My MIM hell..... The Day The Fun Fell Out Of Cash Deposits
What is MIM? It's known by various acronyms, and it means Man In The Middle.
MIM is a type of scam which some clever idiot decided to attempt to use against me. I was quite lucky not to get caught out as it was only the local bitcoin feedback system that saved me from losing £2000.
So here's how it works,
The scammer makes a request with me at the same time they contact someone else and offer to sell them something, they then tell their buyer to deposit the payment into my account, Once the money has been deposited into my account I will send the scammer Bitcoin thinking that everything is fine and it's just another trade, however the scammers buyer will never recieve the goods they have paid the scammer for, and when they go to the police to get some much deserved justice, they only have my bank details as evidence, I dont know what happens to me after that but I'd assume I would have to re-imburse the scammed buyer and try to get my Bitcoin back from the scammer, which as we all know is nigh-on impossible.
So how did I avoid it?
I was fortunate that The LocalBitcoin Platform is very difficult to scam with, There were a few factors in the trade which raised my suspicion, firstly the scammers account was under 24hrs old, a big red flag. Secondly The scammer seemed very very keen to do the deal off the localbitcoins platform, and wanted the bitcoins released extremely quickly. Finally during the negotiations of the deal, an alert appeared above the users name stating that they had violated terms of service, Together all these factors are enough to alert a seller to be EXTRA vigilant, and usually it would spell the end of any negotiations for most traders. On this occasion I was too fast to hand over my bank details so the scammers buyer did actually deposit £2000 into my account, she had no clue what bitcoin was!
How did things end?
My situation got particularly complicated because the scammers buyer actually paid the money to me, at this point I needed to find the buyer and return their money, When I asked the scammer for ID they sent me the victims passport so luckily I had enough information to actually find the victim and contact her, the problem was that she was not home when I called but I was convinced at this point she had been scammed. I then had to be certain that whoever came forward claiming to be the victim was indeed the victim and not the scammer.
How can this be avoided in the future?
I'm not too sure it can be stopped fully, but I think a good way to protect yourself is to ask for the 'buyer' to send you a picture of the receipt used to deposit funds, and have this receipt say TO PURCHASE BITCOIN, surely no 'victim' will be silly enough to buy something and write something totally different on the receipt when requested to. In this situation personal ID is really no protection at all.
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