Tag Archive for: Lost

‘Hackers helped me find my lost Bitcoin fortune’

/in


rhonda and megan kampert

Rhonda Kampert (left) used her recovered Bitcoin to help her daughter, Megan, through university

Rhonda Kampert was an early adopter.

She bought six Bitcoins in 2013, when they cost about $80 (£60) each, and were the chatter of niche corners of the internet.

“I used to listen to a radio talk show and they started talking about crypto and Bitcoin so I got interested,” she says.

“Back then buying it was so complicated but I fumbled my way through the process and bought my coins.”

Rhonda, who lives in the US state of Illinois, spent some of her digital money over the next year or so, then forgot about it.

But when she saw headlines late in 2017 announcing that the value of Bitcoin had risen to nearly $20,000 she excitedly went to her computer to log in and cash out.

‘It was awful’

Except there was a problem. She was missing some of the login details for her Bitcoin wallet – a computer program or device that stores a set of secret numbers, or private keys.

“I realised then that my printout had missed some digits on the end of my wallet identifier. I had a piece of paper with my password but no idea what my wallet ID was,” Rhonda says.

“It was awful. I tried everything for months but it was hopeless. So I kind of gave up.”

Fast forward to last spring and the value of Bitcoin soared above $50,000 – more than 600 times what Rhonda had paid eight years earlier.

Filled with a renewed determination to find her coins, she hit the internet and came across father and son crypto treasure hunters Chris and Charlie Brooks.

chris and charlie brooks

Charlie and Chris Brooks say they have recovered Bitcoins worth a seven-figure sum in the past year

“After talking to the guys online for a while I trusted them enough to hand over all the details I could remember. Then I waited,” she says.

“Eventually we sat down together on a video call and watched everything happen. Chris opened the wallet and there it was. I just felt so relieved!”

Rhonda’s wallet of three-and-a-half Bitcoin was at that point worth $175,000.

“I gave Chris and Charlie their 20%, then the first thing I did was take out $10,000 worth of my coins to help my daughter Megan through college.”

She says she’s keeping the rest locked away in a hardware wallet – a…

Source…

PeckShield says $15M lost on Crypto.com, Tesla accepts doge

/in


After a rough start to the year, the price of bitcoin is about flat in the last seven days. The largest cryptocurrency by market value is currently trading at $41,671, according to Coin Metrics.

Ether, the second-largest, is up about 2% in the same time frame. It’s now priced at $3,113.

Other top coins had a better week. Cardano, Terra and Dogecoin, for example, jumped over the last seven days, Coin Gecko data shows.

Along with price movement, here are six important things that happened in the crypto space last week.

1. Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather sued by investors over alleged crypto scam

In June, Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram Story promoting a cryptocurrency called EthereumMax.

“Are you guys into crypto???” she wrote. “This is not financial advice but sharing what my friends told me about the Ethereum Max token!” Kardashian included the hashtag “#ad,” which indicates that the post was paid for as promotional content.

A class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California was then filed on January 7, accusing Kardashian and other celebrities, like Floyd Mayweather, of “making false or misleading statements” about EthereumMax to allegedly increase its price.

Ryan Huegerich, a New York resident, filed on behalf of himself and other investors who bought EthereumMax between May 14, 2021 and June 17, 2021. The lawsuit claims Huegerich and others lost money on their investments.

Representatives for Kardashian and Mayweather were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. A spokesperson for EthereumMax told CNBC that the lawsuit was “riddled with misinformation” and disputed accusations that it was a scam.

2. Jack Dorsey creates a legal defense fund for bitcoin developers

On Wednesday, Twitter and Block founder Jack Dorsey announced plans to create a “Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund.”

“The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit entity that aims to minimize legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively developing Bitcoin and related projects,” Dorsey wrote in an email.

The fund will defend bitcoin developers from lawsuits, “including finding and retaining defense counsel, developing litigation strategy and…

Source…

Cyber scams: Australians lost $33 billion to online criminals

/in


Australians have been scammed out of billions of dollars with a significant increase in fraud and online schemes.

Australians have fallen victim to a surge in cybercrime, with scammers nabbing more than $33 billion in the last year alone.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre saw an increase of 13 per cent in the number of online crimes reported, as swathes of employees were forced to work from home due to the pandemic.

It also saw self-reported losses top $33 billion.

The ASCS said in its annual report that fraud, online shopping and online banking scams were the most popular schemes.

“More than 75 per cent of pandemic-related cybercrime reports involved Australians losing money or personal information,” it said.

“Nearly 500 ransomware cybercrime reports, an increase of nearly 15 per cent from the previous financial year.”

Earlier this month a Victorian woman lost hundreds to a scam on Facebook Marketplace.

The keen cyclist, who wished not to be named, transferred $600 for the component for a bike she was building and $25 for postage, only to have the seller, who was posing as a family man from regional Victoria, delete their profile and be wiped from the internet.

“I was really annoyed with them and I guess with myself that it had happened,” the woman told news.com.au, adding that she was a regular buyer on the platform and considered herself cautious.

“It just shows it must be pretty easy to do, to set up a fake profile … their profile is there and then it’s just gone and you have no trace of them.

“Usually we go onto the person’s profile and see if they’ve sold anything before on certain groups, how many friends they’ve got, just to make sure they’re legit. It seemed like this person was legit so we thought it would be OK.”

It wasn’t until a couple of days after the money had been paid that the woman and her partner realised the seller’s profile and ad had been deleted.

At first she said she thought there may have been another reason the profile had disappeared, until they found the same pictures of the component, a groupset, on Gumtree selling for double the price.

Data from Australia’s consumer watchdog showed that 1232 reports of scams mentioning…

Source…

BitMart Confirms $196M Lost in Security Breach

/in


BitMart has suffered a hack that lost it $196 million in a number of cryptocurrencies, a report says.

The hack was first reported on Saturday night (Dec. 4), when security analysis firm PeckShield showed that a BitMart address was showing large outflows of entire token balances, sometimes for tens of millions, to an address known as “BitMart Hacker.”

PeckShield later tweeted that the losses were around $100 million on the Ethereum blockchain and $96 million from the Binance Smart Chain.

BitMart representatives initially denied the hack and called it “fake news.” The company originally posited that the outflows were just regular withdrawals.

Then the company confirmed the security breach hours later.

According to the report, the hacker had been using decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator 1inch, trading the stolen assets for the cryptocurrency ether and then using a secondary address to deposit the coins into Tornado Cash, a privacy mixer. That made it more difficult for the funds to be tracked.

Cybercrime, including hacking and fraud related to crypto, has been on the rise since the pandemic started as many people and businesses began relying more on the internet to conduct daily life and business.

PYMNTS writes that hackers have begun stealing crypto from just random individuals, as the “crypto boom” has been attracting more normal individuals and “mom and pop” types of businesses. This is a change from the usual hacking targets, who were often wealthier investors.

See more: Hackers Target Phones of Small Crypto Investors

The carriers have upped their security measures in response, while law enforcement is trying to team up with other entities to address the breadth of scams.

The Federal Communications Commission has boosted rules for wireless carriers to tighten restrictions. In response to that, some companies like AT&T have said the new restrictions could end up with customers subject to more fraud overall if requests to switch devices or carriers are mistakenly tagged as SIM swap scams where hackers switch information from one device to another.

 

——————————

NEW PYMNTS DATA: THE 2021 HOLIDAY SHOPPING OUTLOOK

About: It’s almost go time…

Source…