Good evening,
Last week, user Rizel Diana (Coconut Kitty), sent 63,617,230 satoshis, roughly 186 USD at the time of writing, from Memo.cash to a private wallet. A cursory glance would suggest the transfer was innocent enough. Thousands of transactions occur on Memo daily. I had no part in that exchange or anything leading up to it and, technically speaking, it's none of my business. Why should I care? Why should you? It wasn't my money; in all likelihood, it wasn't yours either. My rationale is twofold: Firstly, we’re wading neck deep through a global pandemic while fighting to survive an economic downturn that cares naught for shelter, starvation or personal safety. Bad actors are leveraging the tough times, working every angle to scam money from bleeding hearts, the skeptical tipper and everyone in between. Charity for life-saving medicine, food, replacement electronics and unpaid bills shouldn't be taken advantage of, ever; second, utilizing a knack for detecting early, tell-tale signs of greed and self-service, I intend to offer screenshots paired with theoretical framework for identifying and curtailing potential scams in the making: Red flags that seem obvious to the trained eye, warning signs that go unnoticed by the novice user and recurring pitfalls for veterans in our space that couldn’t be bothered to look. My hope is that you’ll use the material to make informed decisions, perhaps rethinking some of your own donations and tipping habits before throwing valuable sats at another scammer instead of someone that truly needs them. Kindly review the screenshots and messages. See what I see, try to learn something from them:
1. A screenshot of our resident swindler, the person responsible for this racket.
2. The ruse starts to unfold with a new image depicting a separate individual, she clearly isn’t Diana. Looking back at post history for pictures of another person in the profile can be suspect.
3. A memo documenting a birthday for 2020, 189 days ago, (193 today). Birthday announcements are often accompanied by higher than average tips, something a scammer will try to capitalize on.
4. A subsequent memo showing Diana's 19th birthday, this would have put us on august 2nd, (apparently she celebrates her birthday twice a year, see screenshot #3)
5. Taken moments after the sell order resulting in the large, aformentioned transfer of sats, a memo inferring Diana has limited experience transacting in SLP using Memo’s buy/sell functionality. Scammers will feign unfamiliarity with the interface, using similar phrases like “I’m new” in an initial post, thereby making multiple profiles harder to detect.
6. A memo, only days removed from the creation of the handle, showing a Sour sell order, curious that she’d share contemporary naiveté after making good use of the function 200+ days prior to, perhaps she forgot how. (Note the inconsistencies in screenshot #5)
7. A memo providing documentary proof of the large transfer on 8/14.
“Be excellent to one another” (Borrowed from a protestor sign during the Occupy movement)
-SM-
😉