Topic: What I experienced since the past two days now - page 2. (Read 448 times)

Now that scammer is getting grilled by the police and he'll say anything to get out of there, even if it means implicating other people. He'll say OP was the brains behind the operation and told him about bitcoin and how to use it to launder money. It's best to keep things to yourself. I wouldn't even tell that to the police because they could be corrupt. They could search your place and steal computer hadrware thinking they can get whatever you have stored in there. Many people will see a bag of money with arms and legs when they see you talking about owning bitcoin.

You inspired your neighbour to invest in Bitcoin, but instead of investing, he has been scamming people. It's true that those who know about both of you and that you were too closed would point to you as well. But actually, this isn't your mistake. When you are teaching something to others, it isn't necessary; they must be trusted. Because you can't estimate how trusted a person is, your neighbour would be trusted for some other sector or reason. But he came out as a scammer on crypto. There will always be some scammers, and that's how scammers are born. But we should keep adapting Bitcoin anyway. We can't find a trusted person. This is an unexpected scenario.

You shouldn't just trust someone so easily that's why other people say that you should verify first before you trust them. As your story goes, you are lucky that your neighbor didn't include you as one of his accomplice and may have been go down with him. As you have said your neighbor really want to support mixers and even want you to use even though there's no reason why you should use it which means he has a plan or something like that since he wants to support mixers. As you might have known, there are mixers that have been taken by FBI for a reason which can support money laundering by using mixers.

You are not at fault in any way; perhaps you never had the idea that he was a scammer. Incidents like this teach us not to trust anyone, especially with our investments. I hope you have not discussed your portfolio with him. In situations like this, the victim may want to victimize others who are his friends because he wouldn't want to be the one to go down alone. If perhaps the law in your country is not so friendly with Bitcoin and this kind of incident happened like this, the victim can choose to implicate you because he doesn't want to go down alone. People cannot just be trusted unless they're your biological siblings. Scammers will only want you to know their true identity if you are in the same game with them. 

It is really hard to trust anyone one no matter if it is online or in real life.
And yes there are people who would use crypto or Bitcoin to scam because of its anonymity or being decentralized, but that doesn't mean that everyone is a scammer just like in mixer not everyone who use it is using it for money laundering, there are others who just like to keep their identity or crypto hidden, it will all depends on how we use it.

I mean pretty much most of the scammers and hackers are just like normal investors or people, you wouldn't really going to know if they are hackers or scammers since they not going to tell you about that, it's not like they are people that is not getting out of there houses, these people obviously blend in on other people and investors, probably even here right now there are probably a lot of scammers and hackers here we just doesn't know about it. I mean it wasn't like it is your fault for trusting him, the way I see it is you just trusted him since you think his a great Bitcoin investor which turned out to be wrong, I mean you have your experience on him and that turns out to be great that is why you vouched about him.

You could probably get involved there since you have a lot of conversations I suppose, and most of your conversations are probably about Bitcoin and investing as well, like you said you're the one who told him to store it on a hardware wallet. I guess the trick here is just to be anonymous and just not trust anyone because you just don't know it, I mean if you're actually sure about it that his not some kind of a scammer, I don't really recommend trusting anyone that you don't really know, I mean even though if it is your friend already don't fully trust them like getting or putting money on them.

You should have know by now that there is not trust in anything cryptocurrency or online transactions, even Bitcoin, some people are there just to spoil Bitcoin reputation and name For their own selfish interest, I am not surprised because I have seen so many people who created crypto trading plugs and exchanges they used to scam people and mostly they scam trusted users and close friends which is very bad.

Some investors are just here for quick money, if they don’t make it quick, they end up going into scams just to make it quick. Mixers are not bad, but at the same time they are bad because that’s where scammers use to be untraceable if they scam people their bitcoins.
If you are clean, you can just buy from trusted p2p and save them in your wallet, no need of moving them to mixers.

off topic: That's the reason why lending out cash to people these days is a work of faith. He's been into that for as long as he realized he could use his cellphone to convince gullible people to sending their coins.. where exactly is the problem then? Who am I to blame for the lost coin, the scammer or the witless fellow behind every wallet?..
If you haven't realized how daft some people can be, now lemme tell you; I saw an intriguing post on Twitter. The dude be complaining about how he's missed the arrangement of a few words in his seed phrase, of a wallet that contains atleast $10k worth of crypto. He decided to drop the seed phrase in (his own arrangement) asking that People helped him.

I know it's hard to trust someone and people do a lot of fraudulent activities online, but don't you think you're being too hasty in your conclusion? Your neighbour is alleged to have defrauded some foreigners, he hasn't been convicted yet. It could be that he received funds from an address linked to a fraudster. I'm just saying and you can't rule out such possibility.

I don't think mixers are not entirely bad. People use it because they want to enhance their privacy and to stay anonymous. Just as we are using cryptocurrency so are bad actors also using it, does that make us criminals?

In this era of internet, trust has become a scarce commodity, because online activities are not done physically, so there's no way of knowing what your friends are really doing while holding their smart phones or staring at their computers, what you know is what they tell you. So we should really be careful how we trust people that we call our friends because they could have skeletons in their cupboards that we're not aware of, like the friend in the OP.

Personally I'm very careful about the people that I discuss my Bitcoin investment with, because I've heard the story where a guy told his friends about the value of Bitcoin that he had, that same day armed robbers visited him, they probably forced him to give them his seed phrase, I don't know.

Cash is also used to commit crime, and fraudsters have been stealing from people and covering their traces long before BTC became a thing. Do you go about telling people how much you have in your bank account, the same way i should have the right to keep my BTC holdings private and not have it linked to my real identity. There is nothing wrong in using BTC privately and nothing can make me think otherwise, and surely not this story you just told.

That's why we must be able to maintain privacy well and not talk about Bitcoin ownership carelessly. With increasingly strict government regulations on crypto, it makes us have to be more careful with everyone around us. People close to us and we trust them may turn around and will no longer be with us.

We can tell about crypto but not the secrets we have because that is our privacy. We have to keep it safe, including not saying we have Bitcoin. We cannot blame the government because they want to maintain control of everything in their hands.

By remaining careful when storing Bitcoin, we will be safe and not encounter problems. We also have to be able to protect ourselves, and it is not easy to say anything about our privacy. Everyone has their own goals, and we can't blame them. The important thing is that we do not violate existing regulations.

If that is what you think, I do not blame you as this is an experience that was simply too close for you to remain indifferent about, and you may even think that you were lucky to not get your reputation ruined as you talked with this person often about bitcoin, however to me this seems more as a cautionary tale about being more mindful about the kind of people we discuss bitcoin with, as you have no way to know who you really are talking to.

Criminals definitely use privacy tools as a shield to protect themselves from the law enforcement, nobody can deny it... It is definitely a tough topic for me too because I too can't convince myself if we really need to have full online privacy. We are able to create anonymous nicknames for our social media/forum accounts and that gives some privacy but when we commit a crime, the police can find out our real identity quite easily. That's a very basic privacy option and it works to some degree. People who demand the hardest privacy tool are usually the ones that do something the gov isn't going to like. I also never understand why would a normal guy want to mix his/her coins unless he has some tainted coins or he/she is a scammer/criminal. When a person who got his coins from a legit source like an exchange or mining and uses coin mixing, he literally helps these bad people to wash their money, isn't it? It doesn't make sense at all.

Why don't you ask questions, this guy has been scamming for many years and robbing a lot of people's money. But because he used a mixer, the police had difficulty arresting him and accidentally let him commit fraud for many years. If mixers are really as harmless as you say, then why is the government so determined to eliminate them?


But I agree with you, mixers, bitcoin or fiat...all are not at fault and all those scams come from human behavior. The scammers are the ones responsible and the people who lost money also have some responsibility because if they weren't greedy then no one could have scammed them.

So first he after the act of deceiving foreigners stored his stolen BTC on the exchange? Then after you told about the hardware in storing BTC there? Logically when he succeeded in deceiving many people, of course he couldn't have stored bitcoins in a third party in the first place, but I certainly don't know the exact reason.

I don't think anyone needs to hate you because you are not involved at all the neighbor just has bad intentions without involving you while you may not know at all, then it's his fault but from his arrest the reason for suspicion is because of what? Has anyone been lurking for a long time?

What is clear is that the use of the mixer is to obscure his bitcoin so that it is difficult to identify, but fraudsters always have loopholes to break bitcoin anywhere.

You don't need to blame yourself for the case that happened to your neighbor, he has chosen his own path in an incorrect way and will be responsible for all the crimes he has committed so far. You are still lucky because you only share knowledge with him and are not involved in any cases of fraud that he commits. He deserves to be punished for his actions which have tarnished Bitcoin's image in the eyes of society, people like this need to be eradicated so that Bitcoin is not always dragged into things that cause other people to lose.

When few criminals use a service, it doesn't make such a service bad. I am not a criminal but I am a full supporter of Bitcoin mixing services. I don't want anybody including the government to monitor or know about my financial transactions. Is privacy now a criminal offence? Why didn't the government close banks that engaged in money laundering?    

The highest amount of scams in my country is through fiat. The Bitcoin space is not the only area that has scammers. Scams and other criminal activities are prevalent in almost all sectors of the world. Has the use of guns for criminal activities made the government stop gun possession? The government's responsibility is to increase enlightenment programmes about cybersecurity to help people avoid scams.

You don't have to blame yourself my friend, because anybody is likely to have acted the same way you did in ignorance believing he was truly a Bitcoin investor, not knowing he was an internet scammer in disguise who scammed people through Bitcoin, while using mixers so as to make his transaction untraceable. But I'm happy he got caught by Law enforcement agents. And I think this should be a lesson to each and every one of us here on this forum not to totally believe anybody, be it relative or friends who though we knew for a long time, but only to travel and came back rich, not to doubt his source of income. Because one thing Iife have been able to teach me is that true wealth don't come overnight, but gradually.

You took this words out of me and to be frank, there are many links that would have implicated the OP in this matter and from my experience with the authorities, he might still be called to answer some questions unless he is from a country that is friendly with bitcoin. What the authorities will be looking at will be how the crime was being carried out and who were the people that shared the knowledge to the suspect. Somehow along the line, they will try to know if he acted alone or in connivance with others and the OP might be mentioned as those who helped him perfect his crime. I do not pray it get to that point but this should serve as a lesson to us that we should be careful who we share the knowledge of bitcoin with because some people always look for opportunity to corrupt what is real and genuine.