The guy who tried to scam me on orange club app also tried to move our conversation to signal, and he impersonated a fairly prominent bitcoiner. I wonder if this is a trend.
Edit: Holy Shit! I just watched the video. This must be the same guy. I had the identical conversation two days ago. Same story. He claimed to be buying miners in Philadelphia, and just needed a loan for 24 hours. He impersonated someone I trusted.
the whole thing with the video is also a bit suspicious...
Not even to my closest irl fiend will give 10M sats just like that by a chat...
something is not smelling good with this video.
I post it just for fun.
It's very humiliating, but it's useful to talk about it. As you see we've now uncovered a pattern because people talked about it, so thanks for doing that. Collaborative threat identification is extremely powerful.
many times unfortunately...
You cannot imagine how many people are contacting me in private to tell me that they were scammed... is really sad, and I cannot do too much for them.
Some of them I rescued right on time, but some of them was too late.
I'm not sure what it costs to join Club Orange, but it's kind of a high bar just to run a failed scam and get barred from the site. Whoever did it must have been confident in his abilities to make that investment. I'm not so sure it's just kids.
Kids are often being recruited by syndicates - like the ones operating the scam compounds in Myanmar. They are vulnerable, uncertain and want to make a quick buck. The investment is not done by the person you talked with.
Because they still do not know how to separate the public from private.
This is one of the smartest things you mention in your guides, by the way. It would go a long way toward stopping incidents like the OP if people implemented it.
I was just thinking about downloading the orange club app to try to connect with other Bitcoiners near me but is the alternative more dangerous?
Should I not download it?
The app in itself is not dangerous... the people that are also joining and trying to scam you are the problem.
Scammers will always be everywhere, so just stay vigilant. If something doesn't smell right, then is a scam and you have options to report them.
impersonating is a real danger but also education how to deal with these cheap scam is required.
I never got scammed on chat messenger because I simply tell them to fuck off (Darth's style) and my messengers are very well controlled and limited.
That means orangepill app have a flaw.
On TG for example, you can easily see the userID that is not the same, even that they put in the bio same user name...
Sometimes I just try to scam the scammers and send them a LN invoice of 100k sats to pay before I will start talking.
Suspicious or not, it is completely true that the "mind has no firewall." Bad actors want to catch you acting without thinkingβand how the fuck can any security protect you from pressing send yourself?
Everyone thinks they would "never" do that, but people will do anything if the narrative in their mind makes it the logical conclusion. The point of social engineering is precisely to weave that narrative so that you fuck up irreversibly.
That said, this is easy to avoid when you control who can access you and where: it would be kind of weird for "Mom" to be writing to you from Nostr.
a useful strategy, especialy in the age of AI, is to verify the identity of the entity pinging u thru one or two additional medium(s): physical, digital, or virtual (see: digital vs virtual);
simple example: a friend's mother got called by an impersonator of her son, who said "mom, i got into an accident, i am in a hospital, i need money for a lawyer;" luckily, the father called the son directly on his other phone before the distraught mother sent the funds over;
bitcoin users who still have a fiat-trapped mindset will continue to lose access to bitcoin; scammers, whether individuals or state-level corporations, excel at exploiting people's desire to make money; this duping wil continue as long as the god of money remains strong in people's minds; the religion of money is the strongest tool of control in the world! money does not exist in physical reality, only in the minds of men;