The Bitcoin Foundation has issued a warning against fake sites attempting to scam users out of their hard earned cryptocurrency. Several websites purporting to be the Bitcoin Foundation have been preying on users concerned with the plummeting price of Bitcoin.
Users are being contacted and directed to a website that looks identical to the official Bitcoin Foundation page, except that it claims to be giving away a random amount of Bitcoin to each person who provides a Bitcoin address. The thing is that a Bitcoin address is not enough to steal anything as most of the information is meant to be passed around publicly. Nobody is quite sure what the next step is in the scam, but people have been losing their login credentials to the scammers.
The Foundation has warned Bitcoin owners to close their browsers if they are directed to a website that resembles the one it shared in the announcement. It says that two known scam domains are bitcompensation.com and bitsecuretransfer.com, although there are apparently more in existence; possibly all registered by the same scammer.
Bitcoin has not been the most stable of currencies and has dropped tremendously since hitting an all time high of US$1,147 per 1 BTC in January. It has currently dropped to the the US$375 mark, but that has been far from stable. In any case, the standard procedure for avoiding banking scams should be employed in these kinds of situations. Bitcoin is being treated as a real currency by the Bitcoin Foundation, and it will not be giving it out for no reason.
[Source: Bitcoin Foundation; via ZDnet]
