Scammed Bitcoin Gold Wallet Named ‘MyBTGWallet’ Stole $3M from Users

| Updated
by Bhushan Akolkar · 3 min read
Scammed Bitcoin Gold Wallet Named ‘MyBTGWallet’ Stole $3M from Users

An alleged Fraudulent Wallet appearing on the Bitcoin Wallet is said to have stolen $3.3 million worth of cryptocurrency holdings of users.

After being initialized through the second hard fork in the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin Gold (BTG) the second derivative of Bitcoin had to go through a bumpy ride initially with its website being a victim of DDoS attacks. The Bitcoin derivate is yet again in news for an alleged scam that is suspected to have stolen $3.3 million from Bitcoin users. The theft is said to have been done by the operators of mybtgwallet.com while falsely asking users to claim the bitcoin gold and traping them in a malicious scheme.

The scheme asked users to submit their private keys as a requirement to generate bitcoin gold wallets. All the users who agreed to this proposal soon became victims of the fraud as all the cryptocurrency holdings in their wallet were sent to a different address. The development team has said that they are investigating the matter and are working with different security experts.

The BTG team explained “When we receive verifiable reports that a website or app is a problem, we removed it from our site. Preliminary investigations indicated that at least some of the claims of theft by the mybtgwallet site are reliable — Like all third-party sites, that site was not in our control, but we immediately removed it from our pages and the team is working with security experts to get to the bottom of this issue — It appears the mybtgwallet online wallet site was modified by unknown parties long after it was originally published.”

In addition to this, Bitcoin Gold has been through an interesting recovery in the past week. Last week, Satoshi Labs – a cryptocurrency hardware wallet manufacturer and the maker of Trezor, announced that Trezor will integrate BTG into its wallet. Following this news, there has been a fresh cash flow and increase in market liquidity as the BTG prices have increased by 100% from $150 to above $300. According to CoinMarketCap, BTG is currently trading at $279.47.

This sudden and huge surge in the price of BTG is said to be coming in the wake of the announcement by Satoshi Labs that Trezor’s beta wallet will allow its customer to retrieve BTG coins. A step-by-step process to claim BTG is listed in a blog post by Satoshi Labs. Users are requested to upgrade their firmware to 1.6.0 and to use the company’s beta wallet. The company explained: “For the time being, your Bitcoin Gold wallet will only be accessible from the Trezor beta Wallet. Bitcoin Gold is not Bitcoin — It merely uses bitcoin’s history similarly to the case of Bitcoin Cash — This process will not affect your Bitcoin wallet at all.”

Just after Bitcoin Gold went live on November 12 earlier this month, there are many cryptocurrency wallet-players who have extended support for BTG after realizing that there is a lot of community interest for the latest Bitcoin derivative. One such cryptocurrency mobile wallet ‘Freewallet’ has launched its first dedicated wallet for BTG. The Android version of the wallet is already available on Google Play Store where the iOS version on AppStore is awaiting approval and is expected to launch next week.

Freewallet co-founder, Alvin Hagg, while announcing this on his website, stated: “That’s the second Bitcoin chain split we’ve supported. And Freewallet managed to provide uninterrupted operations during both of them! When a new cryptocurrency is born and a new network is launched, it means there’s a great opportunity for our users to get free coins and instant profits. And Freewallet’s mission is to make sure they are happy because that’s what makes us happy, too.”

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