The FBI has arrested the alleged three leaders of an international crime syndicate that stole huge numbers of credit card numbers – which were subsequently sold on and used to rack up tens of millions of dollars in spending sprees.

Speaking in Seattle, USA, where the Feds’ cybersecurity taskforce is based, agents said the “Fin7” group was responsible for stealing more than 15 million credit card numbers at over 3,000 locations, impacting at least 100 businesses.

The group is alleged to have used phishing attacks, sending emails with attachments that launched a customized form of the Carbanak malware on victims’ computers. The group targeted people in charge of catering in three main industries – restaurants, hotels and casinos – and followed up the emails with phonecalls to those individuals, encouraging them to open the attachment, Uncle Sam’s agents said.

Once the software nasty was opened and installed, it would seek out credit card details and customers’ personal information from payment systems, and siphon them off to the Fin7 gang – which then sold the sensitive data on online marketplaces to crooks to exploit. Infosec biz FireEye has a summary of the malware, here.

The first suspected Fin7 kingpin was arrested back in January in Germany, the authorities said, but that indictment was kept under seal while the FBI continued its investigations. The unnamed individual has since been extradited to the US and will appear in court in Seattle in May.

The subsequent investigation then led to two further arrests: one in Poland and another in Spain. Both are currently in the middle of extradition hearings. The group operated through a front company based in Israel and Russia and operating throughout Eastern Europe.

[…]

Even though the estimated cost of the crime group is a drop in the bucket of what a senior director of credit card company Visa, Dan Schott, said is a $600 billion a year global business, he said that this case’s importance was that it showed the authorities were capable of fighting back “through cooperation across the private sector.”

FBI Special Agent Jay Tabb noted that the case is “the largest, certainly among the top three, criminal computer intrusion cases that the FBI is working right now in terms of loss, number of victims, the global reach, and the size of the organization, the organized crime syndicate doing this.”

Source: The End for Fin7: Feds cuff suspected super-crooks after $$$m stolen from 15m+ credit cards • The Register

All over the western world banks are shutting down cash machines and branches. They are trying to push you into using their digital payments and digital banking infrastructure. Just like Google wants everyone to access and navigate the broader internet via its privately controlled search portal, so financial institutions want everyone to access and navigate the broader economy through their systems.

Another aim is to cut costs in order to boost profits. Branches require staff. Replacing them with standardised self-service apps allows the senior managers of financial institutions to directly control and monitor interactions with customers.

Banks, of course, tell us a different story about why they do this. I recently got a letter from my bank telling me that they are shutting down local branches because “customers are turning to digital”, and they are thus “responding to changing customer preferences”. I am one of the customers they are referring to, but I never asked them to shut down the branches.

There is a feedback loop going on here. In closing down their branches, or withdrawing their cash machines, they make it harder for me to use those services. I am much more likely to “choose” a digital option if the banks deliberately make it harder for me to choose a non-digital option.

In behavioural economics this is referred to as “nudging”. If a powerful institution wants to make people choose a certain thing, the best strategy is to make it difficult to choose the alternative.

[…]

Financial institutions, likewise, are trying to nudge us towards a cashless society and digital banking. The true motive is corporate profit. Payments companies such as Visa and Mastercard want to increase the volume of digital payments services they sell, while banks want to cut costs. The nudge requires two parts. First, they must increase the inconvenience of cash, ATMs and branches. Second, they must vigorously promote the alternative. They seek to make people “learn” that they want digital, and then “choose” it.

We can learn from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in this regard. His concept of hegemony referred to the way in which powerful parties condition the cultural and economic environment in such a way that their interests begin to be perceived as natural and inevitable by the general public. Nobody was on the streets shouting for digital payment 20 years ago, but increasingly it seems obvious and “natural” that it should take over. That belief does not come from nowhere. It is the direct result of a hegemonic project on the part of financial institutions.

We can also learn from Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation. The basic idea is that you can get people to internalise beliefs by addressing them as if they already had those beliefs. Twenty years ago nobody believed that cash was “inconvenient”, but every time I walk into London Underground I see adverts that address me as if I was a person who finds cash inconvenient. The objective is to reverse-engineer a belief within me that it is inconvenient, and that cashlessness is in my interests. But a cashless society is not in your interest. It is in the interest of banks and payments companies. Their job is to make you believe that it is in your interest too, and they are succeeding in doing that.

The recent Visa chaos, during which millions of people who have become dependent on digital payment suddenly found themselves stranded when the monopolistic payment network crashed, was a temporary setback. Digital systems may be “convenient”, but they often come with central points of failure. Cash, on the other hand, does not crash. It does not rely on external data centres, and is not subject to remote control or remote monitoring. The cash system allows for an unmonitored “off the grid” space. This is also the reason why financial institutions and financial technology companies want to get rid of it. Cash transactions are outside the net that such institutions cast to harvest fees and data.

A cashless society brings dangers. People without bank accounts will find themselves further marginalised, disenfranchised from the cash infrastructure that previously supported them. There are also poorly understood psychological implications about cash encouraging self-control while paying by card or a mobile phone can encourage spending. And a cashless society has major surveillance implications.

Source: The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it | Brett Scott | Opinion | The Guardian

Two former investment bankers, one of whom is also a priest, have been found guilty of an elaborate scam – hacking newswires to read press releases prior to publication, and trade millions using this insider information.

Vitaly Korchevsky, formerly a veep at Morgan Stanley and a pastor at the Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church in Philadelphia, USA, and ex-broker Vladislav Khalupsky were this month found guilty of securities fraud by a jury in New York, and are facing 20 years in the slammer.

According to court documents, the two colluded with a Ukrainian hacking gang and investors in the US, Russia, France, and Cyprus to realized more than $100m in illicit profits. America’s financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it has since recovered $53m of the haul.

The scam, carried out between 2010 and 2015 involved Ukrainian hackers getting into the servers of two unnamed newswire services, one in New York and the other in Canada. The miscreants searched for embargoed press releases on companies’ quarterly financial figures, which are typically privately submitted to a newswire a couple of days before they are published, and accessed more than 100,000 of them before being caught.

Source: A curious tale of the priest, the broker, the hacked newswires, and $100m of insider trades • The Register

Hackers stole more than $30 million worth of cryptocurrencies from South Korea’s top bitcoin exchange, sending the unit’s price falling around the world on Wednesday.

The virtual currency was priced at $6,442 dollars late afternoon in Seoul, down about 4.4 percent from 24 hours earlier, after the latest attack on Bithumb raised concerns over cryptocurrency security.

Hyper-wired South Korea has emerged as a hotbed of trading in virtual units, at one point accounting for some 20 percent of global bitcoin transactions—about 10 times the country’s share of the global economy.

Bithumb, which has more than 1 million customers, is the largest virtual currency exchange in the South.

“It has been confirmed that virtual currencies worth 35 billion won ($32 million) was stolen through late night yesterday (Tuesday) to early morning today,” the exchange said in a statement.

All deposits and withdrawals were suspended indefinitely to “ensure security”, it said, adding the losses would be covered from the firm’s own reserves.

It was the second major attack on South Korean virtual currency exchanges in just 10 days, after hackers stole 40 billion won from Seoul-based Coinrail, which suspended withdrawal and deposits services since then.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-hackers-30m-seoul-bitcoin-exchange.html#jCp

Source: Hackers steal $30m from top Seoul bitcoin exchange

As CCN reported, the little-known Coinrail became the latest cryptocurrency exchange to fall prey to hackers, who are said to have made off with approximately $40 million worth of tokens, a fairly pedestrian figure relative to some of the hacks seen over the years.

Later that day, the bitcoin price began to careen downwards, taking every other major cryptocurrency with it. This led some observers to draw the conclusion that the two events were linked.

Writing in market commentary made available to CCN, Greenspan said that “there is absolutely no reason why this smash and grab job at a local boutique should have sent bitcoin down by $1,000.”

While the bitcoin price did experience a small decline in the immediate aftermath of the report that an exchange had been hacked, Greenspan noted that the bulk of the decline came more than 15 hours later and that the scale of the pullback was entirely disproportionate to both the size of the hack and Coinrail’s significance in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

He argued that the decline was instead a technical correction, as most of it occurred immediately after the bitcoin price broke beneath its long-term trendline and moved closer to two key support levels.

“Though the CoinRail hack may have set us off-track, I don’t think that this will have very significant ramifications in the long run,” he said. “The industry has certainly seen much bigger hacks before and other than a technical price level, this doesn’t change much for the path of the industry over the next five years.”

Source: Bitcoin Price: ‘Bloody Sunday’ Not Caused by Coinrail Hack

On Mar 30, researchers at Kromtech Security identified a database open to the public containing full names, addresses, email addresses, encrypted passwords, wallet information, along with links to scanned passports, driver’s licenses, and other IDs for over 25,000 investors of the newly created Bezop. The information was found within a MongoDB database without any security.

John Mcafee, an adviser on the board for Bezop, described Bezop as “a distributed version of Amazon.com” in a recent Twitter post.  It is that, but it’s also a cryptocurrency.  Bezop is adding, and has in fact already added, it’s own cryptocurrency, which they call “Bezop tokens”, into the stream of transactions.

[…]

It does not seem to be a very good start for a company such as this to place personal information of anyone on the Internet and open to the public, especially it’s early investors.  In fact, it’s a little difficult to grasp how it could happen, even if by mistake.   Given the changes to MongoDB, it would have to have been deliberately configured to be public, a configuration which should not even be risked internally.

Making your investor’s personal information public is obviously not a good practice and a huge mistake to make.  We hope that they ensure that their new product, which uses MongoDB as part of it’s design, and any future bounty programs using the same, will be configured far more securely than this MongoDB instance turned out to be.  Ease of use should never be placed above security, even during the development cycle.

At the time of this report, Bezop has been notified and have made no comment, but they have secured the database.

In our previous research we have learned that it takes about 3 hours for a misconfigured MongoDB server to be compromised.

Source: Cryptocurrency Leaks Personal Information for Thousands of I

But really – who uses MongoDB anymore?!

Indian Bitcoin exchange Coinsecure has mislaid 438.318 BTC belonging to its customers.

In a statement by parent firm Secure Bitcoin Traders Pvt, posted late on Thursday, the biz said its chief security officer had extracted a bunch of Bitcoin to distribute to punters – and discovered the funds were “lost in the process.”

The vanished Bitcoin stash was worth £2,493,590 ($3,547,745) at the time of publication, and apparently departed Coinsecure’s secure coin servers on April 9.

Earlier this week, folks began to smell a rat as the site went down for an unexpected nap that day:

Things proceeded to become more alarming for worried customers as Coinsecure stopped accepting deposits due to “backend updates.”

We’re told chief security officer Dr Amitabh Saxena and chief exec Mohit Kalra should have been the only ones with access to the wallet’s private keys. Here’s a crime report the biz filled out and submitted to Indian authorities:

With Bitcoin values tumbling after historic highs, it seems the quickest way to lose your cryptocurrency is to, er, deposit it somewhere.

Source: Tried checking under the sofa? Indian BTC exchange Coinsecure finds itself $3.5m lighter • The Register

Most consumers already say they manage without cash altogether, while shops and cafes increasingly refuse to accept notes and coins because of the costs and risk involved. Until recently, however, it has been hard for critics to find a hearing.

“The Swedish government is a rather nice one, we have been lucky enough to have mostly nice ones for the past 100 years,” says Christian Engström, a former MEP for the Pirate Party and an early opponent of the cashless economy.

“In other countries there is much more awareness that you cannot trust the government all the time. In Sweden it is hard to get people mobilised.”

There are signs this might be changing. In February, the head of Sweden’s central bank warned that Sweden could soon face a situation where all payments were controlled by private sector banks.

The Riksbank governor, Stefan Ingves, called for new legislation to secure public control over the payments system, arguing that being able to make and receive payments is a “collective good” like defence, the courts, or public statistics.

“Most citizens would feel uncomfortable to surrender these social functions to private companies,” he said.

“It should be obvious that Sweden’s preparedness would be weakened if, in a serious crisis or war, we had not decided in advance how households and companies would pay for fuel, supplies and other necessities.”

[…]

Until now, Kontantupproret has been dismissed as the voice of the elderly and the technologically backward, Eriksson says.

“When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off,” he says.

“If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden’s largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.”

[…]

Skarec points to problems with card payments experienced by two Swedish banks just during the past year, and by Bank ID, the digital authorisation system that allows people to identify themselves for payment purposes using their phones.

Fraudsters have already learned to exploit the system’s idiosyncrasies to trick people out of large sums of money, even their pensions.

The best case scenario is that we are not as secure as we think, Skarec says – the worst is that IT infrastructure is systemically vulnerable.

“We are lucky that the people who know how to hack into them are on the good side, for now,” he says. “But we don’t know how things will progress. It’s not that easy to attack devices today, but maybe it will become easier to do so in the future.”

The banks recognise that digital payments can be vulnerable, just like cash.

“Of course there are people trying to abuse them, but they are no more vulnerable than any other method of payment,” says Per Ekwall, a spokesperson for Swish, the immensely popular mobile payments system owned by Sweden’s banks.

[…]

But an opinion poll this month revealed unease among Swedes, with almost seven out of 10 saying they wanted to keep the option to use cash, while just 25% wanted a completely cashless society. MPs from left and right expressed concerns at a recent parliamentary hearing. Parliament is conducting a cross-party review of central bank legislation that will also investigate the issues surrounding cash.

[…]

“If you have control of the servers belonging to Visa or MasterCard, you have control of Sweden,” Engström says.

“In the meantime, we will have to keep giving our money to the banks, and hope they don’t go bankrupt – or bananas.”

Source: ‘Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack’: Swedes turn against cashlessness | World news | The Guardian

That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.
[…]
This particular game was called Winfall. A ticket cost $1. You picked six numbers, 1 through 49, and the Michigan Lottery drew six numbers. Six correct guesses won you the jackpot, guaranteed to be at least $2 million and often higher. If you guessed five, four, three, or two of the six numbers, you won lesser amounts. What intrigued Jerry was the game’s unusual gimmick, known as a roll-down: If nobody won the jackpot for a while, and the jackpot climbed above $5 million, there was a roll-down, which meant that on the next drawing, as long as there was no six-number winner, the jackpot cash flowed to the lesser tiers of winners, like water spilling over from the highest basin in a fountain to lower basins. There were lottery games in other states that offered roll-downs, but none structured quite like Winfall’s. A roll-down happened every six weeks or so, and it was a big deal, announced by the Michigan Lottery ahead of time as a marketing hook, a way to bring bettors into the game, and sure enough, players increased their bets on roll-down weeks, hoping to snag a piece of the jackpot.

The brochure listed the odds of various correct guesses. Jerry saw that you had a 1-in-54 chance to pick three out of the six numbers in a drawing, winning $5, and a 1-in-1,500 chance to pick four numbers, winning $100. What he now realized, doing some mental arithmetic, was that a player who waited until the roll-down stood to win more than he lost, on average, as long as no player that week picked all six numbers. With the jackpot spilling over, each winning three-number combination would put $50 in the player’s pocket instead of $5, and the four-number winners would pay out $1,000 in prize money instead of $100, and all of a sudden, the odds were in your favor. If no one won the jackpot, Jerry realized, a $1 lottery ticket was worth more than $1 on a roll-down week—statistically speaking.

“I just multiplied it out,” Jerry recalled, “and then I said, ‘Hell, you got a positive return here.’”
[…]
This was an uncomfortable leap for a guy with no experience in gambling, but if he stopped now, he would never know if his theory was correct. During the next roll-down week, he returned to Mesick and made a larger bet, purchasing $3,400 in Winfall tickets. Sorting 3,400 tickets by hand took hours and strained his eyes, but Jerry counted them all right there at the convenience store so that Marge would not discover him. This time he won $6,300—an impressive 46 percent profit margin. Emboldened, he bet even more on the next roll-down, $8,000, and won $15,700, a 49 percent margin.
[…]
he lottery is like a bank vault with walls made of math instead of steel; cracking it is a heist for squares. And yet a surprising number of Americans have pulled it off. A 2017 investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review found widespread anomalies in lottery results, difficult to explain by luck alone. According to CJR’s analysis, nearly 1,700 Americans have claimed winning tickets of $600 or more at least 50 times in the last seven years, including the country’s most frequent winner, a 79-year-old man from Massachusetts named Clarance W. Jones, who has redeemed more than 10,000 tickets for prizes exceeding $18 million.
[…]
he and Marge were willing to do the grunt work, which, as it turned out, was no small challenge. Lottery terminals in convenience stores could print only 10 slips of paper at a time, with up to 10 lines of numbers on each slip (at $1 per line), which meant that if you wanted to bet $100,000 on Winfall, you had to stand at a machine for hours upon hours, waiting for the machine to print 10,000 tickets. Code in the purchase. Push the “Print” button. Wait at least a full minute for the 10 slips to emerge. Code in the next purchase. Hit “Print.” Wait again. Jerry and Marge knew all the convenience store owners in town, so no one gave them a hard time when they showed up in the morning to print tickets literally all day. If customers wondered why the unassuming couple had suddenly developed an obsession with gambling, they didn’t ask. Sometimes the tickets jammed, or the cartridges ran out of ink. “You just have to set there,” Jerry said.

The Selbees stacked their tickets in piles of $5,000, rubber-banded them into bundles and then, after a drawing, convened in their living room in front of the TV, sorting through tens or even hundreds of thousands of tickets, separating them into piles according to their value (zero correct numbers, two, three, four, five). Once they counted all the tickets, they counted them again, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. If Jerry had the remote, they’d watch golf or the History Channel, and if Marge had it, “House Hunters” on HGTV. “It looked extremely tedious and boring, but they didn’t view it that way,” recalled their daughter Dawn. “They trained their minds. Literally, they’d pick one up, look at it, put it down. Pick one up, put it down.” Dawn tried to help but couldn’t keep pace; for each ticket she completed, Jerry or Marge did 10.
[…]
That June, Jerry created a corporation to manage the group. He gave it an intentionally boring name, GS Investment Strategies LLC, and started selling shares, at $500 apiece, first to the kids and then to friends and colleagues in Evart. Jerry would eventually expand the roster to 25 members, including a state trooper, a parole officer, a bank vice president, three lawyers and even his personal accountant, a longtime local with a smoker’s scratchy voice named Steve Wood. Jerry would visit Wood’s storefront office downtown, twist the “Open” sign to “Closed,” and seek his advice on how to manage the group.
[…]
And business was good. By the spring of 2005, GS Investment Strategies LLC had played Winfall on 12 different roll-down weeks, the size of the bets increasing along with the winnings. First $40,000 in profits. Then $80,000. Then $160,000. Marge squirreled her share away in a savings account. Jerry bought a new truck, a Ford F350, and a camping trailer that hooked onto the back of it. He also started buying coins from the U.S. Mint as a hedge against inflation, hoping to protect his family from any future catastrophe. He eventually filled five safe deposit boxes with coins of silver and gold.
[…]
A mathematics major in his final semester, Harvey had been researching lottery games for an independent study project, comparing the popular multistate games Powerball and MegaMillions to see which offered players a better shot at winning. He’d also analyzed different state games, including Cash WinFall, and it hadn’t taken him long to spot its flaw: On a roll-down week, a $2 lottery ticket was worth more than $2, mathematically.

Within days, Harvey had recruited some 50 people to pony up $20 each, for a total of $1,000, enough to buy 500 Cash WinFall tickets for the February 7 roll-down drawing. The Patriots won the Super Bowl on February 6, and the following day, the MIT group took home $3,000, for a $2,000 profit.

Curiously enough, the MIT students weren’t the only ones playing Cash WinFall for high stakes that day. A biomedical researcher at Boston University, Ying Zhang, had also discovered the flaw, after an argument with friends about the nature of the lottery. Believing it to be exploitative, Zhang had researched the Massachusetts State Lottery to bolster his point. Then he found the glitch in Cash WinFall, and as happens so often in America, a skeptic of capitalism became a capitalist. Zhang encouraged friends to play and formed his own betting club, Doctor Zhang Lottery Club Limited Partnership. His group began wagering between $300,000 and $500,000 on individual roll-down weeks, and eventually Zhang quit his job as a biomedical researcher to focus on the lottery full time. He bought tickets in bulk at a convenience store near his home, in the Boston suburb of Quincy, and stored the losing tickets in boxes in his attic until the weight made his ceiling crack.

As energetically as Zhang played the game, however, he couldn’t match the budding lottery moguls at MIT. After the first roll-down, Harvey assembled 40 to 50 regular players—some of them professors with substantial resources—and recruited his classmate, Yuran Lu, to help manage the group. Lu was an electrical engineering, computer science and math major with a mischievous streak: one time, to make a point about security, he’d stolen 620 passwords from students and professors. Now he helped Harvey form a corporation, named Random Strategies LLC, after their dorm. Their standard wager on a roll-down week was $600,000—300,000 tickets. Unlike the Selbees, who allowed the computer to pick numbers for them (“Quic Pics”), the MIT students preferred to choose their own, which avoided duplicates but also meant that the students had to spend weeks filling in hundreds of thousands of tiny ovals on paper betting slips.

Source: The Lottery Hackers – The Huffington Post

A great article on how three groups of people were hacking this lottery and how it all ended.

“Platforms like Monero are designed to be truly anonymous, and tumbler services like CoinJoin can [further] obscure transaction origins,” said Dr Mike McGuire, senior lecturer in criminology at Surrey University and author of the study.

Many cybercriminals are using virtual currency to convert the illegal proceeds of crime into hard cash and assets. Digital payment systems are used to help hide the money trail.
[…]
Methods like “micro laundering”, where thousands of small electronic payments are made through platforms like PayPal, are increasingly common and more difficult to detect. Another common technique is to use online transactions – via sites like eBay – to facilitate laundering.

Crooks are circumventing PayPal and eBay’s anti-fraud controls, even though both are “getting better at picking up laundering techniques”, according to Dr McGuire.
[…]
“Keeping transactions low, say $10-12, makes laundering almost impossible to spot, as they look like ordinary transactions. It would be impossible to investigate every transaction of this size. By making repeated small payments, or limited transactions, your profile begins to gain the ‘trust’ of controls systems, which makes it even harder to detect laundering as payments are less likely to be flagged.”

Botnets can be used to make thousands of these transactions and increase your trust rating.

“I have also seen evidence of multi-stage laundering, where criminals will make payments through websites like Airbnb which look completely legitimate. Cybercriminals are also gaining access or control of legitimate PayPal accounts by phishing emails. I also saw it was easy to buy stolen credentials from online forums to gain access to hundreds of PayPal accounts which can then be used to launder payments.”

McGuire said cybercriminals are working with the fraud controls to then manipulate them by applying to go beyond current annual payment limits and then providing false or hacked documentation to support the checks which permit larger payments.
[…]
Cybercriminals elsewhere are active in converting stolen income into video game currency or in-game items like gold, which are then converted into Bitcoin or other electronic formats. Games such as Minecraft, FIFA, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy and GTA 5 are among the most popular options because they allow covert interactions with other players to facilitate the trade of currency and goods.

“Gaming currencies and items that can be easily converted and moved across borders offer an attractive prospect to cybercriminals,” Dr McGuire told The Register. “This trend appears to be particularly prevalent in countries like South Korea and China – with South Korean police arresting a gang transferring $38m laundered in Korean games back to China.

“The advice on how to do this is readily available online and explains how cybercriminals can launder proceeds through both in-game currencies and goods.”

The findings come from a nine-month study into the macro economics of cybercrime, sponsored by infosec vendor Bromium

Source: Crooks opt for Monero as crypto of choice to launder ill-gotten gains • The Register

Zaif, A cryptocurrency exchange in Japan reportedly experienced a temporary glitch last week that suddenly offered investors their pick of coins for the low, low price of zero dollars. Several customers took advantage of the opportunity, but one really ran with it.

According to Reuters, it was possible to buy cryptocurrencies for free on the Zaif exchange for about 20 minutes on February 16th. The exchange reportedly revealed the problem to reporters on Tuesday.
[…]
there’s still one customer that’s putting up a fight over their heavily-discounted purchase. How much did they try to pull out? According to Japanese outlet Asahi Shimbun, one customer apparently “purchased” 2,200 trillion yen worth of bitcoin and proceeded to try to cash it out. That’s about $20 trillion. Considering the fact that Bitcoin has a market cap of just over $183 billion, that sell order really must have confused some traders for a bit.

Reuters points out that the glitch couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange business. Following the recent $400 million heist at the Japanese exchange Coincheck, two separate industry groups have agreed to form a self-regulating body that would strive to protect investors with stronger safeguards. It would also, presumably, demonstrate to authorities that they don’t need to get involved. The Japanese yen is by far the most exchanged national currency in the Bitcoin world, so attracting regulations would have a global impact.

Source: Glitch on Bitcoin Exchange Drops Prices to Zero Dollars, User Tries to Make Off With Trillions

A former Tesla employee claims the company knowingly sold defective cars, often referred to as “lemons,” and that he was demoted and eventually fired after reporting the practice to his superiors. He made these allegations in a lawsuit filed in late January in New Jersey Superior Court under the Conscientious Employee Protection Act (CEPA).The former employee, Adam Williams, worked for Tesla as a regional manager in New Jersey dating back to late 2011. While there, he says he watched the company fail “to disclose to consumers high-dollar, pre-delivery damage repairs” before delivering its vehicles, according to the complaint. Instead, he says the company sold these cars as “used,” or labeled as “demo/loaner” vehicles.
[…]
This is not the first time Tesla has dealt with a lawsuit that involved accusations of lemon law issues. The company settled a lawsuit with a Model X owner in 2016 who complained about problems with the doors and software of his vehicle.

Source: Tesla accused of knowingly selling defective vehicles in new lawsuit – The Verge

Ouch. Sounds like something Musk would do though.

Digital currency exchange Coinbase said it inadvertently charged punters for transactions they never made, effectively draining money from their bank accounts. It has promised to refund the money taken.

For the last few days, netizens have been complaining that funds had vanished from bank accounts linked to Coinbase without reason. Some people report multiple charges being made that drained their accounts and left them with heavy overcharge fees and the inability to pay bills and rent.

“We can confirm that the unexpected charges are originating from our payment processing network, and are related to charges from previous purchases,” a company rep called Olga said on Reddit.

“To the best of our knowledge, these unexpected charges are not permanent and are in the process of being refunded. We apologize for the poor experience.”

Rather bizarrely the post also asks those people affected by the errors to post up details of the transactions, including their location, the bank used, the number of bogus charges and the case number from the bank. From a security situation that’s very poor practice indeed.

Source: Oh sh-itcoin! Crypto-dosh swap-shop Coinbase empties punters’ bank accounts • The Register

At least 60 people fall for Koinz Trading, that claimed to buy and run a BTC miner for you for the price of EUR 6100 + EUR 23 per month. Payments stopped in September. Rumor has it that the founder Barry van Mourik was selling the computers to pay for his debts.

Zeker zestig gedupeerden van Koinz Trading, het Nederlandse bedrijf dat klanten zogenoemde Miners S9-machines had beloofd, zijn hun geld zo goed als zeker kwijt. Het bedrijf is woensdag door de rechtbank in Amsterdam failliet verklaard. Bij de politie zijn tientallen aangiften binnengekomen.

Source: Bitcoinfabriek Koinz Trading failliet – Emerce

A cryptocurrency startup named LoopX has pulled an exit scam after collecting around $4.5 million from users during an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) held for the past weeks.

The LoopX team disappeared out of the blue at the start of the week when it took down its website and deleted its Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube channels without any explanation.

The company’s former Twitter profile now lists only one tweet, a link to a TheNextWeb article detailing the exit scam, but it is unclear if the LoopX team posted this link themselves, or if somebody else claimed the account name after it was vacated.
Victims tracking funds as they dissipate

People who invested in the startup are now tracking funds move from account to account in a BitcoinTalk forum thread, and banding together in the hopes of filing a class action lawsuit.

Before the site went down, LoopX claimed to have gathered $4.5 million of the $12 million they wanted to raise for creating a new cryptocurrency trading mobile app based on a proprietary trading algorithm.

In an email sent to customers last week, LoopX owners made an ironic statement of “We will have some more surprises for you throughout the week. Stay tuned!”

This was probably not the surprise many users were expecting, but some users did see red flags with the entire LoopX operation and tried to warn would-be investors last month, via LoopX’s official Reddit channel.

Source: LoopX Startup Pulls ICO Exit Scam and Disappears with $4.5 Million