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“Daddy, but where’s Donono?”, which of course was the brother of the magical sparkly unicorn, Donini who was flying around the meadow in my daughter’s bedtime story throwing sparkly rainbows around and singing “I’m a sparkly-rainbow unicorn, all daaayy long!” to the tune of “I’ve been working on the railroad”.
At that moment, only a few days ago, I reflected on the whirlwind that was 2018 and why I work so hard on Verus Coin, not for lambos or to be a bank’s solution to money, but so that we, the people, can all have a better future and be more in control of our lives and information when future generations and my children grow up. I believe that for this to happen, we need decentralized public computing systems, run, controlled, and audited by the people who use them, and those of us who can, owe it to our own and future generations to build these public systems now from the decentralization technology, which began with bitcoin, and that too many in crypto abandon amid justifications of their own personal enrichment.
The Verus Coin Community has become like a second family to me, and our decision to fork as the last major event in 2018 was to support the community’s broad request for a do-over on the manner in which hardware miners joined Verus Coin. I hope and believe that this step, and the algorithm we created in the process to better equalize different hardware both contribute towards the Verus Vision of true decentralization, and with such a seamless fork, the smoothest I’ve personally ever seen or experienced, what a way to cap off an incredible year!
One year ago today, Verus Coin, its blockchain, and its algorithms did not exist beyond a vision of what might be. We close 2018 with a very strong worldwide Verus Coin community, arguably the most advanced consensus algorithm in crypto, the only one we know of with mathematically provable 51% hash attack immunity at this time, working solutions to nothing at stake and weak subjectivity, and now with VerusHash 2.0, a more secure blockchain than ever, maybe than any other. I was thankful for our prior decisions on security that we didn’t have to factor 51% attacks into our plans for a community focused solution during this fork.
I have no doubt that the world will increasingly use blockchains for electronic money, to track supply chains, assets, and corporate datastreams, and I am sure this use will spawn many new solutions and applications over time. These applications are all part of human progress, but to me, they are somewhat independent of the true societal potential of crypto at this time in history. The real power of crypto, which I know that we believe in as a community, and which we work to realize on a daily basis in Verus, is being part of a truly decentralized system across the entire participating community, no matter how large that community grows, each according to their means * effort, each rewarded by a system that tries to express fairness at the heart of its protocol, a community full of contributing members mining, staking, earning bounties and sticking together to make the future, supported further by the non-profit Verus Coin Foundation with the only goal being to use its mined and staked coins expressly to realize the Verus Vision.
In past roles I’ve had in the software industry, I have worked to build systems that learn from your behavior, that run your applications, that track how profitable you can be for advertisers, that provision applications for you through service providers, and more. In all cases, I worked for the profit of a few, creating technologies that I feel are being increasingly misused today by their intellectual property owners, as they transform from the idealism of freeing people and making a better world for all to simply making a profit for shareholders.
I believe that the world needs a system like what Verus is becoming, and as we close 2018, a very difficult year by many accounts and on many fronts, I am thankful for the sense of accomplishment I can enjoy by serving a community that values both the Verus Vision and my contributions towards realizing it.
The world needs public systems of money and services that can adapt in response to and along with the worldwide community using them. The Verus launch, May 21st, 2018, began an exhilarating journey that demonstrates what is possible when people refuse to accept that solutions to challenging problems cannot be addressed one by one in a working system, adapting and improving constantly for the community who run it and whom it servers. If designed properly and adapted as needed in a consistently decentralizing way, the only limit to the growth of these public systems and services are the number of people who use them.
Entering 2018, I did not know that I would work on Verus Coin, let alone lead its development. I had a vision of how our societies could leverage -public blockchain decentralization to solve some of the most difficult challenges we face, but I did not know if or how I would have an opportunity to be part of a community building such a system. I want to express gratitude to the Bitcoin Developers, the Zcash Developers, the Komodo Developers, specifically jl777, and the Verus Coin community for providing an incredible foundation and ecosystem within which all of our contributions can make a real difference.
As I look forward to 2019, I have many goals, and one of the biggest is for us to reach the next level and realize much of the complete Verus Vision. I appreciate the fact that I do that as part of a growing, healthy, and vibrant Verus Coin community and more broadly a crypto community, most of which still stands for the values in crypto that attracted me in the first place. One thing is for certain, you will never create or follow any specific plan, and adaptation is the key to survival. This goes for families, projects, communities, and efforts to change the world. I look forward to an another amazing year filled with the beautiful chaos of creation as we make a better future together, one with truth and privacy for all.
Happy New Year!
(*tagline contributed to the Verus Coin community by community member @mammothine and students)
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Las realidades de la economía criptográfica están poniendo a la minería en una posición precaria para 2019. La minería de GPU está casi muerta, y muchos gigantes de la minería están a punto de cerrar. ¿A dónde irá la minería criptográfica en 2019? CEO de Hyperledger, hablando con Bitcoin Exchange Guide admitió que la extracción… Más The post ¿Cómo será la minería criptográfica en 2019?.
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If you're not sure what kind of discussion belongs in this thread, here are some example posts. News, TA, and sentiment analysis are great, too.
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Cut out the root, starve the branches
January 1st 2019 will be the start of my NoFap Journey. I’m positing here to hold myself accountable and to provide motivation to others. These entries will be quasi-journal like.
Some background on who I am
Why am I telling you this? From the outside looking in, people think that I’m doing great. And while I do admit to be doing better financially than peers my age, as well as being more intellectually and academically gifted than the average person, these things are only a small part of life. Most people don’t realize that I’m crippling socially, emotionally, and mentally. The outside doesn’t always tell the whole story. Rich or poor, dumb or smart, hard working or lazy, attractive or unattractive: None of these attributes ever tell the whole story. As you will see if you continue reading, even these small gifts can also be severely hindered by pornography/sex addiction. I will not argue to meaning of life here, but I think you all get my gist.
So what brought me here? This past week I took a long and hard look at my current life, my past, and where I want to be. I’m not happy with most of my current life. Ill list the positives and negatives.
The positives:
The negatives:
Through my reflection, I believe most of these issues stem from a root cause. If I remove the root, the other problems can no longer receive their life support and they will wither away and die. This is a good thing. So what is the root cause? Yep, you guessed it. Fapping.
Im addicted to porn/Instagram/online dating. Not in the ways you’d imagine either (for Instagram and online dating). My porn addiction is like many others on here, so I will not elaborate on that facet. I will elaborate on the others.
Online dating: Luckily I am attractive enough to get women to talk to me online. None of these women are that hot, most 5-6, but that’s not the point. My online dating addiction started when my brain got bored with porn. I used online dating to essentially create and masturbate to my own erotica in the conversations I have with women. I have a profile that is very sexual and indicates that I’m only interested in women who want to hook up. So the only women that respond to me are women looking for one night stands/hookups/fwb. I get the women to start talking “dirty” with, and we have pretty sexual conversations. I even explicitly tell them that I fantasize to them, and they almost always take it as a compliment. When they send me pictures I also let them know that I use them for jerking off, and again, they generally take it as a compliment. Have I slept with any of these women? A couple, but most I would never actually be attracted to in person. My brain only cares about the erotica, the Pavlonian variable reward content that is being created through each conversation. There is no fulfillment in this besides momentary short term pleasure. Conversation, ejaculate, done. Talking to these women is a huge waste of time because I know that I will never actually have a fulfilling relationship with any of them. It is awful to know that my brain would rather have me jerk off to this obscure and novel erotica than go out and meet women in real life. Women that I can actually have a relationship with.
Instagram: like porn but much more attractive women. Endless amounts of attractive women. My brain has become corrupt from this addiction.
As for the sex addiction. For a year in college I was having sex at least 7 times a week. However, this addiction eventually subsided too porn because porn was much easier to achieve ejaculation and required no actual work. I also would not consider sex addiction anywhere near as bad as pornography addiction for various reasons we will not get into on this post.
How does Masturbation make all the other negatives I posted even worse?
Social:
Dating:
Anxiety and depression:
Time wasting:
Goals for 2019.
NOTE: These goals are actually more concrete, specific, and in depth than what’s listed here(and I have about 10 for the year) However, I’d rather not write all of them out because it may give away my identity.
Remember men: Cut out the root, starve the branches
Wish me luck on my NoFap journey. There will be times when I may desperately need it. -TheBitcoinCarnivore
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This post is an excerpt from Forbes 30 under 30 Millionaire Chris Kelsey's account of his "biggest scams":
Stupid people like to say I am a scammer because of many different, stupid reasons and they’ve always been wrong. I have actually scammed before, but not from the things that people have accused me of doing.
E-Whoring
In May 2013, I googled how to make money online from scamming (not those exact words but something to that extent). E-whoring was one of the first things I saw that appealed to me due to the possibility of making a lot of money from it. I read guides that talked about going on adult chats while pretending to be a girl, and selling picture packs or cam shows to them.
I went on an adult chat site (I don’t remember the name, nor do I want to) and said I was selling picture packs. Some people added me on Skype, and some weird guy said he’d pay me $30. I took some random picture pack from online and sent it to him. I got up and ran around the room because it was pretty much the first time I made money completely on my own.
I kept trying this for the next week but had very little success. I wanted to take it to the next level so I learned more about VCWs. They were videos that you could play on your Skype screen and click different buttons to prove you’re real. The VCW that I downloaded for free from a random hacker forum would show a woman sitting on the chair, and I could click “wave,” “blow kiss,” and other stupid things. They were live recordings of a woman who was paid to record her different actions for the sake of making a VCW. VCW stands for “virtual cam whore” which I actually did not know until today.
I began offering cam shows while pretending to be a girl on the chat. Once they’d add me on Skype, if they seemed serious, we’d start a skype call and I had the VCW playing so it showed a girl on the screen. I kept a piece of paper so I could block the top part of my screen so I couldn’t see whatever weird shit the potential buyer in the skype call was doing.
Usually they’d ask me to do different emotes and sometimes they’d ask for an emote that I didn’t have in the VCW, so I’d try to click a similar emote to make it possibly look real. I would say that I did it but it was laggy as the reason why they couldn’t see it properly. If I failed this test, I wouldn’t get their money, and sometimes I could tell they just wanted to stay on the call as long as possible, so then I’d hang up and block them.
The most I ever made selling cam shows was $250 in a night, when I was 16. I only accepted Amazon gift cards instead of Paypal because it was harder to refund. I read on the forums many horror stories of other e-whorers (lol) losing money because of Paypal refunds.
I would sell cam shows for whatever price I thought I could get. Once they sent the first gift card, I’d tell them it didn’t work and to send another. This worked about 50% of the time and it doubled the money. I’d place an order on Amazon as soon as possible just incase they tried to refund the gift card.
Once I received their money, I would either block them or troll them. If I wanted to troll them, I usually made the cam show look like it was about to begin. I would then spam click to repeat one of actions over and over and finally played this video.
At one point it started getting harder to make money because my VCW was free and dozens of people were using the same VCW on the same adult chat websites. I decided to mention that my VCW was an underage girl. Once they’d start talking to me, I’d say that they needed to give me $100-$200 or I’d report them to police (I never actually reported them). It usually didn’t work because they’d just block me but I did get $180 one time. I could’ve scammed for more money but I really hated blackmailing people as it pushed my moral boundaries. I likely tried the blackmail idea around 5–10 times before I stopped and I always tried my best to do it without really scaring them or harming them. If they ever seemed extremely scared I would backtrack so that they wouldn’t get too scared (as I said, I really hated doing this).
I only made around $3,600 in total but I was enthralled to have made this much on my own at 16. I used the money mostly to buy designer clothes or random things I wanted. My “e-whoring history” has been a running joke between my friends and I.
In the beginning 2014, I had already quit e-whoring and I was looking to find the next way to make money. My friend told me about how you could call Amazon and say that your package never arrived. I tried it with an iPad and it worked. I sold it on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks, and I was amazed.
I joined a social engineering forum online and a guy was advertising that you could buy one item and get up to 3 more for free. I eventually learned the process. You would buy the item (it had to be sold by amazon), then tell them that it came broken. Each time the replacement arrived, you’d give a different excuse (although sometimes it worked even when I gave the same reason).
I had different kids from my high school receiving packages at their addresses for me. I also found houses for sale and sent them there, although this was risky as sometimes the packages were lost or sent back to amazon (because the mailmen sometimes don’t deliver to “empty” properties).
On one amazon account, I received 8 Macbook Pros for the price of one. Besides Amazon, I would order items from other websites and say they didn’t arrive. While the most I made in one month was $8,000 profit, I also had received thousands of dollars in free designer clothes.
I also found a glitch (due to the help of the social engineering forum) to receive unlimited Xbox One replacements on the Microsoft website. I only ended up receiving about 8 Xbox Ones before they fixed the bug.
A website called Zagg allowed you to add products to your Zagg account and click a button saying it is broken. I wanted to test how well it worked so I added 20 headphones to my account and reported them all as broken. I then sent it to a house for sale. They all arrived at once but I ended up giving them away because no one wanted to buy them.
In August 2014, a kid I sent items to stole my Macbooks and threatened to fight me at school. I didn’t care if he tried to fight me, but I was worried that if he fought me, the school would ask the reason. So I went to the school first saying I sent packages to his house and that he stole them, and now he’s trying to fight. They ended up not caring at all about that, and instead put me under police investigation.
A cop came to school interviewing me about why I sent packages to different people’s houses. I told him that I was ordering things for my friends who couldn’t receive packages at their own houses. I never heard from them after that and if I do, I don’t really care.
I originally wanted to start a flyer distribution service by hiring Fiverr flyer distributors. I eventually realized that all of them were scams, despite having hundreds of 5 star reviews. I decided I’d try it myself.
I posted a service on Fiverr offering to distribute 50 flyers at Stanford University for $5. As I received each order, I’d print a flyer and take a picture of it around my house. I ended up receiving $200 custom orders for 100,000 flyers. I got rated as a top seller on Fiverr and was featured on the front page.
Most of the people gave top reviews because they didn’t assume someone would be lying about posting the flyers (especially with photo proof). I didn’t feel extremely guilty about this scam as every person needing flyers distributed would’ve likely had no more than two responses if the flyers were actually posted. I’m not saying that to justify the scam, I literally mean that the offerings of the flyers sucked so bad.
I forgot to hide the EXIF data of the images and one person traced it by my house. They wrote a bad review saying I wasn’t actually posting at Stanford.
Each time I received a negative review, I would accuse the person that posted the negative review of asking me to post extra flyers for free. Since Fiverr allows the sellers to have the last response on a bad review, it would always make me look innocent. I sometimes made $500 in a week doing almost nothing.
I posted a credit card fraud guide in December 2017 and was heavily investigated by the FBI (before and especially after I posted it). I was never interviewed or told I was under investigation but many weird things happened including my fiance’s car getting searched. They would also call in to businesses (like Best Buy) before I’d arrive so that they could be prepared to arrest me if I bought something with a stolen card.
Credit card fraud feels like having unlimited money. I spent $5,000+ with a credit card that I paid $15 in Bitcoin for. I used some of the money I made for myself and gave the rest of the proceeds away. If you are in a time of need and want to make a quick buck, this is a great way.
With that being said, I never did it to small businesses as that is screwing over regular people rather than banks. When you use a stolen card to buy something or send money, it is safe to assume that the business will lose their money once the original card owner reports the fraudulent charge (although some are protected by insurance). If you do this at Walmart, that’s fine. If do it to a mom and pop restaurant, just remember you are likely screwing them over and they will lose money (this is why I focused on big businesses only). As a side note, be careful with stores such as Target and Walmart as they specifically look out for credit card fraud. Eventually you will be flagged and can be at risk for getting caught.
Once I got out of my bad financial situation at that time, I stopped doing it. I don’t see it as a longterm way of making money. It is a great feeling when it works out as it feels like a casino but with a much more likelihood of making a profit.
Credit card fraud showed me the massive flaws of our current banking system. Its popularity has drastically increased as people are realizing how profitable it can be. I know in the near future people will not need to commit credit card fraud because our economy will have been fixed. Until then, keep swiping.
This post is an excerpt from Forbes 30 under 30 Millionaire Chris Kelsey's account of his "biggest scams":
Stupid people like to say I am a scammer because of many different, stupid reasons and they’ve always been wrong. I have actually scammed before, but not from the things that people have accused me of doing.
E-Whoring
In May 2013, I googled how to make money online from scamming (not those exact words but something to that extent). E-whoring was one of the first things I saw that appealed to me due to the possibility of making a lot of money from it. I read guides that talked about going on adult chats while pretending to be a girl, and selling picture packs or cam shows to them.
I went on an adult chat site (I don’t remember the name, nor do I want to) and said I was selling picture packs. Some people added me on Skype, and some weird guy said he’d pay me $30. I took some random picture pack from online and sent it to him. I got up and ran around the room because it was pretty much the first time I made money completely on my own.
I kept trying this for the next week but had very little success. I wanted to take it to the next level so I learned more about VCWs. They were videos that you could play on your Skype screen and click different buttons to prove you’re real. The VCW that I downloaded for free from a random hacker forum would show a woman sitting on the chair, and I could click “wave,” “blow kiss,” and other stupid things. They were live recordings of a woman who was paid to record her different actions for the sake of making a VCW. VCW stands for “virtual cam whore” which I actually did not know until today.
I began offering cam shows while pretending to be a girl on the chat. Once they’d add me on Skype, if they seemed serious, we’d start a skype call and I had the VCW playing so it showed a girl on the screen. I kept a piece of paper so I could block the top part of my screen so I couldn’t see whatever weird shit the potential buyer in the skype call was doing.
Usually they’d ask me to do different emotes and sometimes they’d ask for an emote that I didn’t have in the VCW, so I’d try to click a similar emote to make it possibly look real. I would say that I did it but it was laggy as the reason why they couldn’t see it properly. If I failed this test, I wouldn’t get their money, and sometimes I could tell they just wanted to stay on the call as long as possible, so then I’d hang up and block them.
The most I ever made selling cam shows was $250 in a night, when I was 16. I only accepted Amazon gift cards instead of Paypal because it was harder to refund. I read on the forums many horror stories of other e-whorers (lol) losing money because of Paypal refunds.
I would sell cam shows for whatever price I thought I could get. Once they sent the first gift card, I’d tell them it didn’t work and to send another. This worked about 50% of the time and it doubled the money. I’d place an order on Amazon as soon as possible just incase they tried to refund the gift card.
Once I received their money, I would either block them or troll them. If I wanted to troll them, I usually made the cam show look like it was about to begin. I would then spam click to repeat one of actions over and over and finally played this video.
At one point it started getting harder to make money because my VCW was free and dozens of people were using the same VCW on the same adult chat websites. I decided to mention that my VCW was an underage girl. Once they’d start talking to me, I’d say that they needed to give me $100-$200 or I’d report them to police (I never actually reported them). It usually didn’t work because they’d just block me but I did get $180 one time. I could’ve scammed for more money but I really hated blackmailing people as it pushed my moral boundaries. I likely tried the blackmail idea around 5–10 times before I stopped and I always tried my best to do it without really scaring them or harming them. If they ever seemed extremely scared I would backtrack so that they wouldn’t get too scared (as I said, I really hated doing this).
I only made around $3,600 in total but I was enthralled to have made this much on my own at 16. I used the money mostly to buy designer clothes or random things I wanted. My “e-whoring history” has been a running joke between my friends and I.
In the beginning 2014, I had already quit e-whoring and I was looking to find the next way to make money. My friend told me about how you could call Amazon and say that your package never arrived. I tried it with an iPad and it worked. I sold it on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks, and I was amazed.
I joined a social engineering forum online and a guy was advertising that you could buy one item and get up to 3 more for free. I eventually learned the process. You would buy the item (it had to be sold by amazon), then tell them that it came broken. Each time the replacement arrived, you’d give a different excuse (although sometimes it worked even when I gave the same reason).
I had different kids from my high school receiving packages at their addresses for me. I also found houses for sale and sent them there, although this was risky as sometimes the packages were lost or sent back to amazon (because the mailmen sometimes don’t deliver to “empty” properties).
On one amazon account, I received 8 Macbook Pros for the price of one. Besides Amazon, I would order items from other websites and say they didn’t arrive. While the most I made in one month was $8,000 profit, I also had received thousands of dollars in free designer clothes.
I also found a glitch (due to the help of the social engineering forum) to receive unlimited Xbox One replacements on the Microsoft website. I only ended up receiving about 8 Xbox Ones before they fixed the bug.
A website called Zagg allowed you to add products to your Zagg account and click a button saying it is broken. I wanted to test how well it worked so I added 20 headphones to my account and reported them all as broken. I then sent it to a house for sale. They all arrived at once but I ended up giving them away because no one wanted to buy them.
In August 2014, a kid I sent items to stole my Macbooks and threatened to fight me at school. I didn’t care if he tried to fight me, but I was worried that if he fought me, the school would ask the reason. So I went to the school first saying I sent packages to his house and that he stole them, and now he’s trying to fight. They ended up not caring at all about that, and instead put me under police investigation.
A cop came to school interviewing me about why I sent packages to different people’s houses. I told him that I was ordering things for my friends who couldn’t receive packages at their own houses. I never heard from them after that and if I do, I don’t really care.
I originally wanted to start a flyer distribution service by hiring Fiverr flyer distributors. I eventually realized that all of them were scams, despite having hundreds of 5 star reviews. I decided I’d try it myself.
I posted a service on Fiverr offering to distribute 50 flyers at Stanford University for $5. As I received each order, I’d print a flyer and take a picture of it around my house. I ended up receiving $200 custom orders for 100,000 flyers. I got rated as a top seller on Fiverr and was featured on the front page.
Most of the people gave top reviews because they didn’t assume someone would be lying about posting the flyers (especially with photo proof). I didn’t feel extremely guilty about this scam as every person needing flyers distributed would’ve likely had no more than two responses if the flyers were actually posted. I’m not saying that to justify the scam, I literally mean that the offerings of the flyers sucked so bad.
I forgot to hide the EXIF data of the images and one person traced it by my house. They wrote a bad review saying I wasn’t actually posting at Stanford.
Each time I received a negative review, I would accuse the person that posted the negative review of asking me to post extra flyers for free. Since Fiverr allows the sellers to have the last response on a bad review, it would always make me look innocent. I sometimes made $500 in a week doing almost nothing.
I posted a credit card fraud guide in December 2017 and was heavily investigated by the FBI (before and especially after I posted it). I was never interviewed or told I was under investigation but many weird things happened including my fiance’s car getting searched. They would also call in to businesses (like Best Buy) before I’d arrive so that they could be prepared to arrest me if I bought something with a stolen card.
Credit card fraud feels like having unlimited money. I spent $5,000+ with a credit card that I paid $15 in Bitcoin for. I used some of the money I made for myself and gave the rest of the proceeds away. If you are in a time of need and want to make a quick buck, this is a great way.
With that being said, I never did it to small businesses as that is screwing over regular people rather than banks. When you use a stolen card to buy something or send money, it is safe to assume that the business will lose their money once the original card owner reports the fraudulent charge (although some are protected by insurance). If you do this at Walmart, that’s fine. If do it to a mom and pop restaurant, just remember you are likely screwing them over and they will lose money (this is why I focused on big businesses only). As a side note, be careful with stores such as Target and Walmart as they specifically look out for credit card fraud. Eventually you will be flagged and can be at risk for getting caught.
Once I got out of my bad financial situation at that time, I stopped doing it. I don’t see it as a longterm way of making money. It is a great feeling when it works out as it feels like a casino but with a much more likelihood of making a profit.
Credit card fraud showed me the massive flaws of our current banking system. Its popularity has drastically increased as people are realizing how profitable it can be. I know in the near future people will not need to commit credit card fraud because our economy will have been fixed. Until then, keep swiping.
This post is an excerpt from Forbes 30 under 30 Millionaire Chris Kelsey's account of his "biggest scams":
Stupid people like to say I am a scammer because of many different, stupid reasons and they’ve always been wrong. I have actually scammed before, but not from the things that people have accused me of doing.
E-Whoring
In May 2013, I googled how to make money online from scamming (not those exact words but something to that extent). E-whoring was one of the first things I saw that appealed to me due to the possibility of making a lot of money from it. I read guides that talked about going on adult chats while pretending to be a girl, and selling picture packs or cam shows to them.
I went on an adult chat site (I don’t remember the name, nor do I want to) and said I was selling picture packs. Some people added me on Skype, and some weird guy said he’d pay me $30. I took some random picture pack from online and sent it to him. I got up and ran around the room because it was pretty much the first time I made money completely on my own.
I kept trying this for the next week but had very little success. I wanted to take it to the next level so I learned more about VCWs. They were videos that you could play on your Skype screen and click different buttons to prove you’re real. The VCW that I downloaded for free from a random hacker forum would show a woman sitting on the chair, and I could click “wave,” “blow kiss,” and other stupid things. They were live recordings of a woman who was paid to record her different actions for the sake of making a VCW. VCW stands for “virtual cam whore” which I actually did not know until today.
I began offering cam shows while pretending to be a girl on the chat. Once they’d add me on Skype, if they seemed serious, we’d start a skype call and I had the VCW playing so it showed a girl on the screen. I kept a piece of paper so I could block the top part of my screen so I couldn’t see whatever weird shit the potential buyer in the skype call was doing.
Usually they’d ask me to do different emotes and sometimes they’d ask for an emote that I didn’t have in the VCW, so I’d try to click a similar emote to make it possibly look real. I would say that I did it but it was laggy as the reason why they couldn’t see it properly. If I failed this test, I wouldn’t get their money, and sometimes I could tell they just wanted to stay on the call as long as possible, so then I’d hang up and block them.
The most I ever made selling cam shows was $250 in a night, when I was 16. I only accepted Amazon gift cards instead of Paypal because it was harder to refund. I read on the forums many horror stories of other e-whorers (lol) losing money because of Paypal refunds.
I would sell cam shows for whatever price I thought I could get. Once they sent the first gift card, I’d tell them it didn’t work and to send another. This worked about 50% of the time and it doubled the money. I’d place an order on Amazon as soon as possible just incase they tried to refund the gift card.
Once I received their money, I would either block them or troll them. If I wanted to troll them, I usually made the cam show look like it was about to begin. I would then spam click to repeat one of actions over and over and finally played this video.
At one point it started getting harder to make money because my VCW was free and dozens of people were using the same VCW on the same adult chat websites. I decided to mention that my VCW was an underage girl. Once they’d start talking to me, I’d say that they needed to give me $100-$200 or I’d report them to police (I never actually reported them). It usually didn’t work because they’d just block me but I did get $180 one time. I could’ve scammed for more money but I really hated blackmailing people as it pushed my moral boundaries. I likely tried the blackmail idea around 5–10 times before I stopped and I always tried my best to do it without really scaring them or harming them. If they ever seemed extremely scared I would backtrack so that they wouldn’t get too scared (as I said, I really hated doing this).
I only made around $3,600 in total but I was enthralled to have made this much on my own at 16. I used the money mostly to buy designer clothes or random things I wanted. My “e-whoring history” has been a running joke between my friends and I.
In the beginning 2014, I had already quit e-whoring and I was looking to find the next way to make money. My friend told me about how you could call Amazon and say that your package never arrived. I tried it with an iPad and it worked. I sold it on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks, and I was amazed.
I joined a social engineering forum online and a guy was advertising that you could buy one item and get up to 3 more for free. I eventually learned the process. You would buy the item (it had to be sold by amazon), then tell them that it came broken. Each time the replacement arrived, you’d give a different excuse (although sometimes it worked even when I gave the same reason).
I had different kids from my high school receiving packages at their addresses for me. I also found houses for sale and sent them there, although this was risky as sometimes the packages were lost or sent back to amazon (because the mailmen sometimes don’t deliver to “empty” properties).
On one amazon account, I received 8 Macbook Pros for the price of one. Besides Amazon, I would order items from other websites and say they didn’t arrive. While the most I made in one month was $8,000 profit, I also had received thousands of dollars in free designer clothes.
I also found a glitch (due to the help of the social engineering forum) to receive unlimited Xbox One replacements on the Microsoft website. I only ended up receiving about 8 Xbox Ones before they fixed the bug.
A website called Zagg allowed you to add products to your Zagg account and click a button saying it is broken. I wanted to test how well it worked so I added 20 headphones to my account and reported them all as broken. I then sent it to a house for sale. They all arrived at once but I ended up giving them away because no one wanted to buy them.
In August 2014, a kid I sent items to stole my Macbooks and threatened to fight me at school. I didn’t care if he tried to fight me, but I was worried that if he fought me, the school would ask the reason. So I went to the school first saying I sent packages to his house and that he stole them, and now he’s trying to fight. They ended up not caring at all about that, and instead put me under police investigation.
A cop came to school interviewing me about why I sent packages to different people’s houses. I told him that I was ordering things for my friends who couldn’t receive packages at their own houses. I never heard from them after that and if I do, I don’t really care.
I originally wanted to start a flyer distribution service by hiring Fiverr flyer distributors. I eventually realized that all of them were scams, despite having hundreds of 5 star reviews. I decided I’d try it myself.
I posted a service on Fiverr offering to distribute 50 flyers at Stanford University for $5. As I received each order, I’d print a flyer and take a picture of it around my house. I ended up receiving $200 custom orders for 100,000 flyers. I got rated as a top seller on Fiverr and was featured on the front page.
Most of the people gave top reviews because they didn’t assume someone would be lying about posting the flyers (especially with photo proof). I didn’t feel extremely guilty about this scam as every person needing flyers distributed would’ve likely had no more than two responses if the flyers were actually posted. I’m not saying that to justify the scam, I literally mean that the offerings of the flyers sucked so bad.
I forgot to hide the EXIF data of the images and one person traced it by my house. They wrote a bad review saying I wasn’t actually posting at Stanford.
Each time I received a negative review, I would accuse the person that posted the negative review of asking me to post extra flyers for free. Since Fiverr allows the sellers to have the last response on a bad review, it would always make me look innocent. I sometimes made $500 in a week doing almost nothing.
I posted a credit card fraud guide in December 2017 and was heavily investigated by the FBI (before and especially after I posted it). I was never interviewed or told I was under investigation but many weird things happened including my fiance’s car getting searched. They would also call in to businesses (like Best Buy) before I’d arrive so that they could be prepared to arrest me if I bought something with a stolen card.
Credit card fraud feels like having unlimited money. I spent $5,000+ with a credit card that I paid $15 in Bitcoin for. I used some of the money I made for myself and gave the rest of the proceeds away. If you are in a time of need and want to make a quick buck, this is a great way.
With that being said, I never did it to small businesses as that is screwing over regular people rather than banks. When you use a stolen card to buy something or send money, it is safe to assume that the business will lose their money once the original card owner reports the fraudulent charge (although some are protected by insurance). If you do this at Walmart, that’s fine. If do it to a mom and pop restaurant, just remember you are likely screwing them over and they will lose money (this is why I focused on big businesses only). As a side note, be careful with stores such as Target and Walmart as they specifically look out for credit card fraud. Eventually you will be flagged and can be at risk for getting caught.
Once I got out of my bad financial situation at that time, I stopped doing it. I don’t see it as a longterm way of making money. It is a great feeling when it works out as it feels like a casino but with a much more likelihood of making a profit.
Credit card fraud showed me the massive flaws of our current banking system. Its popularity has drastically increased as people are realizing how profitable it can be. I know in the near future people will not need to commit credit card fraud because our economy will have been fixed. Until then, keep swiping.
One year ago today on December 31st, 2017, I wrote a post titled “Thoughts going into 2018 & why we may see 50 before we see 5000.”
I wasn’t surprised to get lots of downvotes. At the time, many folks around here were predicting 5k an Ether by 2019. The idea of double-digit Eth seemed absurd. Even I didn't think it would happen, just that it was far likelier than many were thinking.
Greed is a blinding force...but so is fear. Just as we tend to be irrationally exuberant during boom periods, we tend to be irrationally gloomy during busts.
So just as I tried to instill a bit of realism/pessimism when we were at the height of the bull market, I’ll do my best today to instill some realism/optimism in the midst of crypto winter.
The first thing to understand is that boom and bust cycles are a fact of life in any technological revolution, whether the railroad, the Internet, or crypto.
For instance, from the peak of the dotcom boom in 1999 to the bottom of the bust, Amazon stock dropped 93.4%. By comparison, Ether dropped 93.8% from its high to its low in 2018. Yes, apples and oranges, but the underlying psychology and market forces are the same.
If anything, you’d expect crypto to be more volatile than Internet stocks in the dot-com boom, as it’s not just a new technology but a new asset class. Amazon stock was still equity in a company. Crypto is an asset class the world has never seen before. Indeed, Bitcoin has endured multiple falls of over 80% in its 10-year history. So far, this bear market has actually been less severe in terms of percentage drops than some prior.
Understanding how these boom and bust cycles work is key to staying level-headed during both booms and busts. Here’s, to the best of my understanding, the way these cycles work . . .
In boom periods, irrational exuberance and greed steer the ship as everyone buys into wildly optimistic stories about how the new technology is changing the world right here, right now. Ordinary folks feel like brilliant investors; they can throw darts blindfolded and almost always hit a winning trade. Everyone and their dog is looking for “the next Yahoo” or “the next Bitcoin.” You can turn on CNBC to get ‘expert picks’ on the next hot IPO or the best altcoin to buy. Some folks even quit their jobs and become day traders.
During fear phases, the green becomes red and the champagne turns into blood. FOMO buying is replaced by panic selling as weak hands who were planning to get rich quick run for the exit. Regulators crack down, scaling woes come to the surface, and ICO treasuries get depleted. In the words of Buffet, as the tide goes down, you see who’s been swimming naked.
Good news is ignored and bad news is overplayed. The world once again pens Bitcoin’s obituary and FUD on Ethereum. Casual investors feel like they were duped. They feel angry, sad, and dumb. Prices plummet taking down both quality assets like Amazon and Ethereum and shitty (or early) ones like Pets.com and Bitconnect. Value shifts from weak hands to the strong. Winter is longer than summer but the builders keep building, the innovators keep innovating. The seeds of tomorrow’s good news take root and patiently await the bloom of the coming Spring.
Remember, Mr. Market is a manic depressive. Don’t take him too seriously, especially in an immature market like crypto.
I know people who last December were saying “Ahh if only I had bought Ether when it was 100” or “oh man I wish I had bought Bitcoin when it was 5k” who won’t touch crypto now with a 10-foot pole.
Such is human psychology. We are social animals inclined to do what others do and believe what others believe. If others are buying, we want to buy. If others are selling, we want to sell. As Buffet said, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”
Anyway, aside from this natural boom and bust cycle, there are other forces at play. There is a global tightening of liquidity right now due to central banks raising interest rates and ending QE. Put simply, there is less money to go around. This will hurt any young, speculative asset like Ethereum.
Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum is even younger, more complex, more experimental (and ambitious), and thus more volatile. From January 1st, 2017 to the peak of the last bull market, Ether went up by almost 180x, while Bitcoin went up 20x. So it’s no surprise Ether has fallen further.
It’s human nature to overestimate the impact of revolutionary technologies in the short term but underestimate their impact in the long run. This is why Amazon stock fell from over $100 to around six bucks during the dot-com bust but then gradually rose to the quadruple digits over the next 15 years.
If Ethereum succeeds, it will rise from the ashes of this bear market and follow a similar-ish trajectory. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
In my view, nothing fundamental has changed. Regulatory, scaling and ICO woes were not much of a surprise. Sure, some frustrating setbacks in terms of the project roadmap, but nothing existential.
The big-picture today looks brighter to me than ever before. I’ll write another post on this sometime soon, as this one is already getting long. But to wrap up, let me offer my two cents on how to stay sane (and solvent) during these boom and bust cycles.
First off, don’t invest more than you can afford to lose both financially *and* psychologically. Like if your losses are keeping you up at night, you’ve probably put in too much.
In the event of another major run-up, consider taking some profits for peace of mind. If there are any changes in fundamentals, revise your views, but otherwise don’t pay much heed to the whims of Mr. Market. Be financially and psychologically prepared for dramatic price moves in either direction.
I think a good rule of thumb for 95% of crypto investors is that barring any change in fundamentals, don’t sell at a loss *or* buy at a loss. The former is obvious e.g., don’t sell at 75 if you bought at 100. The latter means that if you sell at 150, don’t buy back in at 200.
This rule forces you to only sell as much crypto as you’re willing to lose and to not make impulsive FOMO buys. Obviously, traders will violate this rule with stop losses but I believe that very few people are psychologically cut out to be good traders (at least without years of practice), myself included. I believe 95%+ of people should focus on investing rather than trading and simply DCA in and shoot to do so during times when things have sold off and fear exceeds greed.
If you want to go more in-depth, read and listen to thoughtful crypto investors like Ari Paul, Chris Dixon, and Chris Burniske. They're not always right (nobody is), but they are smart. If you‘re an Ethereum maximalist, stay open-minded to other views. Qiao Wang has some excellent commentary on the tradeoffs between Ethereum and other cryptos from an investment perspective. Ideally, diversify both within crypto and outside of crypto in other asset classes. I’m personally most bullish on Ether long-term, but this is a probabilistic bet and I try to hedge this bet with a few other cryptos that have different tradeoffs.
A bear market is a great time to turn off GDAX, delete Blockfolio and focus on investing in your skills, knowledge, mental and physical health and relationships. Get outside, get some sunshine and move around. You’ll not just be happier but in a better position to make good decisions in the markets and more importantly, to not make bad, costly ones
Do your best to stay in the game but if you get wiped out, try to learn from it, be patient with yourself, and remember there are bigger games in town than making money from crypto. Not to mention, many successful investors and traders got wiped out early on. The key thing is to try to learn. I've made a lot of stupid decisions, but hopefully I'm wiser today than I was yesterday, and I'll be wiser tomorrow than I am today.
Remember that nothing is guaranteed. Any asset that has the potential to 100x also has the potential to go to zero. Without risk, there is no reward.
That said, these are still early days and the future of crypto looks as bright today as it ever has.
If Ether hits 10 or 50k someday, many folks will say “ahh if only I had bought when it was 100.” But you and I know that this is BS. The reality is that 99% of those folks would have freaked out and sold during a bear market.
I think there will be more bleeding ahead and it *could* be a long while before the market makes a convincing recovery. Much of this depends on factors beyond crypto, like macro forces in the economy, when we enter a recession, what type of recession it is etc.
Crypto winter is an opportunity to exercise our patience, cultivate our resilience and for money to flow from the weak hands to the strong.
Stay hungry, stay foolish, and remember that it is always darkest before dawn.
Oh and happy New Year!
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Hey guys! Where do you recommend I begin a career transition? Live in US east coast major metropolitan city.
My backstory:
What is the most lucrative sales field I can transition to at my age? Tech evangelism maybe? (I'm proficient in bitcoin economics/trading). Willing to start low.
Thanks!
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This post is an excerpt from Forbes 30 under 30 Millionaire Chris Kelsey's account of his "biggest scams":
Stupid people like to say I am a scammer because of many different, stupid reasons and they’ve always been wrong. I have actually scammed before, but not from the things that people have accused me of doing.
E-Whoring
In May 2013, I googled how to make money online from scamming (not those exact words but something to that extent). E-whoring was one of the first things I saw that appealed to me due to the possibility of making a lot of money from it. I read guides that talked about going on adult chats while pretending to be a girl, and selling picture packs or cam shows to them.
I went on an adult chat site (I don’t remember the name, nor do I want to) and said I was selling picture packs. Some people added me on Skype, and some weird guy said he’d pay me $30. I took some random picture pack from online and sent it to him. I got up and ran around the room because it was pretty much the first time I made money completely on my own.
I kept trying this for the next week but had very little success. I wanted to take it to the next level so I learned more about VCWs. They were videos that you could play on your Skype screen and click different buttons to prove you’re real. The VCW that I downloaded for free from a random hacker forum would show a woman sitting on the chair, and I could click “wave,” “blow kiss,” and other stupid things. They were live recordings of a woman who was paid to record her different actions for the sake of making a VCW. VCW stands for “virtual cam whore” which I actually did not know until today.
I began offering cam shows while pretending to be a girl on the chat. Once they’d add me on Skype, if they seemed serious, we’d start a skype call and I had the VCW playing so it showed a girl on the screen. I kept a piece of paper so I could block the top part of my screen so I couldn’t see whatever weird shit the potential buyer in the skype call was doing.
Usually they’d ask me to do different emotes and sometimes they’d ask for an emote that I didn’t have in the VCW, so I’d try to click a similar emote to make it possibly look real. I would say that I did it but it was laggy as the reason why they couldn’t see it properly. If I failed this test, I wouldn’t get their money, and sometimes I could tell they just wanted to stay on the call as long as possible, so then I’d hang up and block them.
The most I ever made selling cam shows was $250 in a night, when I was 16. I only accepted Amazon gift cards instead of Paypal because it was harder to refund. I read on the forums many horror stories of other e-whorers (lol) losing money because of Paypal refunds.
I would sell cam shows for whatever price I thought I could get. Once they sent the first gift card, I’d tell them it didn’t work and to send another. This worked about 50% of the time and it doubled the money. I’d place an order on Amazon as soon as possible just incase they tried to refund the gift card.
Once I received their money, I would either block them or troll them. If I wanted to troll them, I usually made the cam show look like it was about to begin. I would then spam click to repeat one of actions over and over and finally played this video.
At one point it started getting harder to make money because my VCW was free and dozens of people were using the same VCW on the same adult chat websites. I decided to mention that my VCW was an underage girl. Once they’d start talking to me, I’d say that they needed to give me $100-$200 or I’d report them to police (I never actually reported them). It usually didn’t work because they’d just block me but I did get $180 one time. I could’ve scammed for more money but I really hated blackmailing people as it pushed my moral boundaries. I likely tried the blackmail idea around 5–10 times before I stopped and I always tried my best to do it without really scaring them or harming them. If they ever seemed extremely scared I would backtrack so that they wouldn’t get too scared (as I said, I really hated doing this).
I only made around $3,600 in total but I was enthralled to have made this much on my own at 16. I used the money mostly to buy designer clothes or random things I wanted. My “e-whoring history” has been a running joke between my friends and I.
In the beginning 2014, I had already quit e-whoring and I was looking to find the next way to make money. My friend told me about how you could call Amazon and say that your package never arrived. I tried it with an iPad and it worked. I sold it on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks, and I was amazed.
I joined a social engineering forum online and a guy was advertising that you could buy one item and get up to 3 more for free. I eventually learned the process. You would buy the item (it had to be sold by amazon), then tell them that it came broken. Each time the replacement arrived, you’d give a different excuse (although sometimes it worked even when I gave the same reason).
I had different kids from my high school receiving packages at their addresses for me. I also found houses for sale and sent them there, although this was risky as sometimes the packages were lost or sent back to amazon (because the mailmen sometimes don’t deliver to “empty” properties).
On one amazon account, I received 8 Macbook Pros for the price of one. Besides Amazon, I would order items from other websites and say they didn’t arrive. While the most I made in one month was $8,000 profit, I also had received thousands of dollars in free designer clothes.
I also found a glitch (due to the help of the social engineering forum) to receive unlimited Xbox One replacements on the Microsoft website. I only ended up receiving about 8 Xbox Ones before they fixed the bug.
A website called Zagg allowed you to add products to your Zagg account and click a button saying it is broken. I wanted to test how well it worked so I added 20 headphones to my account and reported them all as broken. I then sent it to a house for sale. They all arrived at once but I ended up giving them away because no one wanted to buy them.
In August 2014, a kid I sent items to stole my Macbooks and threatened to fight me at school. I didn’t care if he tried to fight me, but I was worried that if he fought me, the school would ask the reason. So I went to the school first saying I sent packages to his house and that he stole them, and now he’s trying to fight. They ended up not caring at all about that, and instead put me under police investigation.
A cop came to school interviewing me about why I sent packages to different people’s houses. I told him that I was ordering things for my friends who couldn’t receive packages at their own houses. I never heard from them after that and if I do, I don’t really care.
I originally wanted to start a flyer distribution service by hiring Fiverr flyer distributors. I eventually realized that all of them were scams, despite having hundreds of 5 star reviews. I decided I’d try it myself.
I posted a service on Fiverr offering to distribute 50 flyers at Stanford University for $5. As I received each order, I’d print a flyer and take a picture of it around my house. I ended up receiving $200 custom orders for 100,000 flyers. I got rated as a top seller on Fiverr and was featured on the front page.
Most of the people gave top reviews because they didn’t assume someone would be lying about posting the flyers (especially with photo proof). I didn’t feel extremely guilty about this scam as every person needing flyers distributed would’ve likely had no more than two responses if the flyers were actually posted. I’m not saying that to justify the scam, I literally mean that the offerings of the flyers sucked so bad.
I forgot to hide the EXIF data of the images and one person traced it by my house. They wrote a bad review saying I wasn’t actually posting at Stanford.
Each time I received a negative review, I would accuse the person that posted the negative review of asking me to post extra flyers for free. Since Fiverr allows the sellers to have the last response on a bad review, it would always make me look innocent. I sometimes made $500 in a week doing almost nothing.
I posted a credit card fraud guide in December 2017 and was heavily investigated by the FBI (before and especially after I posted it). I was never interviewed or told I was under investigation but many weird things happened including my fiance’s car getting searched. They would also call in to businesses (like Best Buy) before I’d arrive so that they could be prepared to arrest me if I bought something with a stolen card.
Credit card fraud feels like having unlimited money. I spent $5,000+ with a credit card that I paid $15 in Bitcoin for. I used some of the money I made for myself and gave the rest of the proceeds away. If you are in a time of need and want to make a quick buck, this is a great way.
With that being said, I never did it to small businesses as that is screwing over regular people rather than banks. When you use a stolen card to buy something or send money, it is safe to assume that the business will lose their money once the original card owner reports the fraudulent charge (although some are protected by insurance). If you do this at Walmart, that’s fine. If do it to a mom and pop restaurant, just remember you are likely screwing them over and they will lose money (this is why I focused on big businesses only). As a side note, be careful with stores such as Target and Walmart as they specifically look out for credit card fraud. Eventually you will be flagged and can be at risk for getting caught.
Once I got out of my bad financial situation at that time, I stopped doing it. I don’t see it as a longterm way of making money. It is a great feeling when it works out as it feels like a casino but with a much more likelihood of making a profit.
Credit card fraud showed me the massive flaws of our current banking system. Its popularity has drastically increased as people are realizing how profitable it can be. I know in the near future people will not need to commit credit card fraud because our economy will have been fixed. Until then, keep swiping.
This post is an excerpt from Forbes 30 under 30 Millionaire Chris Kelsey's account of his "biggest scams":
Stupid people like to say I am a scammer because of many different, stupid reasons and they’ve always been wrong. I have actually scammed before, but not from the things that people have accused me of doing.
E-Whoring
In May 2013, I googled how to make money online from scamming (not those exact words but something to that extent). E-whoring was one of the first things I saw that appealed to me due to the possibility of making a lot of money from it. I read guides that talked about going on adult chats while pretending to be a girl, and selling picture packs or cam shows to them.
I went on an adult chat site (I don’t remember the name, nor do I want to) and said I was selling picture packs. Some people added me on Skype, and some weird guy said he’d pay me $30. I took some random picture pack from online and sent it to him. I got up and ran around the room because it was pretty much the first time I made money completely on my own.
I kept trying this for the next week but had very little success. I wanted to take it to the next level so I learned more about VCWs. They were videos that you could play on your Skype screen and click different buttons to prove you’re real. The VCW that I downloaded for free from a random hacker forum would show a woman sitting on the chair, and I could click “wave,” “blow kiss,” and other stupid things. They were live recordings of a woman who was paid to record her different actions for the sake of making a VCW. VCW stands for “virtual cam whore” which I actually did not know until today.
I began offering cam shows while pretending to be a girl on the chat. Once they’d add me on Skype, if they seemed serious, we’d start a skype call and I had the VCW playing so it showed a girl on the screen. I kept a piece of paper so I could block the top part of my screen so I couldn’t see whatever weird shit the potential buyer in the skype call was doing.
Usually they’d ask me to do different emotes and sometimes they’d ask for an emote that I didn’t have in the VCW, so I’d try to click a similar emote to make it possibly look real. I would say that I did it but it was laggy as the reason why they couldn’t see it properly. If I failed this test, I wouldn’t get their money, and sometimes I could tell they just wanted to stay on the call as long as possible, so then I’d hang up and block them.
The most I ever made selling cam shows was $250 in a night, when I was 16. I only accepted Amazon gift cards instead of Paypal because it was harder to refund. I read on the forums many horror stories of other e-whorers (lol) losing money because of Paypal refunds.
I would sell cam shows for whatever price I thought I could get. Once they sent the first gift card, I’d tell them it didn’t work and to send another. This worked about 50% of the time and it doubled the money. I’d place an order on Amazon as soon as possible just incase they tried to refund the gift card.
Once I received their money, I would either block them or troll them. If I wanted to troll them, I usually made the cam show look like it was about to begin. I would then spam click to repeat one of actions over and over and finally played this video.
At one point it started getting harder to make money because my VCW was free and dozens of people were using the same VCW on the same adult chat websites. I decided to mention that my VCW was an underage girl. Once they’d start talking to me, I’d say that they needed to give me $100-$200 or I’d report them to police (I never actually reported them). It usually didn’t work because they’d just block me but I did get $180 one time. I could’ve scammed for more money but I really hated blackmailing people as it pushed my moral boundaries. I likely tried the blackmail idea around 5–10 times before I stopped and I always tried my best to do it without really scaring them or harming them. If they ever seemed extremely scared I would backtrack so that they wouldn’t get too scared (as I said, I really hated doing this).
I only made around $3,600 in total but I was enthralled to have made this much on my own at 16. I used the money mostly to buy designer clothes or random things I wanted. My “e-whoring history” has been a running joke between my friends and I.
In the beginning 2014, I had already quit e-whoring and I was looking to find the next way to make money. My friend told me about how you could call Amazon and say that your package never arrived. I tried it with an iPad and it worked. I sold it on Craigslist for a few hundred bucks, and I was amazed.
I joined a social engineering forum online and a guy was advertising that you could buy one item and get up to 3 more for free. I eventually learned the process. You would buy the item (it had to be sold by amazon), then tell them that it came broken. Each time the replacement arrived, you’d give a different excuse (although sometimes it worked even when I gave the same reason).
I had different kids from my high school receiving packages at their addresses for me. I also found houses for sale and sent them there, although this was risky as sometimes the packages were lost or sent back to amazon (because the mailmen sometimes don’t deliver to “empty” properties).
On one amazon account, I received 8 Macbook Pros for the price of one. Besides Amazon, I would order items from other websites and say they didn’t arrive. While the most I made in one month was $8,000 profit, I also had received thousands of dollars in free designer clothes.
I also found a glitch (due to the help of the social engineering forum) to receive unlimited Xbox One replacements on the Microsoft website. I only ended up receiving about 8 Xbox Ones before they fixed the bug.
A website called Zagg allowed you to add products to your Zagg account and click a button saying it is broken. I wanted to test how well it worked so I added 20 headphones to my account and reported them all as broken. I then sent it to a house for sale. They all arrived at once but I ended up giving them away because no one wanted to buy them.
In August 2014, a kid I sent items to stole my Macbooks and threatened to fight me at school. I didn’t care if he tried to fight me, but I was worried that if he fought me, the school would ask the reason. So I went to the school first saying I sent packages to his house and that he stole them, and now he’s trying to fight. They ended up not caring at all about that, and instead put me under police investigation.
A cop came to school interviewing me about why I sent packages to different people’s houses. I told him that I was ordering things for my friends who couldn’t receive packages at their own houses. I never heard from them after that and if I do, I don’t really care.
I originally wanted to start a flyer distribution service by hiring Fiverr flyer distributors. I eventually realized that all of them were scams, despite having hundreds of 5 star reviews. I decided I’d try it myself.
I posted a service on Fiverr offering to distribute 50 flyers at Stanford University for $5. As I received each order, I’d print a flyer and take a picture of it around my house. I ended up receiving $200 custom orders for 100,000 flyers. I got rated as a top seller on Fiverr and was featured on the front page.
Most of the people gave top reviews because they didn’t assume someone would be lying about posting the flyers (especially with photo proof). I didn’t feel extremely guilty about this scam as every person needing flyers distributed would’ve likely had no more than two responses if the flyers were actually posted. I’m not saying that to justify the scam, I literally mean that the offerings of the flyers sucked so bad.
I forgot to hide the EXIF data of the images and one person traced it by my house. They wrote a bad review saying I wasn’t actually posting at Stanford.
Each time I received a negative review, I would accuse the person that posted the negative review of asking me to post extra flyers for free. Since Fiverr allows the sellers to have the last response on a bad review, it would always make me look innocent. I sometimes made $500 in a week doing almost nothing.
I posted a credit card fraud guide in December 2017 and was heavily investigated by the FBI (before and especially after I posted it). I was never interviewed or told I was under investigation but many weird things happened including my fiance’s car getting searched. They would also call in to businesses (like Best Buy) before I’d arrive so that they could be prepared to arrest me if I bought something with a stolen card.
Credit card fraud feels like having unlimited money. I spent $5,000+ with a credit card that I paid $15 in Bitcoin for. I used some of the money I made for myself and gave the rest of the proceeds away. If you are in a time of need and want to make a quick buck, this is a great way.
With that being said, I never did it to small businesses as that is screwing over regular people rather than banks. When you use a stolen card to buy something or send money, it is safe to assume that the business will lose their money once the original card owner reports the fraudulent charge (although some are protected by insurance). If you do this at Walmart, that’s fine. If do it to a mom and pop restaurant, just remember you are likely screwing them over and they will lose money (this is why I focused on big businesses only). As a side note, be careful with stores such as Target and Walmart as they specifically look out for credit card fraud. Eventually you will be flagged and can be at risk for getting caught.
Once I got out of my bad financial situation at that time, I stopped doing it. I don’t see it as a longterm way of making money. It is a great feeling when it works out as it feels like a casino but with a much more likelihood of making a profit.
Credit card fraud showed me the massive flaws of our current banking system. Its popularity has drastically increased as people are realizing how profitable it can be. I know in the near future people will not need to commit credit card fraud because our economy will have been fixed. Until then, keep swiping.zzzzzz
