Managing Director of Kraken for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Curtis Ting is a former FBI agent who has faced all kinds of criminals in his career. Despite his background, the head of the exchange was surprised by the extent of the damage caused by scammers within the cryptosphere and their extreme greed. Overwhelmed by the cruelty of their actions, Mr. Ting said that a place is surely reserved in hell for these bad actors in the industry.
Scammers who no longer hesitate to prey on the elderly
As retail investors continue to flock to the crypto markets, Mr. Ting wanted to warn them of the risks they are exposing themselves to by joining this space. In particular, he urged the elderly to be careful of scammers who no longer hesitate to target them in their various scams. « I am a former law enforcement officer myself, I also have two living grandparents. Frankly, there is a special place in hell reserved for scammers and fraudsters who try to rob the vulnerable and the elderly “, he said.
Mr Ting’s comments echo a fraud involving a former military man named Graeme Stagg. Aged 77, the latter lost almost all his savings in a cryptocurrency scam by sending funds to criminals through the Kraken platform. However, it has an identification system for transactions made by users of a certain age. In addition, when the exchange identifies these, it requires that the elderly write a note stating that the regulations are carried out according to their own will.
More than a million dollars taken from the victim
Despite the existence of such a feature on Kraken, Mr. Graeme confirmed the sending of more than $650,000 in cryptocurrencies to unknown wallets using the exchange’s services. The scammers managed to convince the victim to make other transfers, thus managing to extract more than a million dollars from him before disappearing into the wild. While it is true that young investors are also victims of scams within the cryptosphere, Mr. Ting suggested that the latter are less vulnerable to them than their elders.
The security policy put in place by Kraken to protect elderly people using its platform therefore seems insufficient in the face of the ingenuity of scammers. It is therefore important that these potential victims take the measure of the threat posed by these criminals who show no restraint when choosing their target.
Source : CryptoPotato
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Far from having cooled my ardor, an unsuccessful investment in 2017 on a cryptocurrency only increased my enthusiasm. I therefore resolved to study and understand the blockchain and its many uses and to relay information related to this ecosystem with my pen.
