KSG Crypto Newsletter #5: January 29th, 2019
“Why did you rob the crypto exchange founder’s yacht?” “Because that’s where the money is!”
Check out what’s on this brochure for a cyber crime-related conference coming up in Prague… in Seminar 11, for instance, one section will cover “examples in dark net investigations — de-anonymizing examples / approaches / best practices / lessons learned.”, and in Seminar 10 the discussion titled “VSAT interception with Carrier-in-Carrier (CiC) separation” is immediately followed by “Hunting Down Cryptocurrency Users,”
which… starts to make crypto sound like the Most Dangerous Game.
In the same month that Moshe Hogeg, crypto visionary, claimed to have fallen prey to an OTC “Grin” token scam, a Chinese investor has launched a lawsuit against Moshe, claiming he misappropriated tens of millions in funds from his Stox ICO:
“The lawsuit claims that only 5 million USD of the total 33 million USD raised in its August 2017 ICO, was actually devoted to the company and its flagship product. Hu claims that Hogeg reinvested the rest of the capital to invest in other ICOs — including that of major messenger app Telegram.”
Stox, keep in mind, wasn’t his first time selling a loser investment to crypto investors:
“Hogeg is the co-founder of cryptocurrency smartphone company Sirin Labs. He is also the chairman of LeadCoin, a blockchain-based decentralized lead-sharing network. Both companies issued tokens — Sirin raising $157.8 million in December 2017 via a coin called SNR and LeadCoin raising $50 million in the beginning of 2018. Both tokens had been hit hard by the downturn in the crypto market: SNR lost 99.02% of its peak value, crashing from almost $3.5 in January 2018 to its current $0.034, while LeadCoin fell from a peak of $0.19 to $0.00017.
In June 2018, Calcalist reported that Hogeg bought $19 million worth of real estate in Israel, paying partly in bitcoin.”
Well, at least it looks like there’s some capital left for the creditors, in the form of dirt…a much better store of value than crypto…
Here’s a spooky new form of malware:
“According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, the trojan targets Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Yandex Browser users…
For instance, it can search for addresses of the victim’s cryptocurrency wallets on websites and replace them with the attacker’s wallet details, the researchers said…
Razy can also spoof images of QR codes on currency exchanges that point to wallets, which make mobile money transfer easier…
“These scripts display fake messages to the user about ‘new features’ in the corresponding exchanges and offers to sell cryptocurrency at above-market rates,” the researchers explained. “In other words, users are persuaded to transfer their money to the cybercriminal’s wallet under the pretext of a good deal.”
What I’m interested in…is if there are any such hackers who are working for, with, or ARE exchange proprietors…
February 19, 2019 is the “Lead Plaintiff Deadline,” or last date which investors in NVIDIA between the dates of August 10, 2017 to November 15, 2018 can “request that the court appoint you as lead plaintiff” in the class action lawsuit being filed by The Klein Law Firm.
No news yet on any suits for the huge drop on January 28th…
I wonder what the community responses will be, if and when Mark Karpeles gets handed a 10 year sentence. There are some parties who blame others more for the negative impact off the Mt Gox collapse then they do Mark; and there’s the “GoxRising” project being led by Brock Pierce, but “supported by creditors”…
I do not get the appeal of an exchange rehab and relaunch, especially not for a consumer. Why place trust in some reformed team to rebuild an inherently broken service, when in the time since its collapse, there have been many alternative services built… and why trust anyone remotely like Brock Pierce??
On March 15, I expect the Japanese authorities to repeat, and maybe reveal more, of Karpeles’ wrongful use of customer funds and his misstatements…whether they’re lies, I surely don’t know, but it will be incredible if they let Mark off after what they’ve already said he did:
“According to the indictment, Karpeles embezzled a total of 341 million yen ($3 million) of customers’ money kept in a MtGox bank account by transferring it to his own account between September and December of 2013. Karpeles also allegedly manipulated data on his company’s trading system to pad the balance.”
Meanwhile, 15 people were arrested this month in relation to a Taiwanese ICO pyramid scheme called “IBCoin”. From Bitcoin Exchange Guide:
Lin, the leader of the group, purchased the coins on 2017 at a price of $0.05 per coin. He and his group members then marketed the coins to victims at a price of $1.63-$3.27 per coin and convinced them that there would be a high return on the investment.
The same basic description *could* apply to the founders (or CEOs) of the largest coins today…i.e. Ripple, Ethereum, or ZCash:
Revealed Tuesday, Wilcox’s $3.65 million annual salary accounts for 0.9 percent of the overall zcash issuance — the further 19.1 percent is split up between the Zcash Foundation, the Zcash Company and 44 other founders, investors, and advisors, with 80 percent of the total issuance going to miners.
An Australian crypto exchange named myCryptoWallet told customers that user withdrawals were being halted because their bank account had been closed without notice, but also: “this will not affect user deposits as they have opened a separate bank account to handle all future deposits.” So, they were able to set up an account very quickly which could receive deposits, but customers will have to wait for their withdrawals, because of “gross negligence” by the National Australia Bank.
I would call “continuing to accept deposits, without being able to make any guarantees about when or how you will be able to send back users’ fiat,” gross negligence.
Some people may have already noted the time of death for ICOs, but they are apparently still being born. Here is a current promotion for “Azul Tokens”:
The essence of this token offering is to optimize the process of producing water-cooled rendering workstations. It also aims to finance the entire process of developing a decentralized cloud computing network that’s touted to be the largest in the world…
As we speak, the development team of Azultec is at an advanced stage, negotiating for a possible take-over of a large graphics card and a motherboard manufacturing company. If successful, Azultec will have strategically positioned itself as a company with terrific products…
In the factory where every single Azultec Cube 300 comes in a “plug and play” state, ready for a quick installation, the essence of rendering couldn’t have come at a better time. What makes it even for exciting is the fact that it comes with a self-developed OS complete with an intuitive dashboard for the customer can conveniently track the data in real-time…
To avail Azultec Cube 300’s computing power for Azultec’s cloud rendering network, the process is easy and straightforward. And for it, the customer will be sure to receive a monthly payment with the amount varying based on the amount of processing power afforded to the network…
So… it’s like, cloud mining(?), but instead of mining useless tokens, the centralized datacenters will be… “rendering” on a “self-developed OS,” competing with “Hollywood studios and businesses with 3d and animations studios.”
And the “Azultec Cube 300” devices are:
It is a system with the following features:
8x GeForce GTX 1070 (each with 4 GB of GDDR5X),
4 GB of DDR4 RAM.
2TB Hard Drive storage.
Water-cooled graphics cards.
An average power consumption rate of 1450 watts.
You don’t get *that much* improvement out of water-cooling GPUs in arrays like this… and there’s already established third-party rendering farms with simple ecommerce-like sites. This is a nonsense project, and as I said before, it reflects poorly on the publisher, and can have negative ramifications for the “industry,” when publishers run press releases like this without any serious editing. You can’t allow your advertisers to make NONSENSE claims like this:
How Much heat can be Recouped?
Well, it is possible to design the system in such a way that you effectively reuse the generated heat. When connected to a heat storage system, every individual Azultec Cube will efficiently recoup up to 72% of the energy used. Such a technique then helps cut the system’s operating costs and ensure peak performance.Apart from that, expanding the Hard Drive space within the cube makes it suitable for either deploying for cloud storage or its regular use. Cloud storage will, however, help earn you a lot in revenue, mainly because all the data stored is first is encrypted before it is stored externally.
This is an interesting Ethereum address:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xda952fc2dc626a8195c3a5f68c2de9b89a04a473#tokentxns
It receives and then immediately sends equivalent, large amounts of stablecoins from Bitfinex to Binance. Use your imagination.
Even though the crypto market cap has shrunk, significantly, there are still some communities in the industry that appear to be steadily growing… I think it’s important to keep in mind the sustaining power of “Large Groups Of People With Specific Shared Beliefs And Incentives”:
