According to recent reports, AT&T might be responsible for the loss of $24 million in cryptocurrency, after the cell phone of a digital currency investor was hacked. With this in mind, Michael Turpin is suing the telecom firm for $224 million, after the company reportedly failed to protect his smartphone data.

As part of his lawsuit, the investor claims that AT&T employees are complicit in a SIM swap scam, where hackers attempt to gain access to phone data via social engineering. In other words, for this scam to work, criminals are known to pose as the owner of a victims’ phone number, hence convincing the customer support teams of telecom providers to grant access to the phone in question. By doing this, attackers get access to a variety of accounts, including digital currency wallets.

Every new trend that appears on the internet is bound to give scammers numerous opportunities to come up with various ideas meant to take people’s money away. Bitcoin is no exception to this case, as there are thousands of bitcoin-based scams that unknowing users can get involved in.

With this in mind, in this article, we will discuss the main types of scams and factors that you should keep in mind to avoid a bitcoin scam, whenever you see one. Considering the fact that few people truly understand the way bitcoin and the blockchain works, educating yourself should be the first step.

While Bitcoin has seen a massive growth in popularity in areas from all around the world, it seems like some Governments are still strongly against mass adoption and use of the digital currency. One such example is Columbia, which, according to recent reports, has just declared Bitcoin illegal, thus joining another handful of nations that have taken the same step.

The announcement was made at the beginning of 2017, by the main regulatory agency operating in Columbia, known by the name of Superintendency of Corporations. It seems like the action may have been taken to stop the growth of Ponzi-based investment clubs that operate via digital currencies. In fact, the operators of these investment clubs encourage people throughout the country to invest in bitcoin, and promise huge returns, yet this is not always the case, especially when investing in a Ponzi scheme- in fact, some of these schemes have gotten to the point of being hilarious, considering the fact that some promise a 100% return on the initial investment.

Unfortunately, during the last couple of months, cyber-attacks and ransom attempts have become significantly more common, given the raising popularity of bitcoin as a ransomware payment method.

In fact, a study carried out among a number of UK companies has revealed that many of them have begun building a bitcoin reserve meant to pay off cyber-criminals in case their businesses are attacked. To put things better into perspective, according to the numbers that were crushed into place by the Citrix and Censuswide companies, which managed to question a total of 250 UK IT companies and their respective security managers, it seems like 1 in 3 UK IT companies has a bitcoin reserve meant to be used for this purpose.

During the last couple of months, ransomware attacks have increased significantly, thus forcing online businesses from all around the world to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of bitcoin to scammers.

However, a group known by the name of Armada Collective has decided to take advantage of the fear caused by the increasing number of DDoS attacks, and make some money for themselves. To learn more about the cybercriminals, CloudFlare has decided to take matters into their own hands, and investigate.