🚨 Someone Tried To Scam Me On RoboSats \ stacker news ~bitcoin

pull down to refresh

2841 sats \ 45 comments \ @Jon_Hodl 13 Apr bitcoin

A few days ago, I was trying to stack some private sats on RoboSats with an Amazon gift card.

As soon as someone took my offer, I filled out the details of my lightning invoice and entered the chat.

I sent several messages and got no response. The seller had the green light on their robot to indicate that they were online so it was a bit odd to me.

I thought maybe it was a Tor connectivity issue but I continued to send several more messages in hopes of making the trade.

After like 30 mins of no response, I opted for a collaborative cancel.

Only just a couple minutes after I initiated the collab cancel, the seller starts to respond in the chat saying “Hey sorry. I’m here and ready for the code when you are.”

I could instantly tell this was a scam.

They were obviously trying to get me to send the code after I had already initiated the collab cancel so that they could just cancel the transaction as soon as I sent the code.

Luckily, this wasn’t my first rodeo so I avoided losing any money.

I told le scammer that it’s too late and they would have to cancel and try again with a new order.

If you’re an RoboSats user, absolutely NEVER send any money after you have initiated a collaborative cancel.

Stay safe out there, plebs.

view all related items

204 sats \ 4 replies \ @siggy47 13 Apr

Lately I have frequently encountered a long delay after a seller accepts my gift card offer. Sometimes the seller is online, sometimes not. It's not unusual to wait 3 hours. Odd behavior. I never exercised a collaborative cancel, and eventually the transactions go through. Maybe it's the same guy waiting for someone using a gift card to initiate a cancel, or maybe it's innocent. I dont know.

114 sats \ 1 reply \ @Jon_Hodl OP 13 Apr

It could have been innocent but it seems too suspect to me to send the code after I initiated the cancel.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 13 Apr

I agree that you were right not to send the code at that point.

36 sats \ 1 reply \ @hgw39 14 Apr

One mitigation I have adopted for this is to only trade with sellers who are online. Not 100% fool proof but I started doing this a while ago and it seems to have helped.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 14 Apr

Lately I only make offers. I agree 100% if I'm a taker.

63 sats \ 3 replies \ @TheBTCManual 13 Apr

All robosats traders I've worked with have been a delight, because I make it very clear you F me on a deal, I take your bond and your wife, simple as!

11 sats \ 1 reply \ @hgw39 13 Apr

Are you on the premium version? I don't see the option to take the seller's wife on my interface? Would change the incentives a little so I'd like to find out more.

163 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 14 Apr

Lol Yes on premium there's a dropdown that says secure bond with wife and you upload a selfie of her and your marriage certificate which is then hashed! Robosats then scans said selfie and then gives her a rating out of 10 the hotter wife is the lower the Bitcoin portion of the bond becomes!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 13 Apr

😂

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @john_doe 20 Apr

After like 30 mins of no response, I opted for a collaborative cancel.

I understand the frustration and don't want to justify slow response times. But I feel somewhat targeted as I would estimate it happened 2/15 trades this month that I accepted an offer and couldn't reply right after due to personal reasons. 90% of the time I reply right away though. I would suggest waiting for at least 1h before doing a collaborative cancel and considering it is a scam. I never have used Amazon gift cards though and don't want to undermine your post, it is good to know that people may be trying to scam with it!

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 20 Apr

Totally fair and reasonable assessment.

It felt off to me and it was the second time it had happened to me.

I was literally sitting on my computer when the chime came through to let me know that my BUY order was being filled.

I instantly posted the details on my LN invoice and then entered the chat.

It was like maybe 30-40 seconds and since he was the TAKER and I was the MAKER, he had to be active to fill the order whereas me, as the MAKER, placed a buy order that sat idle for hours so it only makes sense for me to be idle when the order was filled.

To me, it seems very easy to respond to a couple texts just seconds after you deposit the sats or even just say “Yes. Please send the code”

Maybe I’m wrong but the order of events and their timing felt off.

I’ve been in bitcoin long enough and endured enough scams to know that a collab cancel felt like the right thing to do.

I’ll take more time before I collab cancel but if anyone ever asks me to send a payment after a collab cancel has been initiated, there’s a 100% chance I won’t send it.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 13 Apr

I'm not a frequent Robosats user. Why is it so important not to back out of the collaborative cancel?

76 sats \ 1 reply \ @Jon_Hodl OP 13 Apr

Once you initiate a collaborative cancel, you can’t undue it.

So, imagine Alice initiates a trade with Bob and then Alice decides to initiate a cancel when Bob is unresponsive.

Then after Alice initiates a cancel, Bob says “sorry about that. I’m here now. Send the code.”

If Alice sends the code, then Bob can just accept the cancellation instead of acting honestly and Alice loses her money and Bob successfully scams Alice.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 13 Apr

Got it. Thanks

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @j7hB75 13 Apr

Hmm. Seems like RoboSats should have a safeguard in place to prevent the user from sending the code after a collaborative cancel has been initiated?

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 13 Apr

Maybe a way to rescind a collaborative cancel would solve the problem but that may give birth to new ways to scam.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 14 Apr

People will always find a way to scam

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 14 Apr

💯

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Dkryptoenth 15 Apr

Did the scammer succeed in scamming you?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 15 Apr

No. Once I submit a collab cancel and a message, I close the chat.

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @Signal312 14 Apr

Have you reported this on the Telegram group or Simplex group?

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 15 Apr

No, I don’t think it’s really that important.

I highly doubt I am the first person to have ever experienced this before.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Signal312 15 Apr

I actually posted it in the Simplex chat. And the response from a coordinator was..."at this stage, there is no evidence of a scam"

And...thinking about it, what is, actually, the evidence that it was a scam? Because at the point where you where, the seller of the BTC would have already posted a bond of the entire btc amount, no?

So if you were to send the fiat (via gift card), then at the most, the seller could just say they never got it. And then it would go into a dispute status. They still wouldn't have their bitcoin.

Am I missing something?

34 sats \ 2 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 15 Apr

I make buy offer
Scammer takes my offer and we enter the chat.
I send multiple messages without response.
I request a collab cancel due to no response.
Seller then responds in chat AFTER I click collab cancel saying “Please send the code”.
If I send the code, the scammer only has to click “Collab Cancel” and then the order is canceled and we both receive our sats back.
He still has the Amazon code and I have nothing.

The crux of the scam is that they wait for me to initiate a collab cancel and then they try to get me to send the code after I have initiated a collab cancel.

Make sense?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 15 Apr

I see. So you're saying that as soon as BOTH parties have hit collab cancel, the btc seller would immediately get his bitcoin back (the entire sales amount) and you would receive your bitcoin back (but just the bond, your fiat is gone)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 15 Apr

🎯

reply on another page

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 15 Apr

There would be no dispute.

It would be a collaborative cancel.

As soon as the seller clicks the collab cancel button, we would both get our bonds back, and the scammer would have $100 to spend on Amazon with 0 risk.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 14 Apr

Can you un-initiate a collab cancel?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 15 Apr

Not that I am aware of.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @JesseJames 14 Apr

Sadly, its always the people, not really the technology.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Dkryptoenth 14 Apr

This comment has got nothing to do with being scammed on Robosats, but I strongly believe someone needs to be reminded that "Each morning we are born again and What we do today is what matters most."

A blissful day to you all, keep staying strong.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @d6c4895049 14 Apr

Honestly robosats is great, you can sell btc 1-3% above spot price and help someone get no-kyc sats it's a win-win all round

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Filiprogrammer 14 Apr

...and eventually get your fiat account frozen. (talking from experience)

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @Signal312 14 Apr

Tell us more?

102 sats \ 2 replies \ @Filiprogrammer 14 Apr

My Revolut account got frozen, after receiving 5 fiat payments within 24 hours by selling sats for a premium on Robosats and buying them back on Revolut X at the actual market price.

Now I can no longer receive anything into that account. If I try sending fiat to a friend, my transfer gets declined immediately. If I try to withdraw my sats, I get the following error message:

Sending crypto is temporarily blocked
You cannot send crypto to wallets or Revolut friends.
This may change in the future.

Basically, the account is completely frozen.

I contacted support, but only got AI bot replies saying my account is restricted and under review. When I asked about when I can expect to regain access, the bot said that an update might be available in 17 days. That was a week ago and I am still waiting...

Funny how Revolut encourages users to trade all kinds of shitcoins, but when it comes to complying with KYC regulations, they become extremely cautious.

In the past I did successfully withdraw sats from Revolut and it was an awful experience. Only on-chain supported, and I had to pick from a list which wallet software/hardware I was using. Even then, my withdrawal was flagged as "suspicious" and I had to answer a mountain of questions just to prove I wasn’t being scammed. After that they still gave me a 3 hour time-frame to let me cancel the withdrawal. 🤡

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 16 Apr

Chances are that one of those Fiat payments was from an account that was hacked, and so your account has officially received funds that are associated with some sort of fraud.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 14 Apr

Wow.

Thanks for the details.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Dkryptoenth 14 Apr

Scammers! That's just what they are good at, nonetheless robosats should do well to upgrade their security protocol to checkmate such unscrupulous occurrence.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @hgw39 13 Apr

I had a similar instance of this (not with a gift card though) last year on Robosats and it made me aware that you can potentially be scammed by a seller. In my instance I had sent the fiat but the seller claimed I hadn't so we opened a dispute. The coordinator adjudicated and ruled in my favour, as I had clear evidence of the fiat being sent and I got my sats. But it made me realize that if the coordinator and seller collaborate they could scam you, so we're really relying on the coordinator. Although you can't recognize a seller by their bot identity, you can identify them by their Wise or Revolut tag if you're using those payment methods. After this incident I was in another trade with the same coordinator and when I got to the send Fiat stage the Revolut tag was the same as the seller who tried to scam me previously so I cancelled the trade and forfeited my bond. Robosats is still me preferred P2P method (especially now as no one in my community wants to sell sats P2P right now for some reason!) but since this happened I limit the size of my buys and be mindful of who I am trading with (coordinators and sellers). It's a jungle out there :)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Satosora 13 Apr

Is it becoming a degen site? Where only scammers will belong? Rip robosats?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 13 Apr

Don’t think it’s a degen site. I think the incentives are sound but it still requires some vigilance.

In order for anything in life to succeed, there needs to be more good actors than bad actors so I will do what I can to contribute to the honest use of the platform.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @LibertasBR 13 Apr

Why through an Amazon gift card? Was it for privacy or did you just have one lying around?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl OP 13 Apr

It’s the easiest way I’ve found.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bitcoiner1 13 Apr

Thanks for sharing this!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @flat24 13 Apr

Thank you very much for sharing your experience ... These details are highly valuable to avoid those hungry scammers.

Good instinct, cowboy! 👏🤠