$150,000 Worth Bitcoin Trouble in International Scam

$150,000 Bitcoin Trouble

A man in the city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin reportedly lost more than $150,000 after attempting to exchange digital bitcoins for the physical form of the currency to a British man.

Desiring to secure the profits he had made investing in bitcoin, Jamie Russell, a 34-year old software engineer, began to look into ways of achieving that. He had first invested in bitcoin back in August 2012 when the currency was still in its early stages. The price of each coin at that time was $5 per coin. Bitcoin since then has seen a rise in value of more than $800 per coin.

Russell found a man by the name of David Williamson residing in the United Kingdom on bitcointalk.org who agreed to provide him with the physical form of the digital currency. Russell agreed to send him 201.7 digital bitcoins to Williamson in exchange for 190 physical bitcoins.

The men remained in contact for more than a year. Russell transferred over $150,000 worth of bitcoins to the online wallet of Williamson in hopes of getting it back in a different form. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case and Russell never received his physical bitcoins from Williamson who was nowhere to be heard of.

…$150,000 Donated To Charity

Interestingly enough, in a separate case, there’s a similarity in the amount of Bitcoin transferred to a charity by a proud anonymous scam artist.

Dmitry Murashchik, who goes by the name Rassah, is one of the runners of Bitcoin 100. He has recently acknowledged to having accepted a large amount of anonymous donations for his charity organization. He stated to having suspected that the donations came from stolen means at the time. But, because exchanges done through bitcoin are typically anonymous, he claims that he had no choice except to agree to take the money.

Dmitry Murashchik stated,

“We received a sizable donation of about 180BTC at around the same time as a few exchanges were hacked and robbed,” Rassah said in an email. “I suspect the money was stolen. Since there was nothing I could do to figure out where the money came from, we ended up keeping it.”

The anonymous donor gave Rassah’s organization 180 bitcoins in January of 2013. With the recent rise in the bitcoin value, the money then worth $2,600 is now worth about $150,000.

Anonymous scam artist decided to leave a note stating proudly,

“Yes, I’m fraudster [sic] and I make money by scamming idiots around the world […] so I have decided to share some of my money with you, losers.”

Click for featured image.