Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says Bloomberg Reporter (bloomberg.com) 100
A Bloomberg investigative reporter wrote a new book titled Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. This week Bloomberg published an excerpt that begins when the reporter received a flirtatious text message from a woman named Vicky Ho for a scam that's called "pig butchering".
"Vicky's random text had found its way to pretty much exactly the wrong target. I'd been investigating the crypto bubble for more than a year..." After a day, Vicky revealed her true love language: Bitcoin price data. She started sending me charts. She told me she'd figured out how to predict market fluctuations and make quick gains of 20% or more. The screenshots she shared showed that during that week alone she'd made $18,600 on one trade, $4,320 on another and $3,600 on a third... For days, she went on chatting without asking for me to send any money. I was supposed to be the mark, but I had to work her to con me.... Vicky sent me a link to download an app called ZBXS. It looked pretty much like other crypto-exchange apps. "New safe and stable trading market," a banner read at the top. Then Vicky gave me some instructions. They involved buying one cryptocurrency using another crypto-exchange app, then transferring the crypto to ZBXS's deposit address on the blockchain, a 42-character string of letters and numbers...
People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they'd been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.
The huge sums involved weren't the most shocking part. I learned that whoever was posing as Vicky was likely a victim as well — of human trafficking. Most "pig-butchering" operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they'd be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death.
With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who'd escaped...
I'd heard that [southwestern Cambodia's giant building complex] Chinatown alone held as many as 6,000 captive workers like "Vicky Ho."
Two of the workers interviewed "said they'd seen workers murdered." And another worker said Tether was used specifically because "It's more safe. We are afraid people will track us... It's untraceable."
The reporter's conclusion? "It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency."
"Vicky's random text had found its way to pretty much exactly the wrong target. I'd been investigating the crypto bubble for more than a year..." After a day, Vicky revealed her true love language: Bitcoin price data. She started sending me charts. She told me she'd figured out how to predict market fluctuations and make quick gains of 20% or more. The screenshots she shared showed that during that week alone she'd made $18,600 on one trade, $4,320 on another and $3,600 on a third... For days, she went on chatting without asking for me to send any money. I was supposed to be the mark, but I had to work her to con me.... Vicky sent me a link to download an app called ZBXS. It looked pretty much like other crypto-exchange apps. "New safe and stable trading market," a banner read at the top. Then Vicky gave me some instructions. They involved buying one cryptocurrency using another crypto-exchange app, then transferring the crypto to ZBXS's deposit address on the blockchain, a 42-character string of letters and numbers...
People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they'd been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.
The huge sums involved weren't the most shocking part. I learned that whoever was posing as Vicky was likely a victim as well — of human trafficking. Most "pig-butchering" operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they'd be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death.
With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who'd escaped...
I'd heard that [southwestern Cambodia's giant building complex] Chinatown alone held as many as 6,000 captive workers like "Vicky Ho."
Two of the workers interviewed "said they'd seen workers murdered." And another worker said Tether was used specifically because "It's more safe. We are afraid people will track us... It's untraceable."
The reporter's conclusion? "It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency."
Sure, right (Score:1, Troll)
The reporter's conclusion? "It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency."
Yeah, it's true that large-scale / institutionalized slavery never existed until the past decade or so...
Re: Sure, right (Score:3, Funny)
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Yeah, I used to be able to leave my car parked, unlocked, with the windows down and the keys in the ignition. In downtown Los Angeles.
Those were the days...
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But you had no iPhone or iPad or MacBook Air laying on the passenger seat :P
You know, the old days in Italy? A expensive car stops at a red light, a little boy opens the passenger door from the outside, pees (or pretends to) on the passenger seat. Owner jumps out and runs around the car to get the boy. Some one jumps in and steals the car.
In our days car doors lock automatically, though.
Re: Sure, right (Score:4)
There was no crime until Bitcoin was created.
Do you remember the good old days? Man they were great. No crime anywhere.
It's absolutely true that criminal minds will think of ways to steal money regardless of the times. However, many decades ago there were very few people in Cambodia scamming people out of money in the US. Yes, they stole money from local Cambodians but usually not from people in other countries. Furthermore, when people reported the crime, the police could investigate the stolen money trail.
Electronic money transfer has enabled remote money stealing scams, but crypto has made the stolen money trail invisible. Well, we have started to hear reports of governments breaking the crypto protection in a few isolated cases, but it's this crypto anonymity protection that is at the heart of the new way of stealing.
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but crypto has made the stolen money trail invisible.
That is only in your mind. And in the mind of the criminals.
The trail is as visible as a blood trail in bright daylight.
No, you can't read (Score:5, Informative)
"...how THIS slave complex..." this one, the one being talked about in the article. THIS slave complex could not exist without cryptocurrency. The article is saying it exists only because cryptocurrency exists. You are misinterpreting it as them saying "how a slave complex", as though no slave complexes could exist without cryptocurrency. But that is not what they wrote, despite your lazy interpretation.
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Like any cultist or scammer, the cryptocunts will twist words. It's in their blood. They should be put down like rabid dogs, a bullet to their tiny, addled brains.
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There is no evidence that the "slave complex" actually exists other than in this reporter's imagination.
I've been to Cambodia. The chance that a trafficked human there can write legible English is near zero.
And what is the point? Slave complexes are expensive to run. You need security and guards. The workers have to be acquired, which means paying the traffickers. Then the slaves have to be fed and housed.
Why not just hire people for 50 cents an hour?
None of it makes any sense. No location is specified. The
Re:No, you can't read (Score:4, Informative)
The trafficked people are from English speaking countries, like the Phillippines. This is organized crime, not some local small criminals setting up shop.
And the point is making money. Keeping trafficked people with no passport and no rights to be in the country under control is dead simple. No need for guards. If they run away, the local police will return them.
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The trafficked people are from English speaking countries, like the Phillippines.
I live in the Philippines.
You can hire people here for $10 per day.
There's no way you can run a slave complex for that price.
Economic logic aside, a bigger problem is the complete absence of evidence.
No need for guards. If they run away, the local police will return them.
Filipinos and Cambodians look similar. The police might catch some, but they won't catch all, and only one would need to get away or get access to a cell phone to report the location. Then the gig is up.
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To you they look similar, which says a lot about how well you understand the people and the places.
And yes, the gig is up. Has been for a long time. But nobody does anything about it, so it continues.
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i'm not in south east asia, but even so his descriptions sound hard to square with his "slavery" framing. from TFA:
At street level were noodle shops, convenience stores, barber shops—many of them with signage in Chinese, rather than the local Khmer. Photos posted by one confused tourist showed that the shops were bisected by metal gates, preventing anyone who entered through the back door from exiting through the front. Local news reports described a string of suspicious deaths near Chinatown—one body was found hanging at a construction site, and another corpse was dug up handcuffed from a shallow grave in a field nearby. A local vendor told a Cambodian outlet that there had been many suicides at the complex. “If an ambulance doesn’t go inside at least twice a week, it is a wonder,” he said.
This is about one of the supposed slave complexes. So there are: "hapless tourists" taking pictures, "local vendors", ambulances, and news coverage about this place? But nobody asked any questions?
It sounds more like standard it-wouldn't-fly-in-the-west-but-not-SO-unusual-in-various-exploitative-industries-in-developing-countries stuff than slavery.
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Sigh... sure. Whatever. Narrow the field until you have a quantity of one, and call it unique. But scams and call centres and slavery have been around a very long time, sometimes bundled together. Did those centres function before crypto? Of course they did. What, do you think that if crypto disappears, the "slavers" will simply say, "Oh hey, okay - I guess you're all free to go."?
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Re:Sure, right (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no but almost. It was the Cotton Gin that did that, not cotton itself. The automation that the Gin enabled made cotton very profitable. But, the US stopped importing slaves before the Cotton Gin was invented so cotton wasn't the crop that drove the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that was sugar. That's why only about 10% of African slaves who made the middle passage ended up in the US. However, after the US stopped importing slaves, the Gin was invented and the amount of land used for cotton and worked by slaves exploded. This continued until the civil war when it was replaced by the sharecropper system which wasn't much better. Ironically, the war made southern planters very poor (when before the war, they were the wealthiest segment in the US) and that slowed adoption of fossil fuels. And it was fossil fuels that actually ended slavery/sharecropping in most places because it changed the economics of labor. So the sharecropper system lasted far longer than it needed to because the land owners didn't have enough capital to switch to using fossil fuels which is what got folks off the farms. Fossil fuels made hiring workers (often immigrants) in factories more profitable than buying slaves to work land which is why the order of countries banning slavery is the same order as countries industrializing and using FFs. The US jumped the gun by having a civil war instead and as a result, we are still dealing with this 180 years later unlike most places slaves ended up in the New World. Oh, and one final point, Cotton wasn't a world-traded commodity until after WWII with the introduction of the Breton-Woods system.
PS The reason we study history is to not get taken in by inaccurate arguments like yours which lead to policies that make things worse for those you claim to want to help. You don't get to cherry-pick history to support your ideology, you have to understand the entire situation to actually help.
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The reason we study history is to not get taken in by inaccurate arguments like yours - says the guy who tried to restrict discussion of slavery in the USA to "the trans-Atlantic slave trade", ignoring the fact that Southern slavemongers switched to simply breeding slaves locally, like cattle, and selling them the same way. [medium.com]
Re:Sure, right (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't switch to chattel slavery - Not what I said at all. They switched from importation, to creating breeding farms for production of slaves internal to the USA.
Ending slavery with a war was just a bad idea that has lead to unintended consequences that we are still dealing with today. - Given that the slavemongers were the ones who started the war, and that the end of slavery in the USA was not an occurrence nor goal until near the end of the war, I'm fascinated to hear what your (historically warped/illiterate) proposed alternative is.
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What every other country did, that's my model. - Dishonest dodge. Be specific.
Let's go with Brazil for arguments sake. - Brazil waited until 30 years AFTER the USA to abolish slavery: May 13, 1888. If you can't even get the basic facts right, why would anyone trust your neoconfederate-apologist lunatic ravings?
Racial riots don't happen there. - You so sure [hrw.org] about that? [americasquarterly.org] Because it sounds like you're just lying out your ass at this point.
They also didn't have a civil war to end slavery. - Again, wh
Re:Sure, right (Score:5, Informative)
slavery would have ended on its own - That argument has been debunked, over and over again.
You still haven't explained why the US had to have a war when nobody else did. - The USA had a war because the slavemongers decided to start a war. What part of this is so difficult for you to understand? The slavemongers of the Confederate South announced their illegal "secession" over the mere POTENTIAL that slavery might end, and then started launching military attacks.
YOU need to provide your actual alternative. What do you think would have stopped the slavemongers from starting a war?
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Well, not _every_ other country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution#1804_massacre_of_the_French ... speaking of 200+ years of unintended consequences), but generally good points well made.
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Oh, and one final point, Cotton wasn't a world-traded commodity until after WWII with the introduction of the Breton-Woods system.
"King Cotton" was the major cash crop of the South. It was so valued to Europe, and in particular to textile mills in Britain, that the South thought they could use cotton exports and the impacts of a US blockade as reason to entice Britain to enter the war on their behalf. Instead, Britain chose to weather the brief economic impact of the loss of southern cotton imports and r
Re: Sure, right (Score:1)
âoeIt was hard to see how THIS slave complexâ not âoeIt was hard to see how ANY slave complexâ
Careful reading is a useful skill.
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And a rare one.
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...especially when all the money just ends up going to Cambodian gangsters.
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I'm a millionaire (I own my home). I don't have $5M to speculate on crypto currency. Anyone with that kind of money to spend and dumb enough to do that deserves to lose the money.
They won't be destitute afterwards, they will just suffer a huge drop in their standard of living. Tough shit. Lots of deserving, hard-working capable people will never reach the undeserving multi-millionaire's lifestyle. I feel more for them.
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That's silly. Somebody works hard and finds the niche that makes them a millionaire, but to you they don't deserve the money if they aren't also armed with the tools to deflect fraudsters. What a narrow view you have. There are plenty of very astute people who will never be scammed, but will never have a million dollars because they having nothing to contribute. Are they more worthy?
A trusting nature means "undeserving"? Fuck off.
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They were defrauded in a crypto scam - that means they were greedy and stupid. And for millions, which means they didn't bother to do the basic due diligence you'd expect someone investing that kind of money to do.
You think having millions makes them worthy of anything? Fuck off.
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But she had a really cute voice. I trusted her.
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Do you also own a yacht? If so, do you believe that you're really Elmer Fudd [wikipedia.org]?
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I don't know if you are legitimately having trouble figuring this out, but the harder something is to come by, the more valuably it should be treated when protecting it. Even the most destitute, jobless, penniless person can more easily replace $50 in a single day than almost anyone can replace $5 mi
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So for some people, $5 million is much easier to come by than $50 for others.
You sure do (Score:3)
>A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million.
If you have MILLIONS to hand over to a scammer, society is better off with you losing the money. You are not fit to control it and the power it represents in our economy.
On the other hand, the scammer still needs to be hanged in the town square as a warning. Just because you're robbing an idiot doesn't mean you aren't committing a crime.
The terms for people without empathy are "unsocialized", "anti-social", and "psychopathic", most of which are identified as pathologies in the DSM [wikipedia.org].
Society would be better off if people didn't get scammed out of their money generally, it would be better off if those of us with knowledge and ability made it more difficult for people to scam other people out of their money, and as a general rule "protect the weak and defend the innocent" is seen as goals worthy of recognition and praise. Many knights orders us
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Society is ALSO better off when people on social media manage to read the second statement in a post before responding with something that is one of the dumber possible interpretations of the post they are replying to.
You posted a lot more words to look just as stupid as the other guy who essentially posted the same reply.
If reading is really that difficult, maybe text-based media isn't for you.
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In what other situations do you not only blame the victim, but celebrate crime? Society is objectively not better off with a fool being parted from their money by an enslaver.
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Society is ALSO better off when people on social media manage to read the second statement in a post before responding with something that is one of the dumber possible interpretations of the post they are replying to.
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Society would be even better off if edge lords like you toned down your shitty hot takes and bothered to not write like "steal their money, kill them all, and let God sort them out" nihilists.
Society is not better off (Score:5, Insightful)
"Millions of dollars" could just as easily be somebody's retirement cashed out. Age related cognitive decline is a thing.
Your lack of empathy isn't good either. You're not thinking this through at all, you're reacting for the sake of catharsis. I get that. Like me you probably *don't* have millions of dollars and your retirement plan is to work until you die. But that unwillingness to think things through makes it easy for reactionaries to take advantage of you and make you do things that hurt you.
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You are not fit to control it and the power it represents in our economy.
How to say you are a libertarian without saying you are a libertarian.
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Libertarians pretty much by definition are not interesting in judging whether other people are "fit to control" their own money. That's the field of Big Brother.
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Saint Ayn argued otherwise. At the moral level, not legal.
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Citation needed. Bring specific quotes.
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too busy trying to keep Trump from running for President
Sounds to me like they are correctly doing the job Americans hired them to do. Good for them!
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In American, we are citizens ...
That's why the monarchies in Europe don't own prisons like Guatanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, and don't have indefinite-detention anti-terrorism laws. Plus, of course, one man can't order the invasion of another country.
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Your point? The US citizen count in Guantanamo is zero.
If you were trying to say something you should just say it.
Instead of Guantanamo you have no free speech laws and you are subjects who live under the military umbrella provided by the citizens of the US. You know the guys held there? The ones your military helped capture on the battlefield? Yeah, that's right, those guys. Thanks for the assist there, ally!
Just what point were you struggling to make?
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The US citizen count ...
It's not all good news: The USA has assassinated its own citizens.
Thanks for the assist there, ally!
We have laws against doing what we help the USA do. Once again, the USA demands its version is the standard. Helping you doesn't mean you're correct: Remember, that's the prologue to most monster-horror movies.
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Yes, Obama was the king of "extrajudicial killings" and loooooved those drone strikes. Yes those are bad but the average citizen also tends not to be in a car in Afghanistan partying with known terrorists so although I believe those are wrong, I do understand why they happened. If you wanted to go there then you have a much better case talking about the ATF and FBI performing dawns raids on random Americans that resulted in dead Americans in their own land when they easily could have been picked up at a f
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You did understand that this racket was run out of Cambodia, right? Oh, I get it, you thought Cambodia was in the US and therefore under the jurisdiction of the FBI and DHS!
Please pay me to read your ads. (Score:1)
Reporter thinks they can write fiction. Submit story to Slashdot...
No, if most people can't explain something clearly, you don't know what it is and why it would be required to exist.
Re:This sounds fake. (Score:4, Informative)
This just sounds like a crypto scammer trolling a journalist.
The same has been reported in other respected media (The Economist [economist.com], for example), so it is very likely true. And very credible, too.
Which doesnt go for your statement.
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I kept one on the phone for a solid 15 minutes by telling him, "oh this sounds really important! Hang on, I need to get my wife so she can hear this too!" And then coming back to the phone every ~2 minutes to say, "wait hang on she's coming! Just hold on!" until he finally hung up.
If everyone did that they'd make a lot less money and maybe go away as their call efficiency dropped.
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Lol how is my anecdote of burning a scammer a troll?
You guys are fucking hilarious!
Well balanced (Score:1)
Before crypto there was no crime. After all privacy is gone, we can return to the promised land. No crime for eternity, I have spoken. /s
This might be "next level" crime, but .... (Score:2)
There have been (and still are) plenty of people trying to run crypto-currency investment scams online who aren't just part of Cambodian crime rings or hostages of theirs.
Several years back, I was messaged on Facebook by a young woman who wanted to start chatting. She saw me posting in a forum about Teslas, so I initially thought, "Oh - ok. Just another Tesla fan who wants to talk about the vehicles." Especially at that time, that wasn't unusual at all. Lots of owners just want to share stories about mods
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That's my point though.... I couldn't find her photos anyplace else online, and I had no reason to believe they were fake. I believe she was exactly who she claimed to be, and she posted enough random photos so it was really unlikely she was "some man posing as her" and stealing pictures from some other site. She'd occasionally post them with her boyfriend on dates too, and it was always the same guy with her.
She could carry on a good, fluent conversation in chat too. Not this weird broken English stuff you
Re: This might be "next level" crime, but .... (Score:2)
Fuck cryptocurrency (Score:2)
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Title is terrible (Score:2)
The gangsters are the crypto-scammers, not the slave workers.
This is a problem that needs better AI (Score:1)
Small disposal problem, once off. Long term reduction in food costs. Office space too.
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Computers are more expensive than rice fed slaves you can also sell out as forced hookers when crypto collapses.
I understand the skepticism... (Score:1)
Enslaving these people is realistic, in 3rd world countries getting someone to do something for you is both powerful and common. So, that seems very plausible. Targetting people to get them to give away their fortunes is very plausible, this has been done since money has existed. The correlation to crytocurrecny is true in only that it was easier to trace sending dollars overseas, but with cryptocurrency, that tracing is harder.
The only s
Interesting, right up until the last horse manure (Score:1)
Humanity Research Consultancy (Score:2)
if you're dumb enough to get into crypto... (Score:2)
....that's on you.
"A divorced mother of 3 lost $5 million"? What a sad story!
Is that your average divorced mother of 3 with $5 mill to toss away?
What I will never understand ... (Score:2)
How can somebody make/own several millions and be so dumb to then hand it over to scammers like those?
Every time somebody describes to me how those scammers trick people, those people appear like mentally challenged primary school children, not like adults of whom one would expect they make grown-up decisions all the time.
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People who got rich easy/by accident fall for simple things.
Has any good come from cryptocurrency? (Score:2)
FTC (Score:1)