Cities in China will soon begin testing a new Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. Scammers are now taking advantage of this fact by impersonating “CBDC test” groups. According to Tencent QQ, criminals are promoting a scam that asks potential victims to open a new debit card. Victims are told they will receive a “significant amount of money” after an initial investment, generally starting around 10,000 yuan ($1430 USD). Each victim is promised that their investment will grow to 70,000 yuan ($10,023) within an undisclosed period. This scam seems to be appearing most frequently in the cities where CBDC tests …

Coming every Sunday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week Elon Musk, Kanye West and Bill Gates’ Twitter accounts hacked by Bitcoin thief This week, Twitter and Bitcoin suffered a PR disaster. In a coordinated, ambitious attack, about 130 high-profile accounts were hijacked. Top celebrities, entrepreneurs, politicians, businesses and crypto exchanges were affected. Many posted similar tweets that promised followers that Bitcoin payments sent to …

Two alleged criminals, one suspected of stealing thousands of Bitcoin and the other a money launderer with connections to Hezbollah, were extradited from Cyprus, according to the Department of Justice or DOJ. One of the suspects is wanted in Georgia and Arizona for cyber intrusion and extortion and the other is wanted in Florida for money-laundering in support of Hezbollah. Joshua Polloso Epifaniou, a Cypriot national, is accused of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit computer fraud and identity theft and extortion. The DOJ said Epifaniou and conspirators stole personal information from an online game publisher …

Murphy’s law states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It always happens with centralized services. A year ago, we saw how half a million Facebook accounts were leaked online, exposing personal data. We will see it many times more with other services. The recent Twitter hack underscores this once again. The accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, among others, were hacked to push a fraudulent offer with Bitcoin (BTC). Writing for the BBC, cybersecurity commentator Joe Tidy opined: “The fact that so many different users have …

Over the last several months, a number of people claiming to be Cointelegraph staff have paraded around LinkedIn and Telegram, as well as through email. These efforts often attempt to lure unsuspecting victims into sending payments in exchange for stories written about them or their companies and posted on Cointelegraph. Through work with blockchain analytics and Anti-Money Laundering company Coinfirm, Cointelegraph tracked some of this activity, shedding light on the situation. “Scammers are relatively effectively using the identities of trusted or influential people such as journalists in various ways to scam crypto holders out of funds," Coinfirm CMO and co-founder, …

European Bitcoin (BTC) mining firm Northern Data has seen its stock fall 40% in days amid claims that it committed fraud. Data from Bloomberg showed the company’s NB2 stock trading at under €47 ($53.70) at the end of July 17, down from €79 ($90.30) on Monday. Northern Data: “We’re as transparent as it gets” Northern Data, the product of a 2019 merger between U.S. company Whinstone and Northern Bitcoin, claimed to offer High Performance Computing/Artificial Intelligence (HPC/AI) solutions. While touting the scale of its computing capacity to investors and analysts, including well-known German bank researchers, one critic in particular argued …

VeChain is clearly going up in the crypto world, as it is the latest target of the classic fake livestream airdrop on YouTube. The livestream, promising to give away half a billion VET tokens, has 38,000 viewers at time of writing. Double your money It’s a time-honored scam, supposedly originating from the early days of the Runescape online video game. You give me one token, I give you two tokens back. Double your money. Simple. Except for the fact that you never get the two tokens back. The YouTube version involves either hijacking or setting up a fake channel, and …

British journalist and TV personality, Piers Morgan, made his “big announcement” on Twitter on July 16 — but despite social media rumors about a potential Bitcoin endorsement it wasn’t crypto-related Instead Morgan said he’ll be launching a book related to a “liberal war” and COVID-19 called Wake Up. He’d earlier addressed the rumours he’d start providing Bitcoin advice (BTC) in the following tweet: UPDATE: No, I’m not Ghislaine Maxwell’s secret husband, nor am I transitioning, providing Bitcoin advice, quitting GMB, going vegan or replacing Jofra Archer in the Test match. All will be revealed at high noon. — Piers Morgan …

A report authored by Zeus Capital has asserted that the firm is building into a Chainlink (LINK) short position with a target of 99% gains, describing the top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap as “crypto’s Wirecard.” However, the firm behind the report, Zeus-Capital.com, appears to have registered its website just seven months ago, while its Twitter account has been suspended for violations of the platform's terms of use. With the report offering no citations and featuring zero working links, many analysts believe that it was authored maliciously. Suspicious report predicts Chainlink price decimation The purported asset management and research firm claims …

Per a July 15 complaint from two former investors who have been unsuccessful in getting their money back, Idaho-based Crypto Traders Management advertised an investment strategy that constituted an unregistered security, while actually locking up user funds. Plaintiffs are asking for the return of nearly $750,000 as well punitive damages of upwards of another half-million dollars. Consistent updates from CTM kept investors coming back The complaint claims that plaintiff David Powell sent a series of investments to Crypto Traders Management starting near the end of 2018. Despite the subsequent collapse of the altcoin market on which CTM’s professed trading strategy …

The Twitter hackers who compromised more than a dozen celebrity accounts on Wednesday appear to be consolidating their funds to an address that had earlier sent money to BitPay and Coinbase. According to research from Whitestream, a blockchain analytics company, three transactions originating from the “1Ai5” address lead to wallets associated with Coinbase and BitPay, both of which provide merchant solutions. The legacy address was the first to be offered by the hackers, who later switched to a Bech32 address when targeting non-crypto accounts. However, the original address is now the consolidation point of all the proceeds gotten through the …

Presidential candidate Joe Biden fell victim to the criminal enterprise that earlier hacked Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Barack Obama, in addition to many well-known accounts in the crypto industry. Criminals are breaking into Twitter accounts with many followers and post messages asking for or endorsing donations to a Bitcoin address. At the time of this writing, Joe Biden appears to have wrestled back control of his Twitter account from the hackers. Thus far, the criminals have received over 11.5 BTC. A simultaneous scam appears to be soliciting some accounts for donations in XRP as …