I almost was the victim of a Club Orange scam today. Someone impersonated one of my frequent contacts. The guy was either pretty convincing or I'm gullible as hell. He referred to other mutual contacts while weaving his story. I noticed a few red flags right away, like he wanted to switch platforms to message. Still, I wasn't certain it was a scam until the "small loan" he was requesting turned into a large amount of sats. The strange thing is that a new user must pay a significant sum to create an account, so the guy must have been confident in his abilities.
Matteo Pellegrino @orangepillapp , the owner of the app, was very helpful. From Matteo:
the paywall filters out 99% of scammers, not 100%
stay vigilant
The account was shut down immediately.
Just a cautionary tale.
How would he have known how to impersonate a frequent contact of yours?
He knew who the person was, and made reference to him in the story. In other words, he knew who our mutual contacts were.
Please be careful with doxxing apps.
You're right about that
For the record, there's no doxxing on Club Orange, we don't do any KYC.
It's criticism of user behavior, not your execution.
Scary. Do you think he did research on your public communications or something? Seems like a lot of work to target someone like that for a scam.
That's the thing. He had to spend a good amount of sats to get on the site. He chose to impersonate a fairly prominent bitcoiner who he knew I would find credible. He did some homework.
If you ever get a message from me asking for sats, tell me
go fuck yourself, scammer. Even if it were really me, I should not be trusted then and would deserve to be labeled a scammer forever.lol, this reminded me of how much I love replying to scammers and getting really creative in telling them to go and fuck themselves:
You must love it if you're on Telegram.
Nah. I'll send you the sats😀
You are giving out loans on Orange Pill app? I might need to join. Haha
I am glad it worked out ok in the end and they booted the guy.
Well, I didn't do it, but I might have if the amount was small.
Oof.
I been thinking about joining this app. As an investor I see all the updates they push but I haven’t signed up yet.
I think it would be a cool app to use if I started a bitcoin meetup but then I will doxx myself and who knows what can happen after that
I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. But Matteo is correct scammers are everywhere just the cost of being human
As an investor, what do you think about OPA being closed source?
Or about them pretending database transactions are lightning transactions?
And do you know more about why they changed their name?
We never pretended database transactions are lightning transactions.
So when you wrote this:
you didn't try to brag, but thought it's clear that 80% of those aren't lightning transactions, just database transactions?
Or when you wrote this and compared yourself to a lightning wallet with real lightning transactions?
You can't zap 44k people at once on the lightning network, not even two.
Afaik, you don't even run a lightning node yourself. Or do you have a pubkey of a node I can look up on amboss.space, and it will have Club Orange as the node alias?
Well I didn’t know they were doing such wizardry. Nor that they were closed source
I have been using it for a few years and I'm ambivalent. We have built a great group of local bitcoiners as a direct result of the app. We also compromise our own privacy. It's certainly a tradeoff. I think of all the public bitcoiners we all know a lot about, and I'm sure every last one of them has a bigger stack than me.
Good point!
Nobody ever tries to scam me... I feel left out
You're too young and smart
Glad you figured that out before getting scammed. I ain't planning on using the app, but preciate the heads-up. I'd rather learn from other people's screw-ups! Ahahah