You know those goofy emails that get caught in your spam inbox: the ones that say something along the lines of 'I installed a Trojan horse on your device and caught you looking at pron. if you don't send $$$ within 24 hours I'm blasting pics of you' etc.

For S&G's I pulled up one of the bitcoin addresses in the blockchain explorer and 'followed the money'. After about 3-5 clicks I came across this account, learned some people believe it, freak out and send them money.

The damn account has almost $9MM in it and has received almost $2B! Who knew those emails could be so lucrative.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qyj862v4wdms3uv5fp3qnc78lfetew44zqj3awq

...cause the truth about the world is that crime does pay.

Pardon my ignorance, but I was told one of the advantages of Bitcoin was annominity. You can track how much is in someone's wallet just from a payment address they sent you?

permabull said:

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Pardon my ignorance, but I was told one of the advantages of Bitcoin was annominity. You can track how much is in someone's wallet just from a payment address they sent you?

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Yes.
The blockchain is just a ledger. That's how it works. Every transaction is recorded on the "block chain". Wallet balances and all transactions are public.

Yep, that's right but figuring out whose wallet that belongs to is tougher. The US is making companies based in the U.S. that allow US customers the ability to move funds in and out report transactions over a certain account. Similar to the KYC laws.

Comeby! said:

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You know those goofy emails that get caught in your spam inbox: the ones that say something along the lines of 'I installed a Trojan horse on your device and caught you looking at pron. if you don't send $$$ within 24 hours I'm blasting pics of you' etc.

For S&G's I pulled up one of the bitcoin addresses in the blockchain explorer and 'followed the money'. After about 3-5 clicks I came across this account, learned some people believe it, freak out and send them money.

The damn account has almost $9MM in it and has received almost $2B! Who knew those emails could be so lucrative.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/BTC/bc1qyj862v4wdms3uv5fp3qnc78lfetew44zqj3awq

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Many of them were sent out using data derived from one of the big data breaches we've had over the last 5 years, so often times something in the email (typically the subject) is actually accurate to the point where the receiver assumes it's a "legitimate hack" (eg. comes to your email and it has a password you use widely as the subject line).

Some bad actors took the data in these breaches and used it to access accounts, some took it and decided to see if it could be used to extort.

And, yeah, throw an email like that at a couple hundred thousand people you are going to get some people to bite.

I wonder how gold and silver stackers handle this

Sometimes I don't feel bad for some victims.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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...cause the truth about the world is that crime does pay.

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Sad, but true.

The biggest lie my mother told me was "Violence never solves anything."

False. It solves everything.