When you call us a number that we do not know, the most common is usually to look for it on the Internet to see if someone has reported it for being telephone harassment, spam or scam attempts. Unfortunately, when we make a transaction in bitcoins, it is difficult to know if the person who is going to receive it has used that account in the past to perform scams. Therefore, BitcoinAbuse will help you avoid losing your money.
BitcoinAbuse works just as the name implies. If you have had a negative experience when making transactions with a specific bitcoin address, you just have to report it on the web . Currently, as detailed, they receive more than 3,200 reports per month, with figures that are increasing progressively as the web is known.
BitcoinAbuse, or how to know if they have cheated with a bitcoin address
To consult the addresses we have two options: write an address and look for it, or give it the latest complaints. If we go to the latter, we can see the ones that have been reported around the last day, in addition to being able to consult the pages that exist.
If we click on one of the addresses, we can see how many complaints that address has, the date of the last complaint, how many bitcoin it has received, and how many transactions it has received.
At the bottom we can see the complaints, where we see the date, the type of abuse, the name, email, IP or any identifying information of the abuser, and the type of scam.
Thus, some of the addresses that we can find may appear in fake emails that claim to have intimate images of us and that threaten us to send them to our contacts if we do not pay, as well as addresses used in malware such as ransomware . In fact, the vast majority of reports are related to these two routes of use.
It is also possible to monitor specific addresses, where we will receive an alert when there are coins that move from registered addresses. In this way, we can know if someone is using it to buy or sell bitcoins.
However, this system is easy to jump for whoever wants to cheat us, since you just have to create a new wallet from which to carry out malicious activity. Despite this, BitcoinAbuse offers more information about someone who has done scams recently, and it is also a great help for cybersecurity researchers who can associate scams faster through the bitcoin address, where they can find emails , languages used in emails, types of scam, etc. That can help them create a profile of the attacker that allows them to associate it with other attacks or so that the authorities can identify it more easily.
There are users who criticize this type of websites, since as with blockchain transactions, once a report has been sent, it cannot be deleted. This is positive because scammers will see their addresses there forever, but there will be other users who have not been victims of trolleys or false reports. At the moment it seems that users are taking it seriously, since for example they have not registered any complaint to the donation address of the web.
