United States blockchain and crypto investor Michael Terpin has won $75.8 million in a civil case against 21-year-old Nicholas Truglia, who reportedly defrauded him of crypto assets. Reuters reported the news on May 10. Per the report, the California Superior Court last week ordered Manhattan resident Truglia to pay the amount above in compensatory and punitive damages. The amount is reportedly one of the largest court judgments awarded to an individual in the crypto space thus far, Reuters notes. As previously reported, Terpin filed the complaint against Truglia in particular in late December, after first filing a lawsuit against AT&T …
Cryptocurrency crime trends have been in the spotlight in recent weeks, but SIM swapping has been strangely absent in a number of reports on 2018. Cryptocurrency analytics companies CipherTrace and Chainalysis released two different reports focusing on the major crime trends in the space in 2018. While their data and findings sum up the biggest threats of the last 12 months, they’ve omitted the prevalence of SIM swapping in recent times. How it works SIM swapping is a relatively simple concept to understand, but the potential damage that can be done to an individual is scary, to say the least. …
BitSIM is a small, dual-chip overlay that is physically placed atop a phone's regular SIM card. Once there, the BitSIM turns that phone – even if it's a “dumb” phone – into a Bitcoin wallet. It does so by submitting transactions to the Bitcoin network as encrypted text messages. The phone owner's private key – stored in the BitSIM overlay – is unlocked with a PIN. Founder Leon-Gerard Vandenberg says that BitSIM “interposes SIM commands between the original SIM and the phone. So the phone thinks there's a SIM there, and the original SIM thinks there's a phone there – …