Victim Location 90210
Type of a scam CryptoCurrency
I saw an ad in my Facebook news feed for a ‘news’ story about the Spanish government investing in a bitcoin start-up. I work in this space and am based in Spain, so I clicked through to read the piece. It gradually became evident that the news website I was on was a phony one, albeit aggregating genuine news stories from Reuters, peppered with fake editorial articles at various points throughout promoting this bitcoin start-up – ‘The Bitcoin Code’. It promises that anyone can make large sums of money in a few hours, but is positioned as being a journalist who was testing the site. A quick bit of googling revealed that The Bitcoin Code is a known scam. I have reported the ad as a scam to facebook, but this website was one of the more sophisticated efforts I have seen and I can imagine that many people could be taken in. I imagine that they tailor the editorial to be locally relevant to wherever the user is based.