Has bitcointalk been hacked?steemCreated with Sketch.

in bitcoin •  7 years ago  (edited)

Update: the leak actually happened two years ago, so no news here ...

I just received the following email to the email address that I've registered on bitcointalk (I may have published this address one or two other places, except for that I've only used it on bitcointalk):

I sell an e-mail database of Bitcointalk forum users.
Quantity of unique e-mails: 543,690
63,000 users from parsing and
492,000 users from the dump purchased on DarkNet.
The database is not fake, you can check it by doing the following:

  1. Find any e-mail on any Bitcointalk page
  2. Tell me first three characters of that e-mail
  3. I send you all e-mails from my database that begin with these characters

The price of the database is 1 BTC.
This database can be used to involve new investors in ICO projects and find partners for any crypto-currency business.
If you are interested, do not hesitate to contact me.

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That is an obvious scam. You pay 1 btc for nothing. You won't get anything.

I'm not going to try, even if I thought the database would be worth 1 BTC for me or my business plans, it's very much against my principles - but still, even spammers may be honest sometimes, there is certainly a non-zero probability that I'd get the dump by paying for it, I even think it's likely. There are systems for escrow also (i.e. copay wallet).

I find it reasonable to believe the spammer actually has the dumps, and I see no reasons not to ship the "goods" after payment.