An unknown (to me) user by the name of u/James-Gilbert938 contacted me via direct chat on reddit with a relatively innocuous "Hello friend". Hopefully most of you will be able to spot an incoming scam straight away from this first contact alone. I thought that I would engage to see where this was going and he immediately "confirmed" his full name and location to gain my trust (as, you know, all trustworthy people do online).

James then proceeded to tell me that he was a "certified" bitcoin miner. Yup. Certified and explained exactly how he was able make a lot of money on investments. I responded for the lols to see how far I could take it.

I asked our new friend to send me some bitcoin so that I could assess the speed of transactions as very recently my mother and I lost a lot of investment money due to an investor not receiving our funds in time (spoiler:this didn't actually happen).

He did it. Another pic here.

It was only $5 but it was something. I tried to convince him to double it so I could check whether or not the speed would be affected by an increase in funds sent but he wasn't convinced. Apparently, he's been conned like this before because he's just too honest. Poor honest scammer. I was hoping that promising extra funds from my mother would help sweeten the deal but I think he smelled a fish as he wasn't even willing to send the same amount. You'd think the $7 he'd already sent me would be less than pocket change to a certified bitcoin miner but clearly that $2 means more to him than he's willing to admit. Oh, hang on a minute…it appears that his sense of greed is greater than his common sense! He only went and did it! Now it just so happened that James, despite being an expert in bitcoin, managed to apparently send the funds to the wrong account and immediately believed I'd scammed him. Despite being in bitcoin for "6 years" he didn't consider that he could verify the transaction using a block explorer so I showed him that he'd either made a mistake or never sent it to me in the first place. He resent it (and then apparently "texted" the person he sent the original funds to by mistake for a refund. lol!). So I then I had $15 of his bitcoin. Luckily, for the lols, I was able to spend a little more time and effort in convincing him that this second transaction was way too slow. So he sent through a third transaction!! He tried to style it out, but he couldn't fool me. I now have $25 of the scammer's money.

Anyway, thought some of you might get a kick out of this. As ever, please be vigilant. Not only in dealing with bitcoin – there are scammers and con artists out there eager to take what's rightfully yours at every step. If anything about a situation seems a little strange then keep your guard up.

Also, to my new friend the bitcoin billionaire who likes to scam people, how are you feeling?

Edit: as it's not clear from the post, I scammed the scammer 3 times for a total of $25.