Colorado resident loses over $6,000 in Bitcoin after falling for a fake jury duty scam

Scams in cryptocurrencies continue to increase and take new forms. Possibly rule number one is to maintain a series of precautions to avoid going through this type of inconvenience, but is it enough?

One of the news that has come to light was about a resident of the state of Colorado who has been involved in a somewhat sophisticated maneuver. This time, what the scammers did was take on the role of officials and obtain as much information as possible during that call. According to the sheriff of Summit County, an agent will never notify about an arrest and offer a settlement through a transfer or use a Bitcoin payment.

Unfortunately, the victim has suffered a loss of over $6,000 in Bitcoin, added to the stress involved in trying to negotiate with the perpetrators who were threatening to arrest him for failing to appear for jury duty. Fortunately, the officers were able to intervene in the matter, preventing the victim from transferring an additional $4,000.

Similar scams have also happened to other people. In Denver, a woman has lost an estimated $5,000 in Bitcoin after being contacted by fake police officers who notified her that she had missed jury duty, thinking that it could be possible that she had not paid attention to that notification, so she ended up following the instructions that the criminals were giving her over the phone to have that court order removed in exchange for a payment using a Bitcoin ATM.

In this case, the woman contacted the Denver police, who confirmed that she was a victim of a scam. What is truly incomprehensible is that the bank has been notified of this fraudulent operation, and yet officers say there is not a high likelihood of recovering that money. In my opinion, there should be swift mechanisms that not only take precautions on these operations but also contain them in a timely manner.

Scammers operate through social engineering and identity theft. They also use number spoofing. In this way, calls appear to be completely authentic, so the victim does not suspect immediately, and when they do, it is already too late.

In September, there was a case in which Keystone Bank staff intervened in a cryptocurrency transfer worth $8,000. The operation was the same, through phone calls that attempt to accurately reproduce the way law enforcement agencies operate, so this appears to be the root of all incidents, or at least a similarity in all cases that have occurred.

Statistical data in Colorado indicate that in 2023 alone, more than 1,300 cases have been documented with losses of up to $81 million.

Possibly scammers are interested in cryptocurrencies due to the irreversibility property that blockchain chains have when making a transaction, as well as an extra difficulty in tracking funds.

Recently, researchers at Stanford University have presented an article discussing the development of work that could allow Ethereum transactions to be reversible. With this in mind, it means that immutable property could change, at least considering a specific protocol, making a transaction frozen for an estimated time before it eventually becomes irreversible.

The fact is that if statistics are on the rise, necessary measures must be taken to address this issue as accurately as possible. There are private initiatives trying to counteract the effects on victims of these scams, but perhaps it is not enough, and the search for a solution should be aimed at a larger scale.