How to find a victim in the SEC archive
A new cryptocurrency scam technology has appeared on the network. Although, the new is just a well-forgotten old. Modern scammers have taken proven technologies and adapted them to modern conditions.
Everything is very simple.
The victim is chosen – usually a fast-growing crypto company. There are a couple of dissatisfied customers – any company always has some. What to do – there is a category of people who lack trees in the forest, stones in the mountains and water in the ocean. However, scammers have learned to do without them. Groups of dissatisfied people are being created – a dozen live accounts and thousands of bots. Sometimes expensive bots that quite reliably imitate real users.
Then an information attack begins – a massive spread of negativity, in which there is one real fact for a dozen fakes. The goal is to create unrest among customers and demonstrate the threat of future problems.
Having frayed the victim’s nerves, scammers come out demanding compensation. Cryptans who come under attack face an unpleasant choice: put the company under attack and suffer losses, or pay.
And here the victim selection technology plays in favor of the ransomware,
This is precisely a fast-growing crypto-company, that is, a structure that has not yet had time to acquire a toothy legal service, has, as a rule, a good income (that’s why it is fast-growing) and values its reputation, the loss of which can be very expensive. In the crypto business, perhaps the main driver of growth is the information background. You can grow well with positivity, but lose everything with negativity.
And there is one more detail that immediately puts the victim at a disadvantage. Now only those companies that are mentioned in the archives of US SEC cases are under attack. This is immediately passed off as a serious negative signal, although in reality it means no more than an inscription on a fence.
The victims who paid the ransom do not want to make the story public. According to rumors, the extortionists have already approached Impact Theory and Green United; the effectiveness of the attack is unknown.
The price tag for corporate blackmailers starts at a million dollars. They claim that Binance’s problems also arose precisely because of such schemes; they even named a figure of $340 million.
Khamitzhan Dikhaev vs. Meta Force
The latest known victim of corporate blackmailers was Meta Force (Lado) of Vladimir Okhotnikov. It is a rare case when the identity of a representative of a blackmail team is known. This is some person called Khamitzhan Dikhaev, a native of Kazakhstan, now living in Georgia. The “work” follows the standard pattern: a case is fabricated, fake messages are sent, groups are formed on social networks.
As usual, the flurry of allegations includes allegations that the SEC has filed a criminal investigation in which Meta Force managers are defendants. There is no hiding from the fact that Meta Force is accused of being a Ponzi scheme, which is obviously not the case.
The personality of Mr. Dikhaev is noteworthy. He is wanted in Kazakhstan on charges of fraud, but this does not prevent him from openly engaging in corporate blackmail in Georgia. True, he cannot leave Georgia – huge personal debts interfere. This gentleman is trying to be an advocate for Meta Force clients… truly, we live in a strange world!
It is unlikely that Mr. Dikhaev will succeed with Meta Force, at least because a leak occurred and blackmail lost its effectiveness.
It is obvious that the attacks will not stop. However, this is a normal process for a new business. Very soon immunity will be developed, and Dikhaev’s business project will disappear into oblivion, and the crypto-scam scheme will go into the archives.
