Bitcoin Foundation issues warning about scam sites

The Bitcoin Foundation released a warning on its blog Monday about a fraud being perpetrated upon innocent Bitcoin users.

The foundation said its website is being cloned and spoofed at Web addresses and domains that have nothing at all to do with the organization. The offending sites that the Bitcoin Foundation said it knew about currently include bitcompensation.com and bitsecuretransfer.com.

The blog post includes a screenshot of a webpage purporting to be from the Bitcoin Foundation. The fraudulent page reads, “Since the price of the bitcoin went down a lot, members of the bitcoin community have lost too much. To decrease these loss [sic] and to sustain our coin, we, The Bitcoin Foundation together with Blockchain, are going to offer to each of our members a random amount of coins.” The fake page asks users to enter their Bitcoin address in order to “redeem your gift.”

The Bitcoin Foundation, whose help desk has received a significant uptick in complaints recently regarding fraudulent activities, is urging people who are contacted and directed to a webpage that looks like the screenshot to close their Web browser “as you are about to be scammed out of your Bitcoins.”

The foundation’s web team said in the blog post that they are taking measures available to them to help remove these fraudulent sites from the Internet. While the team is aware of just those two aforementioned websites, they continue to monitor any additional scam sites. The Bitcoin Foundation is asking people who come across anything that resembles the screenshot, or something similar that might not be in English, to forward the web address to [email protected] and write “SCAM SITE” in the subject line.

Image courtesy of Bitcoin Foundation