Definitely many of us have heard of sextortion, an online scam scheme already existing for at least a few years which usually targets victims of breached passwords. A monetary part of the scam consists of a claim to send bitcoin ransom in exchange for not sharing publicly some private photos or videos of you, which scammers claim they own (hint: they don’t).
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There is a certain scheme of crypto scam I have come across which is not a usual ‘bitcoin investment’ enticing you to put your money into some ‘binary trading’ establishment in a hope for sky high profits. This is a cloud mining offer which eventually does not seem like a straightforward scam for some, however it is still dangerous if you are not aware of some important details and general principles of securing your crypto wallet.
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The most illustrative part of crypto scam investigation is visualizing the flow of funds through transactions and addresses associated with a scammer’s wallet. This method allows us to reveal related addresses or their clusters and also to track funds to certain centralized exchanges where they can be potentially cashed out. Additionally, we can also include in the graph other entities related to scammer in order to create a full picture.
We will approach this task using two different investigation tools: Maltego CE and GraphSense. Both tools are available for free in non-commercial versions.
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