Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

74 votes and a single comment, I think that is record high ratio.

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged 11 individuals for their roles in creating and promoting Forsage, a fraudulent crypto pyramid and Ponzi scheme that raised more than $300 million from millions of retail investors worldwide, including in the United States. Those charged include the four founders of Forsage, who were last known to be living in Russia, the Republic of Georgia, and Indonesia, as well as three U.S.-based promoters engaged by the founders to endorse Forsage on its website and social media platforms, and several members of the so-called Crypto Crusaders—the largest promotional group for the scheme that operated in the United States from at least five different states.

I never heard of it. For some reason despite following crypto closely I have never heard to 90% of these frauds despite the frauds being so big. Maybe the fraud is some weird front for money laundering, so they don't try to promote it much.

Also , no end to the YouTube scam livestreams. For some reason, YouTube Saylor and Musk giveaway scams stay under radar forever (no arrests, no indictments) despite many arrests and indictments for other frauds, like ransomware, mlm, insider trading (coinbase & opensea). Goes to show how some scams and criminals are better than others.

Interesting

I’d imagine they don’t target people who closet follow crypto but instead people who only think of it as “some high tech money thing making people rich”.

> YouTube Saylor and Musk giveaway scams

I think I saw one of these once. It involved an atrocious (but still somehow impressive) deepfake of Musk. Is this common?

No idea about the deepfake thing, but a few years ago I noticed a whole bunch of old channels that I had subscribed to were taken over and replaced with Musk-related giveaway scams. Never watched any of the videos or livestreams - the title, thumbnail and (renamed) channel name were enough to make it obviously scams.

Youtube is incredibly slow to respond to these kinds of things.

They're very common; I've seen a dozen or more. The ones I've seen don't look like deepfakes; they're random Elon Musk or Cathie Wood videos with a URL for a scam site superimposed.

They are getting very creative too. There is a common bot scam nowadays where it will ask for help and share private keys of a crypto wallet with money inside it.

The catch is to transfer those tokens from the crypto wallet, you have to fund it with native token to pay the gas fee. When you do, the gas fees is automatically sniped by the bot and stolen.

Another interesting one I've come across is where scammers plant obvious bot tweets and then other bots call them out to upsell security services by a random account which then setup a similar trap.

It's amusing to watch. I might fall for some of them if I wasn't aware of them. I can't imagine an average person not getting fished.

> When you do, the gas fees is automatically sniped by the bot and stolen.

Wouldn't stealing the gas fee cost more gas to initiate a theft transaction? So they'd be net-zero?

Or do they use a SUICIDE op, etc. to get a partial gas refund?

I think the idea is, someone would fund it with more than just enough to pay for gas, making the snipe profitable.

I consider myself a "normal person" in this matter, just one who happens to hold the belief that crypto is always, everywhere, and fundamentally a scam -- even though the technology is cool and theoretically could be used for honest purposes.

This makes it easy to avoid getting hosed :)

I think there is some truth about Tate's comment on some adolescent/young adult male from middle-class families (i'd add: without cultural capital, and remove the color denominator as in my country, social class seems to have way more incidence).

Nobody really care about them, or empathize with them, to the extent than before a debate i had with someone with opposing views on a lot of things, i myself was thinking about coinbros, guys in the hustler University or scammed into giving money to fake Elon musk something like: they have money to spent, they will loose some and get help from their parent at some time.

But in fact, they aren't really middle class. Some of them are and will get support, some think they are and will get burned hard (or have their parent and close families suffer). They are targeted by the same scams the 70s-90s housewives were: they have holes in their education, a strong external belief system, are an easy demographic to target and just got access to money and don't know what to do to get more. So instead of madoff-like scams, MLMs with beauty products and other "housewivy" stuff, and revolving credits "get money now to make money later" its now crypto and Get Rich quick schemes sold for 50 dollars a month. Basically the same scams, just a different audience.

But while it is easy to get empathy for housewives who just got the right to have their own bank account, drive alone (my grandmother had fun anecdata about this, my grandfather was 20 year ahead of time) and go to a movie unsupervised, it is a bit harder to have some empathy for the new target of those. Because they are somehow like me, only with a bit more money at birth, in a more centralized place, and the fundamental attribution error is hard to get rid of as it stroke my ego, when it was mostly luck and amazing parenting (and having great parents is luck too when i think about it).

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