Hello Sir,
1st of all, I’m sorry to hear this happened. Let us (the community) Help you! I can’t exactly send you $1100 dollars, but I can be damn sure to spread your bitcoin address to every exchange, every, mining pool, every potential bitcoin news source I can find, so WE CAN TRACK AND FIND YOUR COINS! At this point, we NEED your BTC address to see where the coins are so that we can have the parties involved (bitstamp, coinbase, circle, blockchain.info) monitoring their own logs for activity related to your coins. I know its a small drop in the bucket of stolen coins, but at least, we as a community DO have the tools to track and look for activity related to your money, its not like paper cash, its digital!
Background:
Originally uncovered while perusing reddit, I found an article about a man in his late 20s who, through craigslist, decided to sell someone bitcoin, for cash. According to the story, this man reached the destination, where a person (perhaps 19 years old or so) had persuaded our victim to finalize the transaction in the car (a silver honda accord). At that point, the victim went to the car and was held up by another man, threatened at gunpoint, and was forced to transfer roughly $1100 USD worth of bitcoin (about 4.76 BTC at the time of the robbery) in addition to confiscating his phone immediately afterwards.
If the victim is reading this, please contact me ASAP so we can release the related public address and can, as a community track your coins down.
Lessons to be learned:
- Only complete transactions in or next to an establishment such as a cafe or a restaurant.
- Only do transactions during banking hours or in well lit locations with video cameras.
- Don’t make person to person trades for Cash – Use a service such as Circle/Coinbase/Coinsetter.
- In a last ditch effort (if you have no friends who casually buy/sell bitcoin), consider using a BTM to sell small-ish amounts to hold you over.
