21st September 2024 > > A story of a scam.

tl;dr

A slightly ridiculous scam story.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

MicroStrategy has raised another $1bn to add yet more to its current stash of 245,000 BTC acquired at an average cost of $39k each.

And then Milk Road brings this claim from Head of Research at BitwiseInvest to my attention:

Ryan might only be talking his book. But what if this RIA is not a lone wolf?

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Genesis scam

ZachXBT, an online sleuth who has retrieved much stolen crypto to return to the rightful owner, has identified the individuals behind a $250mm scam:

https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1836753185718865979

The scammers targeted the victim by first pretending to be from Google support, then followed that up by pretending to be from Genesis. Long story short, the victim agreed to move cryptos worth a quarter of a billion dollars to a new wallet on the advice of someone he was talking to on the phone. Ho hum. We will come back to that in a minute.

Zach tracked them down using on-chain data and social media posts by both the scammers themselves, and one particularly irate recent ex-girlfriend. It isn’t clear why she was annoyed, or how recent the breakup was, but reports that they were spending several hundred thousand dollars a night on entertainment suggests that they weren’t just buying a few bottles of champagne to try to impress the pretty girls.

One spectacularly stupid thing they did was to record themselves committing the scam, during which they used their real names. This was a big help in tracking them down. You can watch and hear that on the link above, but I must warn you, it is distressing to listen to. There is not one iota of common decency or morals in any of them. Their outlook on life is horrifying and disgusting.

…

Back to the victim.

This person had invested a very large amount of money in Genesis, a firm that has since gone bust. All the signs were there long beforehand, with its involvement with the FTX scammers and Three Arrows Capital. Putting that much money into this firm was a dubious decision at best.

Genesis filed for bankruptcy in January 2023 and recently started paying out on its agreed liquidation process.

At this point, the investor would have been informed that he has got back about 50% of his original investment, giving him $250mm of cryptos sitting in a segregated account held at the trustees of the Genesis bankruptcy. Personally, I think he further demonstrated his rather dubious decision-making process by moving those funds when requested to do so by the scammers.

When faced with such a situation, you have two options, as far as I can see:

1. Agree to move your quarter of a billion dollars of cryptos to a wallet for which you do not know the private key on a stranger’s say-so. Then put the phone down.

2. Say “**** off you ******* feral scammer. I hope you die a very slow and exceedingly painful death in front of your loved ones, as they forcefully demonstrate their personal delight in your pain and suffering.” Then put the phone down.

   
   

Which camp are you in? Answers, as always, on a postcard to CC Towers.