Fraud Is Quicker Than the Law. Business Insider. Bitcoin: Bitcoin under pressure. $250,000 worth of Bitcoins stolen in net heist. Richard Engel is widely regarded as one of America’s leading foreign correspondents for his coverage...
Expand Bio Richard Engel is widely regarded as one of America’s leading foreign correspondents for his coverage of wars, revolutions and political transitions around the world over the last 15 years. Most recently, he was recognized for his outstanding reporting on the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the conflict in Libya and unrest throughout the Arab world. Engel was named chief foreign correspondent of NBC News in April 2008. His reports appear on all platforms of NBC News, including “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “TODAY,” “Meet the Press,” “Dateline,” MSNBC, and NBCNews.com. Engel, one of the only western journalists to cover the entire war in Iraq, joined NBC News in May 2003. Prior to working for ABC News, Engel served as the Middle East correspondent for "The World," a joint production of BBC World Service, Public Radio International (PRI) and WGBH-Boston radio from 2001-2003.
Business Insider. An 18-year-old Australian says that he has had $1 million in Bitcoin stolen from the Bitcoin "bank" he was running, but he cannot go to the police because he worries that giving authorities the keys to investigate the case is the same as giving them control of the money itself, according to ABC Australia.
The man ran a Bitcoin bank called Tradefortress. Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed if the receiving party doesn't agree to the refund. Business Insider. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart A Chinese Bitcoin exchange that held up to $4.1 million in users' accounts has gone offline and everyone involved with it has vanished, according to CoinDesk.
The GBL exchange claimed to be based in Hong Kong but turns out to have been headquartered in China. The Hong Kong Standard reports: The company appears to have launched in May 2013, with its domain btc-glb.com registered on 9th May and a post later that month by Bitcoin Talk forum user zhaoxianpeng promoting the site. Some mainlanders went to the IFC office listed on its website, but this turned out to be a false address. Fourteen of them made a report to the Hong Kong police. WantChinaTimes notes that GBL had not obtained any of the usual business licenses required to operate a financial services company. Moreover, 13 of the discontinued services closed without any prior notice, while the remaining five were forced to shut down following hacker attacks. Bitcoin’s skyrocketing value ushers in era of $1 million hacker heists. A company billing itself as one of Europe's biggest Bitcoin exchanges said it suffered a coordinated attack that succeeded in stealing almost $1 million worth of the digital currency, marking the latest in a string of high-stakes heists hitting companies that hold large sums online.
Kris Henriksen, CEO of Denmark-based Bitcoin Internet Payment Services (BIPS), made that claim last week in a Web post that said the attack began as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Two days later, Henriksen said, the same attackers targeted the BIPS network again and managed to use the damage they previously inflicted to somehow tamper with the channel that connects BIPS data storage systems to company servers. Major Bitcoin theft from website, claims owner. 8 November 2013Last updated at 11:22 ET Bitcoins are becoming more popular as a method of payment online A man who ran an online "wallet service" for storing Bitcoins has claimed hackers stole virtual currency from his site worth more than one million Australian dollars.
The Australian man said 4,100 Bitcoins (US$1.04m, £650,000) were taken in two separate attacks. He said he would not report the theft to police as Bitcoin transactions are virtually impossible to trace. This has led some users to speculate whether it was an "inside job". In a radio interview with ABC News the man, who only used his online name TradeFortress, denied being involved. The Bitcoin virtual currency is increasingly used to pay for things online. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the theft occurred on 26 October but users were only alerted this week via a message he posted on the wallet service's website. "Please don't store Bitcoins on an internet-connected device, regardless if it is your own or a service's. " Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions. Cryptographic currency's massive rise in value leads to a corresponding increase in online heists by criminals seeking easy paydays. 10 IT Job Titles We Miss (Click image for larger view.)
Business Insider. One of the most powerful myths about Bitcoin — the encrypted, independent online currency that's become a huge trend in recent months — is that Bitcoin is "secure.
" Bitcoin.org, the semi-official voice of the Bitcoin community, says "the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking. No organization or individual can control Bitcoin, and the network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted. " But Bitcoin is not secure. There have been dozens of robberies of Bitcoin banks and exchanges, and millions of dollars have been lost. To put that in perspective, if robbers were routinely walking into brick-and-mortar banks and taking millions of dollars, with zero consequences and no arrests, it would make huge headlines every day. But on the Internet, Bitcoin thefts worth hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars happen on a weekly basis and no one cares.
Don't hold you breath for refunds. And then disaster struck.