It all began early Monday morning on August 29, 2016. I had been awaiting the launch of the Antminer R4 home Bitcoin miner. Since I didn’t get into Bitcoin until late 2014/early 2015, I never experienced home mining, and quite frankly, I never thought I would get the chance. Not only are the newer models cost prohibitive, they require way too much electricity. The R4 was set to change that (at least the latter part, as I would learn). 23:00 GMT. The time came and the orders opened up. This is when I posted on r/Bitcoin:
“Antminer R4 Home Bitcoin Miner - On Sale Now” http://bit.ly/2c5PSRW
A descriptive, albeit bland, title to announce the orders had started. The URL was straight to the Bitmain shop. To my surprise, the post was almost immediately upvoted to 2. Then to 1. Then to 0. It stayed there, until I noticed another post about the R4 linking to an article, nearly 34 minutes later. Within minutes the post had 9 upvotes...17…25…and rising.
Normally, I would not have thought about this situation any futher. There are many reasons these things can occur. It wasn’t until I read a comment by u/hummir that said:
“Why are links to bifmaintech.com instead of bitmaintech.com? Scam?”
Yes, this had indeed been an elaborate scam. Currently, at the time of this posting, the site and reddit post are still live.(Currently, has been Blacklisted) The article and site attempted to mask impersonation fraud by linking to it in-article. Could this be related to the recent Trezor scam that used a stolen email list? For this latest attempt, it would have been vital to achieve a high upvote/point total in order to maximize reach, and it could be possible that my down-voted posted was related to their scheme.
I hope this serves as a warning to the community. Scammers and Fraudsters will continue to evolve their tactics, but a vigilant and informed community will always prevail.
Submitted August 30, 2016 at 05:08AM by tothemoonsands http://bit.ly/2bNpSg8
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