing power nevertheless it was a fun experiment  

As if everyone has a common sense, some people will only know that they have or use common sense when someone says to use it. The only way to destroy bots is if there is some kind of AFK checker that can only be overridden if there is a human behind that computer, that was used by many games that I played back then to prevent bots from farming.

I wonder what the victims of such scam are actually thinking.
"Wow,this BTC address has the name of Ellon Musk,this must be totally legit."
Having a name inside a Vanity address doesn't prove any legitimacy at all.I got really disappointed by all the Bitcoin charity campaigns,so I won't be donating my Bitcoins to any charity anymore.Just HODL your BTC and only donate your fiat money to charity or crowdfunding campaigns(after you verify that those campaigns are legit).

Personally, I don't see a big need for me to have my own vanity Bitcoin address as I am not actually a celebrity or popular guy. Anyway, one thing for sure with this story is that scammers are always so creative in finding ways to attract victims and milk them out of their funds or digital assets away from their purse. They are tuning in to our sense of greed in many cases and taking advantages of people who are just new to cryptocurrency who can easily be misled. The best way to counteract is of course providing the right information and putting a red warning for these type of scams.

Oh, those are quite prevalent on Twitter then. They're always on Elon Musk's tweets with a photoshopped image. The fault is thus on Twitter for not actively policing the feeds to remove then. It would be incredibly easy to at least tag them with the current OCR they're using on images to detect certain phrases.

LOL. Those scams generally don't ask for donations. They advertise themselves with something like "Elon Musk decides to giveaway bitcoin in celebration of SN10 landing". Then they'll have some explanation about how the most tech-savvy man wants you to "learn" bitcoin. So, as a proof, you need to send some BTC and Musk will send you double of that.

There generally are lot of supporting replies saying, "OMG, My life has changed. Thank you so much @elon"..

It is indeed funny that people still fall for these scams.

It is not a fault from Vanity address, Vanity pool, it is from the side of people who are foolish and be scammed by scammers who create faked Vanity addresses. Scammers try to use those addresses to impersonate famous people.

Questions for scam victims?
- Where is the place they got those faked addresses?
- How do they blindly believe it?
- Why did they skip the investigation or verification on validity of those addresses?

Scammers can create any Vanity address but people can decide to donate or not. They in the ends are the ones self decide they will be scammed or not.

It is that simple, all that surrounds vanity addresses seems like a waste of time, if you want one then you need to find one by yourself, if you use another service then your keys are exposed from the beginning and the proverb of not your keys not your coins applies here, now on the other hand do people actually believe that those rich people are going to take the time to generate a vanity address themselves and then ask for donations? If true they really need to learn how to spot scams as it is amazing the dumb scams in which they fall.

I've generated thousands of long vanity addresses by myself for my Minted Seats project so it is definitely doable without too much effort.  I think the longest one I ever got was something like 1NastyFansX so finding 1ELoNMUSK would be fairly simple and not extremely time consuming for even a single computer with a decent GPU.  You would think that getting people to blindly send funds to an address would be the hard part, but it appears people are so desperate to use their crypto for SOMETHING that they'll do just about anything with it in some cases.

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

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.

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:


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

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.

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

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

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?