The story I’m going to tell you just ended a few minutes ago, and I’m still under the shock of what just happened.

TL;DR: Beware spoofed e-mail address: admin@btc-e.com!

Context: BTC-E.com is one of the biggest Bitcoin exchange.

A few days ago someone added me on Facebook:

Looks like some fake account, I wonder what he wants…

Hmm, this sounds like some shady suff, but not sure yet. For reference this is the link for the video. So this is a software that double spends (so I thought, I only took a quick look to the video), ok, what do I have to do with it, I’m listening…

So he wants me to write a software that helps him scam people. But it gets even stupider, he thought the best platform to ask me is Facebook. Wtf was just he thinking?

So I tried to ignore him, but he kept messaging me:

Here I had an idea. Why not trick this scammer? So I created a reddit post to ask for ideas, with the title: Scamming the Scammer (yes, the post is deleted, only the title and the comments show up, will explain later), while I kept uploading his messages to imgur, he even tried to call me.

After the reddit post didn’t get much upvote, I was like “meh, don’t waste my time on it”, I blocked the user, deleted the messages and moved on with my life. So I thought.

Next day I got this email:

Interesting. At this point I had no reason to suspect anything.

Yet I still said something he had to avoid answering. The thing is, even is BTC-E one of the biggest Bitcoin exchange, we have absolutely no idea who are behind it. But at this time I only remembered a vague gossip about it, so I let it slip.

Funny, one more question to dodge.

Wait he just sent me the same video the other guy who “lost 300+btc”. What’s going on here? So I told him what I did:

I needed some time to put together the pieces, neverthless I deleted the “Scamming he Scammer” Reddit post, just to be sure.

I had a suspicion though: maybe BTC-E is trying to scam its customers? The story was vague, I didn’t really understand.

Where do you going with this?

At this point I watched the the video again more carefully. The guy simply shows a software, called “Bitcoin Faker” that promises you to send any amount of unconfrimed bitcoins. Which is of course a bullshit and here I try to explain to him.

Wait, what is just happening now? He want me to code this software, that makes absolutely no sense. So I said it’s too shady and he need to explain me exactly what’s going on, because I still didn’t understand.

Ok, this still doesn’t make sense, however I might can expose how shady BTC-E is, so I unblocked the rich arabic guy and tried to get some information from him.

This is just getting more and more confusing. I thought there is a communication barrier.

Not good enough.

This not making sense goes on for a while, I won’t bore you with that, rather I just tell you the resolution: I just explained him a few tricks how to make unconfirmed transaction confirmed, he did not give me any transaction id, despite asking him multiple times. Anyway he’s happy and promised me to send me some thank you coins. Note I did not have too much suspicion at this point. I was talking with the admin of BTC-E after

I was surprised this is how easy it was, I got back to talk to the BTC-E admin to answer the email.

Here I explained him, too how to make transactions confirmed. (Note he didn’t provided transaction ids for me either.)

Wow, that was easy.

I see, so you want to give me some reward for my help. Great. But wait, it’s not a new account, I registered like 3 years ago, though I didn’t use it since, and I also left like $1 on it, but that’s fine, with today’s Bitcoin fees you can say that’s “nothing”.

Oh, I got $5k for telling him the obvious? Well, similar things happened before, people can be very grateful in Bitcoin. Awesome!

Here we go…

Ok, I am willing to pay $400 for BTC-E VIP account, but I cannot find how to upgrade my account on the site. In fact not even google can find such a thing.

Yep, this is a scam, verified. I can send the $400 usd to the site, I won’t send it to Bitcoin address.

Ok, he starts talking like a classic scammer, no more doubt, he is scamming me and I shared this story in the interview:

Whatever I send him my address, of course he doesn’t pay. Shortly I got the email, too:

Here I had an idea. Why not scam the scammer?

I did not succeed scamming the scammer, when he realized I am not going to pay he sent me a last message as plan Z, that I think he is spamming everyone with:

The only last question remains: why didn’t google filtered properly out an the admin@btc-e.com, which fails the SPF validation?