Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/13/22-year-old-bitcoin-millionair.html
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Oh man, the victim is really, really lucky that the perpetrators were as bad at thieving as he is at securing his investments, otherwise he might have lost a lot more than his pride.
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As I said in a Bitcoin post here the other day:
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No, no, the money was just resting in their accounts.
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I thought there was no money, just math?
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People don’t want to steal that bulky cash or heavy gold any more.
Police in Florida have arrested a 25-year-old man accused of being part of a multi-state cyber fraud ring that hijacked mobile phone numbers in online attacks that siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from victims.
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Probably pinin’ for the fjords.
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Maybe he needs a fjord escort?
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What were these people thinking? That police would tell him to go away because it isn’t real money?
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I’m opposed to the idea that someone with a bunch of bitcoin to their name counts as an actual millionaire. It’s not anything tangible or usable, and it’s not money, either. And converting that kind of an amount of bitcoins into real money is, I believe, not easy or fast.
We’ve got actual genuine millionaires here, who got rich on real stuff – from cellphones to computer games, and from shipping to elevators. This guy doesn’t count, if you ask me.
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That’s unfair. There’s plenty of drug dealers and neckbeard libertarians in there as well.
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Like I said…
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They should serve time in a Virtual Reality prison.
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Not to worry - it’s FDIC insured.
Every con starts with greed.
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I lost $6000CAD to a scam in Bangkok when I was younger. Being taken for what you perceive as a lot of money can cause symptoms akin to PTSD in the mark after they realize they’ve been bamboozled. It’s easy to laugh at this young man because of the “currency” that he was taken for, but it’s more challenging to have some modicum of empathy.
What pisses me off is that the Thai police actually took this seriously. I’m not aware of anyone successfully prosecuting anyone involved with the Bangkok Gem Scam.
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The criminals are the smart ones here (despite falling to conceal their real identities) for converting that nonsense money into real money. Don’t want to be holding that hot potato when everyone realizes how ridiculous it all is.
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And converting that kind of an amount of bitcoins into real money is, I believe, not easy or fast.
$35 million is a lot, but you could easily convert that to cash over a week or two. There’s around $500 million worth of Bitcoin traded each day.
Once in a while I think, “Maybe I should have mined a few Bitcoins back in the day, before everybody discovered them and mining got to be super-expensive.” Then I think, “Well, if I had done that, I would probably have stored them in one of those coin exchanges, like Mt. Gox, and they would have gone missing.” I am a bit more clueful than the Finnish guy mentioned here, but it sure seems like anybody who trusted anybody in the cryptocurrency world got snookered. I did the next best thing besides get in early and make $$$$: I just didn’t go there at all. Still looks like a good idea.
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No more Boom Boom for that guy.
