Crypto News Recap: YouTube's First Crypto Scam, Iran Terminates 1,100 Illegal Bitcoin Miners

Published August 24th, 2020 - 06:30 GMT

Crypto News Recap: More Social Media Crypto Scams, Iran Crackdown on 1,100 Illegal Bitcoin Miners

Bitcoin remained above the $11,650 and $11,550 support level. (Shutterstock)

Highlights

Here are the markets highlights for the week

It looks like 2020 is also becoming the year of the social media crypto scams as YouTube also suffered a first of its kind attack.

Bitcoin (Trading at $11,679 at the time of writing), started the week under pressure, as the main cryptocurrency dipped 71% from Monday to Friday. Nevertheless, Bitcoin remained above the $11,650 and $11,550 support level.

Binance Exchange Announces Chain Mainnet Upgrade

According to the Announcement, Binance’s chain Mainnet “Darwin” is expected to go through a hard fork at block height 109,999,000 scheduled on 2020/08/28 at 6:00 AM (UTC).

This new hard fork is named after scientist Charles Darwin. A hardfork is “an upgrade that is not compatible with the previous release because some breaking changes are introduced in the latest release. A hardfork in Binance Chain requires +⅔ validators to successfully upgrade to keep making blocks. If the existing full nodes in the network do not upgrade, they will not be able to receive and execute further blocks normally after the hardfork block height”, the announcement says:

Binance Chain Mainnet Darwin Upgrade Announcementhttps://t.co/3GnFK3h2dT pic.twitter.com/m6wWGFuknF
— Binance DEX (@Binance_DEX) August 23, 2020

Cred, Bitcoin.com Announces Update on Crypto Wallet

Licensed global financial services platform, Cred, and famous Bitcoin.com unveiled a new major update on the crypto wallet that allows users to access earnings.

The latest partnership witnessed the merge of the crypto wallet with the CredEarn platform. According to Yahoo Finance, this integration ‘allows wallet users to easily interact with the CredEarn platform without ever leaving the Bitcoin.com wallet application’.

https://t.co/UtJJm8netW Wallet Launches Cred’s 1-Touch “Earn” Button https://t.co/gNLMcaEJp4 pic.twitter.com/OYvGQh8cqN
— Bitcoin News (@BTCTN) August 23, 2020

Iran Closes 1,100 Illegal Bitcoin Miners

In a big crackdown led by Infos from an unknown whistleblower, the Iranian Power Generation, Distribution, and Transmission Company (Tavanir) announced the shut down of 1,100 illegally operating bitcoin miners.

According to Bitcoin.com, the whistleblower who cooperated with the gov’t was awarded $2,400.

However, the Iranian government is fully adopting the crypto ecosystem jolted by their desire to overcome the US sanctions.

Ripple's YouTube Scammers Steal 2.5 Million Sub Accounts

In a first of its kind on YouTube, scammers managed to get access to over 2.5 million sub-accounts, live-streaming dozens of Ripple scam videos promoting XRP giveaways all over the Internet.

^{Source: YouTube/UniversoCurioso}

As a result, the American blockchain company, Ripple, decided to file a lawsuit on the social media platform, asking YouTube to have more strict measures on illusive content. Users announced on Twitter:

Update on the ongoing XRP scams on YouTube.
- 1,543,000 received
- 839,000 laundered
- Most used VASPs for laundering are @binance (508K) and NiceChange (273K)
- Victims: More than 60% XRP come from @coinbase users, ~25% from private wallets, and only ~2-3% from @binance users
— xrplorer.com forensics (@xrpforensics) August 17, 2020

And this one said:

Dear @CoinbaseSupport. In the past couple of days, your users have been scammed of more than 230,000 XRP to scams promoted on YouTube.

Isn't it on time you started warning your users when they withdraw to potentially fraudulent accounts? https://t.co/B5crdeZRRn
— Thomas Silkjær (@Silkjaer) August 16, 2020

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