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Comment by strikelaserclaw | Hacker News Reader

man who falls for this stuff. i've been seeing "send me money to this account to get double that" scam for like 20 years, its hard to believe there are people who still don't know better.

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I think they could have done a lot better by having Elon tweet out a new product preorder page (limited edition Tesla merch?), which accepts payments in crypto. Really anything other than give me X so I can give you 2X, which has been done to death already. 100k is chump change, historically for this class of scam.

Another idea is, hijack customer service request DM's from crypto exchanges, and lead customer to phishing login page. Perhaps could athorize API access to the account, and then change email back to original, without the owner realizing account breach.

The traffic burst would be huge for the Tesla tweet. That type of scam introduces more complexity, such as requiring hosting for millions of visitors in an hour, which can leave a traceable trail.

Compromised aws or similar accounts shouldn't be that hard for someone to get hold of at that point though?

You could probably make the whole site fairly convincing with just static files & some js which would be super easy to scale up with just a free cloudflare account or something along those lines

Hosting for millions of visitors/hour isn't that hard. Maybe the cloud companies want to make you think otherwise, but a handful of bare metal servers around the world should be enough to handle that kind of load unless you're streaming video or running a really heavy web framework. Those can easily be obtained for free if you're already a criminal and have access to compromised servers or stolen credit cards to buy them with.

The point isn't tech scalability - the point is that scaling to that many visitors requires payment, and many cloud providers have anti-fraud mechanisms in place to prevent scammers from doing this quickly and easily without being traceable.

They wouldn't have needed a site. The tweet could have included the address and mentioned "first 10000 people to send X Bitcoin get the new Tesla Y"

I too don't understand who's technical enough to know what BitCoin is but not technical enough to understand the scam.

I think some people are possibly just sending the scammers some money for the banter? A sign of respect for the hack.

Bitcoin isn't just for "technical" people anymore. The 2017 craze caused a ton of non-techies to hear about Bitcoin and get involved. It was front page CNN a decent amount. Coinbase made it their mission to make Bitcoin as accessible as just downloading an app and giving it your credit card info, and IIRC at one point Coinbase was the most downloaded app on the App Store.

There's an argument to be made that the only reason Bitcoin became popular the last few years is because of the amount of non-techies who have been falling for all the same, tired "join my ICO and get rich!" scams.

Wishful thinking is a powerful drug. The same technique is used on dating apps, where a beautiful "girl", explicitly seeking sex, sends you a link to some paid service, to "verify" your account or some nonsense.

The very fact that someone owns bitcoin means they have been scammed by the promise of doubling their money.

Consider this: i'd argue that the fundamental feature of twitter isn't tweets. It is the underlying certainty that the tweeted content belongs to the person with the blue checkmark.

My friends in social media positions heard about the twitter hack from me, not the other way around. Given how this info disseminated, combined with the breaking of twitters fundamental feature, i'm surprised more people didn't fall for the scam. A commenter yesterday claimed Coinbase had blacklisted the wallet very early on. I assume Gemini and Binance had similar reactions. Without this swift action, i'd wager the actual haul could have been many times the ~13 BTC they ended up with.

makes me wonder why they did the scam in the afternoon PST when everyone is at work. why not wait until midnight. bitcoin is as popular overseas as in america.

Perhaps they weren't willing to risk losing their window of opportunity.

The trick is the scale at which you teach people. You only need a few people who are new to Bitcoin and stupid, intoxicated or otherwise not at their best in that moment and you made a profit that's significant in many countries. If you reach 100k+ people your odds should be good.

The funny thing is you could create an ethereum smart contract that verifiably will double any money you send to it, and send it back, at least until its own funding pile runs out.

Hello, I am a Nigerian Prince and I need your help....

//That scam still works today, never underestimate the gullibility of people.

I wonder if a lot of people sent test amounts to see if it worked or not. 5000 people sending $10 adds up fast.

It’s got to be teens that fall for it. I can’t imagine the elderly (the demographic that usually fall for this scam) managing a bitcoin transfer.

‘Mom can I please buy $50 worth of bitcoin, pretty please?’

yeah but add verified twitter accounts from authority figures, add nice graphics, livestreams, etc. and it is very convincing for at least enough people to keep the scams going. Twitter and YouTube have millions of users. If just a tiny fraction of them send some BTC, that is a lot of $ given how valuable BTC is.

I believe it's got a lot to do with the Dunning-Kruger effect because this scam gives the illusion to the victim that they are the one who's actually doing the scamming. When victims of this kind of scam see an opportunity that they'd be making money off of a "very stupid" offer they jump on it. In some cases though the scammer is forced to employ tactics to speak to victim's emotions by inducing guilt or pity but otherwise it's just plain stupidity powered by internalized intelligence.

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