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Elon Musk Turned to the Creator of Dogecoin for Help in the Fight Against Twitter Scammers

musk needs help with crypto spammers

The CEO of Tesla Motors, entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk published a message in his Twitter meant for the creator of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin Jackson Palmer with the request to invent a way to deal with crypto scammers on the social network.

A few minutes later, Musk received a response with an invitation to use a script that would resolve the issue with the scammers. Judging by the message of Dogecoin’s creator, Elon Musk used it.

https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1041577055970893824

We remind you that Elon Musk had to deal with Twitter fraudsters not once and not twice. Bots with offers to receive different cryptocurrencies for free were attacking Musk so much that he even started writing brilliant responses to them. Later, the social network management even began to block accounts containing the name of Elon Musk.

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Cryptocurrency Prices Today, February 15: Cryptocurrencies “Stand Still”

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Litecoin, Cardano, Stellar, IOTA, Dash, Monero: Cryptocurrency prices

According to the online platform Coingecko, Bitcoin (BTC) remained stable over the past 24 hours. The price at the time of writing is $3604 per coin.

For the most part, cryptocurrencies did not change in price throughout the day:

Bitcoin Cash lost 0.99% over the past 24 hours and costs $121 per coin;

Ripple dropped by 0.03 and costs $0.30;

EOS added 2.3%, and its price is $2.85;

Litecoin grew by 0.18%, and its value is $42;

Cardano gained 0.27%, and its cost is $0.040;

Stellar added 2.66% and costs $0.078;

IOTA grew by 0.87%, and its cost is $0.27;

Dash lost 0.6, and its price is $79;

Monero fell by 0.06% and costs $47.

Over the past 24 hours, Ethereum remained stable. The exchange rate of the coin is $122.

The total market capitalization is $120 billion. Bitcoin accounts for 52.7% of the total volume. In monetary terms, it is $63 billion.

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Romance Scams: Total Loss Accounts For More Than $143 Million

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently published a report showing that romance scams are relentlessly gathering momentum. The number of romance scams has increased in 2.5 times, from 8,500 in 2015 to 21,368 last year, overtaking the number of any other type of consumer fraud.

Romance scams data

The data provided below shows that in 2015 the number of reports did not exceed 10,000, and the total loss was estimated at about $33 million. The situation has been worsening since 2016, when the reported loss accounted for $75 million, two times bigger than in 2015. However, the year of 2018 broke all the records when the total loss comprised over $143 million.   

Source: www.ftc.gov

How do scammers lure people?

Romance scammers usually create attractive and convincing personas on the dating sites and apps or social media, like Facebook, for example. They frequently use fake photos and names, but there were cases of assuming the identities of real people. The scammers lure people with their sob stories to convince victims to send them large amounts of money.

Once the romance scammers have people by the heartstrings, they say they need money for medical treatment or for any other quite sad reason. The fraudsters usually explain to victims that they are in the military and stationed abroad, thus, they cannot meet. The report says that most affected are people from 40 to 69, the rate of their losing money to romance scams is higher more than twice in compare to the rate of people in their 20s.

Tips how to not get engaged in a romance scam

  1. Do not send money or anything else to the sweetheart you have never met in person before.
  2. Tell your close friends about your sweetheart. People can become blinded when they are in love, thus, pay attention if your friends or family are concerned.
  3. Do not rush, just take it slowly. Try to ask questions, use a reverse-image search of the profile picture. If something does not match, it is a scam.

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Japanese Giant GMO Internet Lost ¥1.3 Billion in 2018: Report

One of the biggest Internet companies in the world, Japan-based GMO Internet Inc., posted a report on its financial performance. An operating loss accounts for ¥1.3 billion (~$11.75 million) in 2018.

GMO’s mining business

According to the report, mining business fared very poorly in 2018 which resulted in great losses. The company explained that the business did not increase as expected due to the collapse of cryptocurrency market in Q4. The report provides  the table where we can see the real revenue and real loss of the company. The data provided below does not include “extraordinary losses” of approximately $319.2 million.

Source: GMO Fiscal Report 2018

Alongside, Internet giant announced that it would implement a policy change regarding to their mining business model. The company will sell its bitcoin mining assets at cheaper rates to compensate for a portion of its annual losses.

Moreover, GMO plans to relocate mining centers to the regions where power supply is cheaper. The centers allegedly will be somewhere in Northern Europe.

GMO’s Bitcoin exchange

Source: GMO Fiscal Report 2018

According to the report, the company’s quarter-revenue has fallen by 66.7%, even though the company annually posts about its 7% profit from its crypto exchange GMOCoin.

In 2018, GMOCoin recorded a net sales of ¥4.02 billion (~$36.33 million). In Q1, crypto exchange has lost about ¥76 million, yet, high sales of next quarters compensated them. The fall of cryptocurrency market has also played a significant role in GMO’s revenues. Each phase ended on a lower note than a previous one in terms of sales, while the profits remained marginal.

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Elon Musk and the Half-Blood Prince of Twitter in the Opinion of Its CEO

Elon Musk, probably the most famous technological entrepreneur, is also quite a loud personality on social media, Twitter, to be specific. Most of his tweets either caused scandals, or lawsuits, and the vast majority of them created a massive hype in the community.

However, Musk’s eccentric statements were given quite a positive validation just a couple of days ago by another influential figure, the one who actually made it possible for such tweets to be written and posted.

The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, gave an interview to Recode where he talked with a correspondent Kara Swisher on Twitter (how surprising!) for 90 minutes, discussing the platform, its main focus, the safety of Twitter users, info verification and many other topics.

Among all the points discussed during an interview, one specific question caught the attention of the community. When Kara asked Jack whom he considered the most influential personality on the platform, his answer was pretty unexpected – Elon Musk.

This seems like a rather bold statement, given the fact that the influence of Musk’s tweets was not always quite positive. Just a quick reminder:

When Elon Musk tweeted about loving anime and Bitcoins, it almost shut Twitter down, because the users were going crazy because of these couple of words, just casually thrown out there.

When he, out of the blue, tweeted about making Tesla a private company, not only did it outrage the members of the Board of Directors, it also attracted the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Not to mention all those times, when Musk’s account was supposedly hacked and used to promote fake crypto giveaways and scams resulting in huge money losses of his subscribers, which is quite an expected thing considering the size of his audience.

Thus, such a high praise from Jack Dorsey was perceived badly by the audience.

Elon Musk himself though was pretty delighted. He responded: “Thanks Jack. Twitter rocks.”

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Cryptocurrency Prices Today, February 14: Cryptocurrency Did Not Catch The Romantic Atmosphere And Began To Fall In Price

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Litecoin, Cardano, Stellar, IOTA, Dash, Monero: Cryptocurrency Rate

According to the Coingecko online platform, Bitcoin (BTC) lost 0.35% over the past 24 hours after a period of growth. The price at the time of writing is $3607 per coin.

Cryptocurrencies have returned to the red zone:

Bitcoin Cash lost 0.6% over the past 24 hours and costs $121 per coin;

Ripple fell by 1% and costs $0.30;

EOS decreased by 4.1% and its price is $2.78;

Litecoin dropped by 3.2% and its value is $41;

Cardano lost 2.5% and its cost is $0.040;

Stellar fell by 1.1% and costs $0.076;

IOTA decreased by 1.6% and its value is $0.26;

Dash lost 1.9% and its price is $78;

Monero dropped by 2.5% and costs $47.

Over the past 24 hours, Ethereum has lost 0.7%. The rate of the coin is $122.

The total market capitalization fell to $120 billion. Bitcoin accounts for 52.5% of the total. In monetary terms, it is $63 billion.

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The Most Dangerous Crypto Crimes: What About SIM Swappers?

Cyber attack and crypto crimes in every shape and form are quite abundant on the market of digital assets right now. They all have different goals and different levels of harm. The careful and thorough analysis of such attacks will make it possible to predict them and protect sites, platforms and companies from breaches and money losses.

However, there is a weird tendency going on among the analytical reports, which we will try to explain down below.

Two major cyber security companies Chainalysis and CipherTrace released their analytical statements at the end of last year. Both reports contained statistics on hacker attacks and crypto crimes and an outline of current trends.

The main focus of CipherTrace was different money laundering techniques, cryptocurrencies that are the easiest targets for crypto criminals that choose this path, AML regulations and other related info.

Whereas Chainalysis told its readers on the scale and profitability of such Ethereum scams as phishing and various Ponzi schemes.

Surprisingly, there seems to be nothing about the infamous SIM-swapping.

Just to remind you, SIM-swapping is a kind of a cyber attack aimed at money theft. Simply speaking, a hacker convinces the phone provider to “swap” the number of a victim to a new device. In such way, criminals get full access to the personal information of their victims, still their identity, and later money.

SIM-swapping scams have been involved in multiple scandals with the biggest cell-phone providers of America, the crimes involving this technique resulted in huge money thefts and loud arrests of witty hackers, yet very few reports actually mention it.

However, this still does not diminish the dominance of SIM-swapping over many other types of crypto crimes. In order to fight it, we not only need more coverage from the mass media and analytical firms, but also the cooperation from the cell phone companies to protect the users, their info and their money.

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