Every time you hear able to noble causes of financial freedom afforded by Bitcoin, it's good to remember the very 21st century parable of Sebastian. The man who, having invested his family's future in cryptocurrency to get rich quick on the fossil fuel powered gold rush, was blinded by the promise of doubling his riches by someone pretending to be a egomaniac billionaire on social media.

> It is too easy to steal Bitcoin. All the exchange platform websites should know who their customers are and know if a particular wallet address is being used by thieves.

Where are the centralised security processes and authorities to protect my speculative investment when I need them?

I'm not really sure this guy ever actually lost £400k. The 10 BTC are from when he bought in 2017 (for £40k and he'd cashed out that original investment already) and I don't see any plausible reason someone like this was actually planning to cash out at the current price. It's not like the £400k was money he had earned and plowed into BTC.

In many ways this is a facet of being an investor in BTC and should be a message to any BTC investor sitting on top of what has become an astronomical sum- take a look at your portfolio. Take a look at all the risks of being invested in a single product like BTC (scam risk, risk of hack, risk of adverse regulations, extreme volatilty, perfect correlation of your entire investment portfolio), take a look at how much of your portfolio is invested in that single asset, and decide whether you should rebalance. Because no offence, if your savings are 90% BTC, you're not investing, you're gambling on BTC.

Is the image in the article real?

The image shows a real Elon Musk tweet with a reply by another Blue-Checked Twitter user @joshymcb (Josh McBride), except he changed his display name to Elon Musk (with Unicode variations). His reply had the link to the Bitcoin scam.

If Josh McBride really did that (and wasn’t hacked), how does he still have his Twitter blue check? I was under the impression that Twitter came down hard on people intentionally misleading others by abusing their blue check.

Ie, if have your blue check, you cannot pretend to be someone else.

Update - Josh says his account was hacked : https://twitter.com/joshymcb/status/1371660418444316673?s=21

Somehow crypto currencies have this strange effect on people who should know better: they see some random claim that sounds impossible and directly invest ridiculous amount of money they would _never_ spend that easily in a different context. I don't get what makes people trust such things but there is something deep at play here, somehow the FOMO makes people take crazy level of risks.

If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

I have sympathy as this man lost a lot of money and it will have a lasting impact on his life. But the scammer took advantage of his greed, so I hope he learnt a lesson. Only greed could make you believe someone when they suggest you let them hold your 400k for a few minutes and they'll send you back 800k, without appearing to gain anything from you doing so.

I see theses posted all the time. Are people naïve enough to think that their favorite celebrity just sits on social media giving out $1000 to everyone that likes their post?

As the saying (and the song) goes: You can't con an honest John. The mark thought he was the one taking advantage of Elon Musk and his looney marketing scheme, that he would be getting something for nothing. This opportunity was obviously so good it couldn't possibly last, so he'd better hurry take it, or the sucker Musk would wise up.

I can't help notice that they describe a website that "looked professional", with an image that looks very similar to this array of sites:

https://imgur.com/a/c9S2jRp