If FIMFiction accounts got hacked by a Bitcoin scam · 10:27pm Jul 15th, 2020
To all of my followers,
You've all given me so much, and now I want to give something back. For the next thirty minutes, anyone who sends me $1000 or more in Bitcoin will prove themselves to be a complete idiot. Yes, I know there are people all over Twitter saying that if you send them $1000+ in Bitcoin, they'll send you back twice what you gave them. The accounts being made to say that were originally owned by some of the richest people in the world.
This is FIMFiction.
I don't even have a Bitcoin account.
Seriously: if you tried to send me Bitcoin under the belief that I would give you double the money back, then dear gawds, retire from the human race because you just came in last. They made Kanye West's account say it, and 237 idiots immediately proved they would have been stupid enough to vote for him. Besides, yet again: I don't have a Bitcoin account. I'm sure the Bitcoin you just sent went... somewhere, much in the same way that matter dropping into a black hole still technically exists. Sort of. On a subatomic level. I'm equally sure that whoever's running Bitcoin will never, ever return it to you, because if "double your money back" combined with "Bitcoin" didn't already set off your hackles, then did you know there's this seven-mile bridge down by Key West which you can have cheap?
So in summary: rich people do not send you back double whatever you give them. Any account claiming it will do so has been hacked, unless it's that of a politician and in that case, they're probably just fundraising. Poor people hack rich people, take from other poor people, and become richer. There is no money tree. There is no bill fairy. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And once again: I have no Bitcoin account. I don't even know how all of the conned set theirs up in five minutes or less.
No doubling.
No Santa Claus (in July).
No kidding.
Additionally, all received Ko-Fi tips are currently going towards a $600 payment for having someone sit in a vibrating chair in the hopes that the shaking will give her bladder muscles some exercise.
...it has just occurred to me that any medical procedure described on that level will make it sound like the paying party fell for a con.
Also that some version of a vibrating chair rents by the minute at the mall.
...hey, did you see that Pen Stroke is giving tripled donations back? But he's only taking gold! Time to raid Mom's jewelry drawer!
The stupidity of the human race will never cease to amaze me.
I literally was just on Twitter and saw this was going on.
ESS EM AICH AS THE COOL KIDS SAY
Days like this make me feel glad I don’t use any social medias.
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I only use Twitter, and that's mainly as a means of either venting or playing the occasional hashtag game. I'm banned from Facebook -- nothing I did: they refused to admit my mobile number existed, so goodbye game data saving placeholder account -- and none of the other sites appeal to me. There's nothing I could really do with them, and I'm nowhere near delusional enough to think I'm going to eventually wind up with a seven-digit follower account and the chance to host a VPN commercial.
Instagram is useless. Etsy is for active crafters. Facebook is a black hole of psychosis. Parler is Facebook without the ads. Twitter is for screaming and saying things which I think are so funny as to get up to three whole likes.
(On a good day, I manage two.)
a story comes to mind:
someone was thinking of investing in Bitcoin.
then he found a Bitcoin-making machine, less than one year old, being sold on Amazon for FIFTY DOLLARS.
need i say more?
Aw man, all I've got are these funny green pieces of paper with pictures of US Presidents.
Soupy Sales sounds like a pony name, come to think of it.
5309653
That it does. But we still have to explain this one for the people who haven't studied television history.
Soupy (yes, we know...) hosted shows for kids in the late 50s and early 60s, moving from media market to media market because there weren't really national broadcasts for that sort of thing, and becoming more popular meant moving to where there would be more people. He had a way with kids. They felt like he was talking to them as a friend, as someone they could trust. And so on January 1st of 1965, their Uncle Soupy was there, while their parents were still sleeping off alcohol and converting it into hangover.
New Year's Day. Soupy wasn't very happy about having to work it. And so he concluded that broadcast with a special message to his viewers.
He told them to tiptoe into the adult bedrooms, get into the wallets, find all those funny green pieces of paper with the pictures of dead presidents, stick them in an envelope, and mail them to him. Oh, and here's the address!
Soupy may have been under the impression that he was joking. The kids, however, trusted him.
So, several days later...
...okay, to be fair: Soupy claims a lot of it was Monopoly money. But there was enough of the real, and offering to pass it to charity didn't sit well with the parents whose initial donation had been involuntary. Screaming ensued, suspensions were inflicted, and all future requests to raid adult wallets and send in the contents were placed where they belonged: with the televangelists.
Soupy probably would have loved Bitcoin.
But don't expect to see any of it back.
Send me a slightly used Black Lotus and you'll get two mints! I just need to get a bag of Life Savers first.
5309633
The universe isn't infinite, so all that's left is human stupidity.
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To, well, marginally increase your faith in the collective intelligence of the human race, some of those "takers" are undoubtedly shill bids.
5309680
Brilliant.
Some days, all you can do is laugh.
By the way, send me all your bitcoin, and you'll LIVE FOREVER!*
*Terms & Conditions May apply
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I've seen four in person. They weren't the big daddy clean five-figure ones but they were definitely worth high three to four figures.
Imagine a trust fund kid that got into Magic. The BMW-driving popped collar Kyle. That was this kid.
And because he bought all his cards through this shop, he was allowed to get away with the most absolute flagrant breaking of rules in a state championship qualifying tournament.
I.e. actually using those lotuses. And proxying foreign language cards before the ruling was made to allow it, with no translations provided beyond "it does this trust me", and getting yelled at by the proctor for "harassing" him.
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5309699
I've seen... two, both at flea markets. And no, this wasn't someone selling their collection at pennies on the dollar: card collector tables. One of the specimens may have been a fake, because it didn't look quite right and there are people who make their living on your hope of writing the 'I never believed I would actually find...!' post. The other had been professionally graded and was kept under glass at a security level known as 'Try to grab the entire table and run.'
Don't ask me what that vendor was doing at a flea market. I guess they have to do something between professional shows.
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5309711
...I may have to write that slot machine story.
5309692
Oh damn. Now that's something I'd be willing to trade actual money for.
I remember there was a sidequest in megaman battle network 2 where that's literally what you do. give a rich guy 5000 bitcoin and he gives you twice back. shame that dosen't work irl now if you'll excuse me I'm expecting a callback from the Nigerian prince who wants to hide his fortune in my bank account.
5309650
I liked Tumblr. I used to go there for art and (very) short fiction.
Oh there ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
The money doubling scam? Really? People still fall for that?
Heh. We laugh, but this sounds awfully reminiscent of British colonialism, which was far more successful at swindling native leaders than it had any right to be.
"Hey there, give us your land for a couple of years, and we'll give it back to you twice as prosperous!"
Looks like the brothers have made a break from fiction and found reality much more Profitable
This happened several months ago.
With cryptocurrency Etherium and Elon Musk (it wasn't Elon Musk).
Same deal - we double what you send us.
It's hard to call it a scam, because it is so outrageously silly, yet people fall for it. Again.
People who actually do that just prove the human race is doomed. Either because they are an idiot or their parents let them use their credit card for whatever.
I'm disappointed Kanye dropped out of the running.
He's still a better choice than Yet Another Old Racist Out Of Touch With The Times.
...never understood the appeal of cryptocurrency, but hey, gotta make ends meet somehow.
It makes you wonder about the poor people who are ignorant enough or desperate enough to believe a scam like this. It's pretty rough out in the world these days and I can only imagine more people than ever are at their breaking point.
As a thought experiment, try reading the above again out loud, but change "people" to "ponies". Does it make the statement more meaningful, less, or unchanged?
Edit: typo correction
All scams work on the same basic point. They tell you that the universe is working in your favour. You have a chance to make something brilliant happen; you're lucky, you're in the right place at the right time, you just need to grease the wheels of probability with a small payment there's no time to THINK about it it's happening NOW of course it's really happening you KNOW you're special don't you well this is the PROOF!
Social media is much beloved by scammers because, instead of trying to convince one person at a time, you can throw out one message to be read by ten thousand people. And if only ten of them fall for it, that's still a hefty return!
Honestly, you'd probably save more if you bought a wand massager instead. Plus once your done with your "medical procedure", you have a wand massager, for other "medical procedures"!
It's a win-win scenario!
5310114
It can treat your hysteria!
Looking at the transaction history is absolutely fascinating. About 350 people sent them money for a total north of $100,000 USD. In the grand scheme of things, that's... really not that much. Given that the barrier to acquire BTC and send it on is fairly high and how blatantly obvious a scam it was, that's also more than I'd expect, really.
The most interesting bit is that the rumor floating around is that the access was via Twitter's API, and was a Twitter vulnerability rather than, say, weak passwords on the accounts themselves. Meaning these accounts were arbitrarily selected to post that message. Meaning they likely had access to *everyone's* accounts, including private messages and perhaps even location history.
350 people lost a collective $100,000, but that almost feels like a waste. Frankly, you could probably quietly sell the exploit for more. I'd be shocked if they didn't get something much more valuable out of it first.
5309731
I remember BN6 had a sidequest where a bunch of penguins escaped from a zoo you'd been to earlier in the game and you had to find them, among other places, in your bathroom. I'm 90% sure that they would not have bothered including a bathroom in your character's house if not for that sidequest.
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See, this is how far out of the loop I am...
When you asked for a used Black Lotus, my question was “Would you want an Elise or a Europa SE?”
5310142
A script kiddie who got an incredibly lucky break and then milked it immediately rather than risk it getting patched while trying to sell it is my guess.
5311655
According to Twitter it was simple social engineering of a few employees with broad access to account data. They did indeed snag location data, DMs and personal information of 45 accounts prior to their tweets.
Social engineering definitely could've been just some random nobody, but it's pretty much universally useful/effective so who knows. By the simple fact that there are presumably way more random nobodies than say, corporate or state actors you're probably right, though.
5312544
Considering who was hacked I think the DMs are worth far more than the bitcoin, and the bitcoin was used to misdirect. I mean, it’s bitcoin: you can’t launder it. The interesting thing is that NOBODY missed what happened. About the only way to be more conspicuous would be to engage in necrophilia on live television. There are multiple reasons it could have been done:
• Whoever did it now has enough information to potentially blackmail a former U.S. President, a presidential candidate, a bevy of billionaires, and assorted others, depending on just what they left lying around in their Twitter DMs. (Almost certainly not anything that would earth‐shattering, but perhaps enough to warrant a more substantial, harder‐to‐track payoff.)
• The number of enemies Twitter and Dorsey et. al. have is legion. In the process of doing this they obtained irrefutable proof that Jack Dorsey lied to Congress and made it a big enough spectacle that it should be impossible for it to be swept under the rug.
• Hell, the bitcoin angle could have all been incidental last‐minute opportunism and the real objective was what they did to Geert Wilders’ account. It’s not like Middle Eastern hackers haven’t wasted good exploits on trivial political shit‐flinging before.