URGENT: Certain banks banned until further notice

Please help us stop the stolen bank account scammer and limit damage to victims of stolen bank accounts!

If you have any Fiat trade currently open and the BTC buyer has an account age of less than 14 days, please open a dispute with cmd+o (or ctrl+o).

You can see the account age and also the onion address when you roll over the avatar icon or click on it.

We blocked all reported onion addresses and bank accounts but it seems he continued with fresh accounts, and we needed to extend the ban to avoid the scammer from continuing.

If you had any SEPA trade in the past 2 weeks with one of those onion addresses please PM @ManfredKarrer the trade details data (json) [1].

Known SEPA scammers onion address:

  • kqsaevkgu7apgzlt.onion:9999

NEW: Interac scammer’s onion addresses:
oid3pbzavhqoqexf.onion:9999
xqcpwnidrrgmrd2h.onion:9999
7sa5qyxxnrv2rujg.onion:9999

Suspicious onion addresses:

  • jsumctnyhgynxmjg.onion:9999 (very likely a scammer, but not 100% confirmed yet)

  • ja6kkx6igvh3pl3r.onion:9999

  • yyf6oj4o2jglokbq.onion:9999

  • weacrbzsmvqx2hyk.onion:9999

  • uftr4ot6r2muassx.onion:9999

There might be false positives in the list above. If you don’t belong on this list, please get in touch so we can unblock you.

If you got contacted by the bank about a chargeback request, or had any unusual situations, please get in touch as well by PM to @ManfredKarrer. We will try to resolve the issue so that you and the victim do not experience any losses.

[1] You can see the trade details when clicking the trade ID

We blocked all reported bank accounts and onion addresses.

If anyone had trades with a high price tag (e.g. >3% over market price) Please open a dispute and don’t confirm receipt. The scammer often took offer or made offer with big distance to market price.

Would you please be a little bit more specific? I just did a SEPA payment an hour ago. Will this transaction be cancelled/reverted or will I still get my BTC from escrow once the seller confirms that he received the money?

Thank you.

No, as far as I can see only new trades are disabled. Open trades are unaffected. You can continue with your trade as you were.

Unfortunately not. Users which fall into the banned banks/regions cannot trade until we release the ban. User with new accounts , 14 days have to expect to end up in a dispute of they are the BTC buyers.

Fund are not at risk. If the trade fails because it was a banned user the funds stay in your wallet. There might be some UI mess with a pending trade. We will give advice how to deal with that soon. But for now our focus is on stopping the scammer. Sorry but ealing with Fiat is a mess…

1 Like

Ugh. Yet another example of fiat / banking payment methods being the weakest link in the Bisq chain, by a huge margin. Seems scammers will always find ways to exploit weaknesses in the traditional P2P banking system. Unless it’s cash exchanged face-to-face (which has its own risks) there’s no good way to mitigate these core weaknesses in systems outside of Bisq’s control.

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Seems scammers will always find ways to exploit weaknesses in the traditional P2P banking system.

Just want to make a small clarification. There is NO SUCH THING as “traditional P2P banking” - Regurgitated payment gateways that portend to be the next FINTECH unicorn are simply redressed dog and pony shows, smoke and mirror trickery.

Legacy payment networks never were and never will be P2P, they are more like Person to first gateway clearinghouse, to second gateway clearinghouse, to data aggregator, to account correlation, to third gateway clearinghouse, maybe to a person but entirely reversible easily stopped, blocked and/or stolen.

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Exactly. They’re marketed as “person to person” but there are so many trusted intermediaries in between that it’s laughable to call it P2P. That’s the whole reason Bitcoin was created - to eliminate this crap.

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So far only onion address kqsaevkgu7apgzlt is identified 100% as scammer. The others might be false positives.

If your onion address is one of those please get in touch so we can clearify and remove you from the ban list.

  • ja6kkx6igvh3pl3r.onion:9999,
  • yyf6oj4o2jglokbq.onion:9999,
  • weacrbzsmvqx2hyk.onion:9999,
  • oid3pbzavhqoqexf.onion:9999

You see you own onion address at settings/network.

2 Likes

Big KUDOS and THANKS for the arbitrators and Manfred, i already have the btc locked because of teh scammer with the onion address kqsaevkgu7apgzlt.onion:9999 back in my wallet!!

Bisq Rocks!!! <3

2 Likes

Im not able to take any offer since this scamming thing.
my address is cvm75lb3u46elysa.onion:9999 .

Do you have any errors popping up or buttons are grayed out or something?

I would like the ability to automatically block accounts younger than 30 days. Can this be done or even be made configurable?

Also would it be possible to have new accounts wait an additional 15 - 30 days for the BTC to be released. You should check the time between the trades and then the chargebacks. Once they have passed the 30 days then they can trade like regular users. He will keep creating new accounts and continue with chargebacks unless it is made very painful and slow for him to use stolen bank accounts.

At the final step when I press Take Offer, its thinking for 2min then I get an error .

Is your Internet connection good? Try restarting your PC, it might help.

A quick update:
Seems the scammer has been stopped, no new cases has been detected so far. We still act extra careful and leave the bans on some banks/regions active until we have a new release deployed with important security improvements (see https://github.com/bisq-network/proposals/issues/77, https://github.com/bisq-network/proposals/issues/78). Everybody should update to that relase as soon as possible to close the gap for such scammers.
Total reported damage so far: about 10 000 EUR Some have sent back the received funds already but with bank holidays it was a bit more delayed. Some users got issues with their bank (blocked accounts).

Damn just though we have the scammer under control to read 1 minutes later about a scammer at Interac: https://bisq.community/t/scammer/7482

I need to block Interac as payment method until we have a new release out with further protection.

Anyone who receives a chargeback request please accept it and get in touch. If you have traded with one of those onion addresses please send all trade details by PM to me.

Interac scammer’s onion addresses:
oid3pbzavhqoqexf.onion:9999
xqcpwnidrrgmrd2h.onion:9999
7sa5qyxxnrv2rujg.onion:9999

I restarted PC, upgraded Bisq to 1.0.1 and tried with different connections: It works until I try to take an offer…
Did you blacklisted my address or something ?

I have the same timeout issue during taking offers.
It’s there since I updated to v1.0.1