Beware of the Instagram Bitcoin Scam of 2019

I felt compelled to write a blog about this one, because, well there is next to literally nothing about it on the web and there is a TON of people getting taken to the bank (quite literally) for non-traceable funds and scams.

Recently I had a run-in with one and luckily I have a bit of a background with Bitcoin and Blockchain and understand the inner workings/background with it.

How it occurred. I have my Instagram on private so there’s nothing special to add me by. The person that added me and was impersonating a model (not a well known one, I didn’t know their name and had never seen them before). This particular scammer appears to be targeting middle-aged men (as an FYI). The model was not verified, so the challenge in reporting them is, is the “model” has to report them directly this model’s name happens to be Zara Zentio and the faker’s name, behold aka “Stacey Connor”:

How did I find it was Stacey? I reverse image searched the above photo and wallah: zarazentio/182018756/

Now, onto the scam. What I was particularly interested in, is that the person “Stacey”, prior to me uncovering the scam, was into Bitcoin mining. I thought this particularly interesting for a “model” to be into. Now I am not saying a “model” type can’t be into mining bitcoins. It just seemed…interesting. about 5 years late and well…off. I typically auto-ignore these profiles, but I decided to give “her” the benefit of the doubt to see if she knew what she was talking about.

Well, within one conversation, I knew “she”, Stacy, was a fraud. I asked for pictures of “her” Antminers, to which she sent me pictures that she claimed she took herself, she sent me these:

A quick reverse image search turned these up (some of them dating back to March 2018):

Then, this person went on to create fake certificates that were very easy to look-up, such as the below one:

Onwards, this led me to try to report this individual “Stacy” to Zara directly. As you guessed, Zara I am sure gets millions of unsolicited messages and probably has a zillion fake accounts of herself out there, so adding another one to the bunch is nothing to her (no response). I learned quite quickly that Instagram won’t do anything unless you are the person being impersonated or unless the person is “verified”.

Taking matters into my own hands further, I tried to see where I could report them to (legally) and there’s not a whole lot out there (other than private investigators) and filling out forms on .gov sites. Additionally, I did find where I can look and see how much they’ve defrauded people via their BitWallet, shown below. It shows an outgoing dump, but to whom? Also, the amounts were far, far below the payouts mentioned (in small $100 amounts), which begs the question, is this some kind of chain fraud going on?

Check the Bitwallet on Blockchain.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed. The account was created well over a year ago. This may have been done to elude potential filters/bot ban waves set forth by Instagram. They started adding pictures slowly and adding people, allowing people the chance to report this account. Only over the past few months did they really start driving home the “Bitwallet” fraud.

“Stacey” gave me a landline-based out of New York. This threw my original thoughts out the door. A “landline” out of New York?

So, “Stacey” had over 400 people on her friends’ list. I did my best to start messaging as many people on the list I could, linking the model’s real profile and also eluding to the type of fraud, but, alas, Instagram limits the number of messages you can send, so I was only able to send out about 50ish alerts.

Now I did record myself and stream some of this. I’ll link here later.

The outcome?

I live-streamed myself getting them to “delete” their Instagram. However, I am not sure it lasted long but it did result in the scammer blocking me. I do wish the Zara would report the individual. View how it went down here:

Watch Avalloch – Taking down Instagram Scammer from Avalloch on www.twitch.tv