Friend request? Beware, it could be a bitcoin scam

Cyber­crime police say that there’s a new bit­coin (BTC) scam going viral that preys on peo­ple using Insta­gram and oth­er social media plat­forms.

A user gets a friend request from a known friend which would be a fake account. Once the user accept­ed the request, cyber­crooks would start a con­ver­sa­tion say­ing they have made prof­its through bit­coin trad­ing. If the user rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed, he/she would be asked to start invest­ing mon­ey, and in no time, all the BTCs would be with­drawn from the user’s wallet. 

A 26-year-old woman techie is the lat­est vic­tim. On July 29, the techie, a res­i­dent of Elec­tron­ics City received a friend request from an old friend which she did not know was a fake account. The cyber­crook start­ed to talk to her, say­ing if she was inter­est­ed, she could give it a try by start­ing to invest small amounts.

She was then tutored on how to use the Binance App and asked to invest Rs 15,000 for which, the promised returns through Bit­coins was worth Rs 1.8 lakh which would be trans­ferred to her online wal­let. After invest­ing Rs 15,000, the vic­tim also got an alert via Binance app that her Bit­coin account was cred­it­ed with Rs 1.8 lakh worth of BTCs, but to get it con­vert­ed and cred­it­ed into her bank account, she had to pay up anoth­er Rs 25,000 which she did, but it did not happen.

When the vic­tim checked with the crim­i­nal, she was asked to deposit mon­ey again. By then, the vic­tim sus­pect­ed foul play. She then approached with the South­east CEN police sta­tion and filed a complaint.

Based on her com­plaint, the cops have reg­is­tered an FIR book­ing the unknown accused under sec­tions of 66‑C and 66‑D of the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy Act.

“As the amount is invest­ed direct­ly through these apps which have encrypt­ed accounts, it is very dif­fi­cult to trace the encrypt­ed account to which it is siphoned and freez­ing those bank accounts is a chal­lenge for inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cials,” a senior police offi­cer from South­east CEN police sta­tion said.