Last week had Black Friday hit the retail industry and Bitcoin Black Friday also came and went — but not without a little bit of a scandal, as it turns out the newly minted BitcoinBlackFriday.info website (not to be mistaken for BitcoinBlackFriday.com) was a scam. Keep reading for the follow-up on that now-unveiled con job.

The Google+ Bitcoin Community founded by Avatar X has reached its third anniversary and over 17,000 members.

Crime news seems to dominate this Bitcoin Weekly now that the sordid saga of GAW Miners, ZenMiner and the companies’ founder Josh Garza has opened a new chapter as the Securities and Exchange Commission filed an official complaint alleging fraud and a Ponzi scheme. This particular story has been unfolding since early 2015.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and the criminals behind them are beginning to make more news by asking for bitcoin ransoms as part of extortion. This week, three Greek banks found themselves under fire from DDoS attacks and the attackers requested bitcoin to stop; however the banks refused to be extorted.

Finally, the company LibertyX (subsidiary of Moon, Inc.) has launched an interesting service at over 13,000 retail outlets that allows customers to purchase bitcoins for cash.

Bitcoin market value has drifted upwards over the past week to $360 from $330; the past seven days also saw a brief peak around $380. Trade volume also spiked around November 26, which is also Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. (a day before the aforementioned Black Friday).

This and more in this Bitcoin Weekly.

GAW Miners, ZenMiner and Josh Garza face SEC Ponzi scheme charges

The day has finally come for GAW Miners and ZenMiner, two proported bitcoin mining operations, and the companies’ founder, Homero Joshua Garza a.k.a. Josh Garza, as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) laid charges of conducting a Ponzi scheme. The press release on the filing is already available at the SEC’s press website.

The long and sordid tale of Garza and his trail of companies is reported by SiliconANGLE’s Duncan Riley. Rumors of the SEC investigation into Garza and his companies started in January 2015 and eventually went downhill when Paybase (also owned by Garza) stopped trading after an apparent hacking claim.

Now the rumors have proven true, and the SEC is laying charges with a complaint filed December 1, 2015, available here [PDF].

The charges allege the fraud was perpetrated via the two companies by offering shares in a bitcoin mining operation that did not exist. The SEC goes on to say, “In reality, GAW Miners and ZenMiner did not own enough computing power for the mining it promised to conduct, so most investors paid for a share of computing power that never existed. And, “Returns paid to some investors came from proceeds generated from sales to other investors.”

The charges allege specifically that Garza sold $20 million worth of mining contracts called “Haslets” to over 10,000 investors between August 2014 and December 2014. While these mining contracts should have been tied to computing power used to mine bitcoins, and therefore deliver profitable proceeds, because they were not, the company could not have fulfilled its contracts.

Most investors who bought into Hashlets, the SEC alleges, never recovered the full amount of their investment.

The official G+ Bitcoin Community turns 3!

The official Bitcoin Community on Google+ has just reached its third anniversary! The community founder, Avatar X, has celebrated this birthday with a Google+ post.

Congratulations on your third anniversary G+ Bitcoin Community. To many more!

Over the past three years, the Bitcoin Community on G+ has grown to 17,452 members with 15,272 posts published from over 23,000 submissions.

In 2014, SiliconANGLE interviewed Avatar X about the community when it hit 10,000 members; it has grown by over 7,000 since then. The G+ community continues to be a busy placed filled with curated news and discussion, and it has been a credit to the bitcoin community as a whole.

If you have Google+ visit and join the Bitcoin Community today.

Hackers extort Greek banks with bitcoin ransom demands

Three Greek banks have been targeted by hackers with attacks and extortion requesting bitcoin as ransom. The hacker group, calling itself the Armada Collective, struck the first bank on Thursday, November 26, 2015, last week and demanded a ransom of 2,000 BTC (approx. $7.2 million USD), according to Greek police and the country’s central bank.

CNBC is reporting that the initial attacks took the form of DDoS designed to knock out the bank’s consumer-facing websites and make it impossible for clients to do business. On Thursday, the hackers managed to disrupt electronic transactions at all three banks; however, customer information remains protected.

“No bank responded to this extortion, so the same hackers tried again at the weekend and today,” a Greek official said on Monday. “But we had strengthened our defense in the meantime, so no disruptions took place.”

In spite of the disruptive nature of the attacks, none of the banks involved have given into the ransom demands and there are no plans to.

In the past, DDoS attack threats followed by ransom demands have rarely been honored when a payment is made anyway, as seen with the attacks against ProtonMail, a private encrypted e-mail service, which still suffered a massive DDoS attack after paying a ransom.

While ransoms are not unknown, bitcoin as a currency is slowly becoming a favorite among DDoS extortionists. As a result, it is putting the currency into the media as connected (again) with criminality. However, in the past, extortionists simply demanded money in their local currency or through other payment services.

A further problem of paying ransom to DDoS attack extortion is that it funds further DDoS attacks against other vulnerable targets in the future. Over the past few years, DDoS attacks for ransom have been on the rise and anti-DDoS services have become prevalently needed for defense.

Businesses that depend on websites to connect to customers are particularly vulnerable and often become targets. This came to light with an intensity this Black Friday as e-retailers preapred for DDoS attacks (and potential ransoms).

LibertyX launches service at 13,000 locations for buying bitcoin

Many bitcoin services have been attempting to resolve the barrier to buying bitcoin, such as Coinbase, Inc. and Circle Inc., that allow customers to get bitcoins with the click of a mouse (or touch of a mobile screen), but LibertyX (subsidiary of Moon, Inc.) is looking to allow people to pull cash out of their pocket and trade it for bitcoin.

As reported in The Merkle, LibertyX has expanded to 13,000 participating retail locations where, with the use of a mobile app, customers can pay cash to the retailer for BTC delivered to their bitcoin address. Currently, the service is only available in the United States and the island of Guernsey (a British Crown protectorate in the English Channel), a nation that happens to also export the .GG Internet domain (which is big in esports venues).

The LibertyX mobile app is available for iOS and Android. Users can also look in the app and website for a map of retail locations where cash can be exchanged for bitcoins. A quick check shows approximately 18 total locations in the Phoenix metro area (mostly in the north), so there’s certainly a presence that can be seen.

Currently, only cash is accepted for bitcoins, however LibertyX is researching the possibility of adding debit and credit card options (without having to pass along additional fees).

According to the website, the first $1,000 in transactions is without a fee for customers who sign up using Facebook; after there will be a one percent flat fee on all transactions up to $5,000. No fees are added by the store (processing fees or sales tax).

The amount of bitcoins that can be bought by a given customer is limited by a verification level. Up to $100 can be purchased by simply having the iOS/Android app, up to $200 for customers with a verified phone number and up to $1,000 with a verified identity.

Visit the LibertyX website to learn more.

At first it looked like it might just be competition for the Bitcoin Black Friday founded by Jon Holmquist. However, once it launched and showed its true colors it became the poster child for caveat emptor.

Bitcoin Black Friday marred with a scam, but otherwise went well

For the past four years, BitcoinBlackFriday.com has been the go-to for Black Friday deals to be had by bitcoin users. This year, however, an apparent upstart competitor appeared with the website BitcoinBlackFriday.info. It had all the trappings of a proper Bitcoin Black Friday site (and even a press release and newsletter); however, once the fateful Friday rolled around, it was quickly revealed to be a scam.

Erased. But not quite adeptly enough to remove everything (someone forgot to delete a directory).

As of this posting, BitcoinBlackFriday.info, the central site to the scam, has been taken down. Although it has been taken down in the most inept way possible: The content was simply deleted, leaving behind a single directory “deals/,” which is also empty.

After the launch of the BitcoinBlackFriday.info site, users quickly began to detect something fishy. Some of the deals began to lead to slightly wrong websites, such as “Buy-Trezor.com” when the proper website for Trezor, a bitcoin hardware wallet, is “BuyTrezor.com.” The information spread quickly on Reddit and the BitcoinTalk forums.

The level of the scam’s attention to detail and hours spent producing a good-looking website and at least half a dozen phishing websites to mimic intended sites meant that some thought was put into the con. It is currently unknown how many people may have been taken in by the scam, and unfortunately it will not likely be the first to hit the bitcoin community.

SiliconANGLE caught up with Jon Holmquist, founder of BitcoinBlackFriday.com:

“We’ve been saying since they launched that we aren’t associated with them,” Holmquist said. “It’s a shame that they took the opportunity to deceive shoppers during a holiday season, and I feel bad for any consumers out there who lost out. The people responsible for the scam site should feel awful.”

Cheers to Bitcoin Black Friday next year, and keep an eye on Bitcoin Weekly for stats on this year’s Black Friday should they be posted.

Featured image credit: via reddit member huevos_de_acero