A young boy who made money in Bitcoin was kidnapped.
A kid who made money trading Bitcoin and probably shared it on social media was kidnapped in Bradford. One of the criminals was apprehended and is now serving four years in jail. His name is Muhammed Khubaib, 22 when he committed the crime.
I can only imagine how traumatic it is for the 14-year-old boy and his family. When he was kidnapped, the criminals asked the boy to call his mom and demanded: “£10,000 or her son wouldn’t be going home”.
The family ended up paying the criminals £1,000 in exchange for the boy’s safe release. Soon after, they reported it to the police, and Khubaib was arrested shortly after that.
Not all victims will come forward, and some would be less fortunate as all it takes is a swift transfer of their cryptocurrency to another digital wallet, and they can lose all their money.
A few days ago, the Department of Justice revealed that a couple had been arrested for the 2016 Bitfinex Bitcoin heist. At that time, the estimated dollar value of the stolen Bitcoin was $74 million. Since then, it has ballooned to $4.5 billion.
A big chunk of the stolen Bitcoin ended up in crypto wallets owned by Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, both of New York, New York.
With many people who made money on NFT and Bitcoin flaunting their wealth or new lifestyle online, they can quickly become a target of a romantic scam.
The scam usually involves someone you meet online asking for money or luring you into investing in a cryptocurrency market.
It will start with the person showing you proof of how much money they made and that they are doing you a big favor for letting you in as an investor.
It happened to this woman who lost £55,000 of her hard-earned money to a man who calls himself Andy. While she thought she had met the man of her dreams, she didn’t know that she would lose her money to a stranger who had since vanished and broke her heart along the way.
I have started my career as an NFT artist, and I have sold two pieces so far. I also started to become active on Twitter, and suddenly I would get private messages from women. While none of them have asked me for money directly, they offer me services such as NFT promotion, which you will frequently see on Twitter.
But when I started to do a reverse photo search, most of these accounts whose profiles show photos of beautiful women, most of those photos are stolen from other people’s profiles on social media.
While I can’t say for sure that these are men pretending to be women, likely, anyone hiding behind photos they have stolen online can only be after one thing, your money.
How to protect yourself and not lose your crypto wealth
If you are invested in cryptocurrency, it is best to have a hard wallet to house your digital money.
Always do due diligence, as this story should be construed as a financial advice. There are a lot of articles, videos that can tell you the value of putting your cryptocurrency in a digital wallet because most transactions are irreversible, once it is transferred to another wallet, it is very hard to claim it back.
While what we do with our money is our business and should not be a reason to be victimized by criminals, it is best to remain low-key, especially social media.
Many online criminals are out there looking at social media to see who they can victimize next.
I have seen some people who made new money, excited to be part of a social club or tribe, one of the reasons why BAYC has evolved from being an NFT project to an exclusive social club for its owners.
There are more than 6,000 people who own a BAYC. Some of them are new at having insane amounts of money. Unlike celebrities who have since come out publicly with their NFT collection, who can very well afford security, they might not be well knowledgeable in protecting themselves from criminals.
The NFT loaded ones are not necessarily loaded with real money, and everything they own is digital wealth, which they can lose if they are not careful, and it serves them best by being anonymous online.
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