Investor and entrepreneur Mykhailo Patzan sent fraudsters 1 bitcoin because he believed that his business partner was asking for money.
An unusual story shared dev.ua.
According to Mykhailo, a couple of weeks ago, he was chatting on Telegram with his business partner in the evening and they were discussing bitcoin, which had reached a value of about $72,000 at the time, and the appropriateness of selling it.
Mykhailo was in the United States at the time, his partner was in Ukraine. The next day in the afternoon, Mykhailo received another voice message from his partner, as they usually communicated, asking him if he had sold the bitcoin. They exchanged a few more messages, one of which was the following from Mykhailo’s partner: «I’m at the bank, send me one bit»
Mykhailo said that it was normal for him and his partner to receive such questions about funds when communicating, but he called his partner back anyway.
«I called him because I had some questions: first, I had a little less than a bitcoin, and second, why on earth would he want a bitcoin from me. My logic also worked, social engineering and all that, so I called him, though on Telegram», — Mykhailo recalls.
His partner dropped the call and sent a voice message instead, saying that he was at the bank, couldn’t talk right now, and would call back in about 40 minutes. According to Mykhailo, the style of the conversation, as well as the voice, were completely similar to his partner’s.
After 20-30 minutes, the partner got in touch again, but did not call back, but sent a video message saying that it was definitely me, not artificial intelligence. This message convinced Mykhailo, and he sent the money that his partner had asked for. When asked when he would be able to return the funds, the partner replied — tomorrow at 11 o’clock.
So, according to Mikhail, no one returned the funds to him yesterday. As it turned out — his partner was probably artificial intelligence. More precisely, the criminals who used AI tools to lure him out of his money.
The next day, when Mykhailo contacted his partner, it turned out that the latter’s Telegram account had been hacked and that he had written to many other contacts with similar requests to send money, but in different amounts, tailored to the person he was talking to. According to Mykhailo and his partner’s estimates, about $500,000 was transferred to the attackers from their close circle of people alone in an hour.