Elwar, many are giddy about recent ATH, etc. Can you repeat your story about 'local bitcoins gone bad'?
You mean when someone stole 85 bitcoins from me?
They didn't actually steal 85 BTC from me, I sold 30k euro worth of bitcoins to someone. It was at a McDonalds in Germany where I'd been selling bitcoins to get cash to live on. I got tired of a few hundred euros here and there, wasting my time. So I figured I'd be there for a few years and one guy wanted a lot of BTC so I told him I'd do 30k.
I'd traded with the guy before, this time he sent his "associate" to drop off the money. I had this bad feeling going...like how in every movie where it's the "last score" something always goes horribly wrong.
As I walked into the McDonalds there was some young guy eyeballing me. I went inside and it was packed. The middle of winter so everyone had their coats on. I sat down with the guy and we got to business. I counted the money, checked that it wasn't counterfeit, put it in my pocket. While I was doing this some guy kept walking past me back and forth which was odd because there were no seats for him where he was passing. At that point I just wanted to get out of there quickly. I released the bitcoins to the guy and got up making sure to keep my hand in the pocket where the money was.
The guy stood up and asked me to hold his briefcase while he put on his jacket. I held it with both hands while he put it on. Then I put my hand back in my pocket and walked immediately across the street straight to the police station to make sure I didn't get jumped. Next to the police station was where my car was parked so I hurried to my car, took an alternative route home and finally made it to my apartment. When I took the money out to count it again I noticed that they all had big letters across them "VOID". Fake bills that you would buy on a tour of the currency printer. All of them.
I went back to the McDonalds asking for the video footage to see if it was worth going to the police. The guy at McDonalds watched the footage and told me it was too grainy to see anyone's face but he saw when the guy picked my pocket when I stood up and the guy was putting on his jacket. He switched out envelopes.
Come to find out it was an Eastern European mafia type gang. The guy standing outside probably would've jumped me had I made it out. I put the word out on the localbitcoins forums and about 2 months later I was contacted by someone who said the same thing happened to him in Amsterdam but he jumped the guy when he tried to do the same thing and everyone scrambled. He said he had the guy pinned, he was whining..."just let me go please...". He waited for the police to come and take him away.
And thanks to me letting people on localbitcoins know about what had happened to me, I got thrown into a Europe wide sting operation that happened all on the same day where they went after people from the "dark web" looking for drugs and criminal activity. The German police showed up at my apartment thinking I was a criminal (part of the reason why I didn't report the theft in the first place...what do you know, they proved me right). They took all of my money, computers, and cell phone. They didn't find anything illegal of course, selling bitcoin personally was completely legal. I had a clearance at work, they tried to get me fired but my bosses knew everything, I was always open about how I got cash. From then on I stopped using cash altogether and went 100% bitcoin. They finally had to return my, now dated, electronics to me a year later. As well as my money. They had to admit that there was no evidence of me committing a crime. At least Germany returned all of my shit when they realised I didn't do anything wrong...unlike a certain other government.
Let this be a lesson...don't keep your private keys solely on stuff in your home.