Was the call I received from a mempool 'Database Officer' genuine?

MrGumby

Hello.

Advice please!

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, had any dealings with crypto currencies. But I was called out of the blue by someone describing himself as a mempool 'Database Officer' who knew my name and some other details as well as my mobile number. He subsequently sent emails from an account at mempoolspacebtc.com.

He said I had opened some sort of account in 2017 and it still held 1.45 BTC, now worth £100K+. He would help me access the money for a 2.5% fee. I had to set up a crypto exchange, e.g. at Coinbase, deposit a percentage of the value into the account amounting to almost £1K to reactivate my 1.45 BTC. Or something like that.

He went on to say "Also we managed to set up a tracker which is connected to the wallet we have here so you can look at it on real time". He gave a userid and pw for https://cointracking.info/. The dashboard there does show the BTC and sterling values given above.

This all seems very odd. I have no recollection of getting involved with bitcoin. I diligently maintain a secure database of all financial accounts and also record them in Quicken. There is no record of anything crypto-related. Annoyingly, I recently lost all my pre-2018 emails, so can't check for a relevant email. Certainly, there have been no crypto emails since 2017.

Could this be genuine?

TadleyBaggie

Of course it's a scam. 

FlorayG

Absolutely no.Scammers have all sorts of personal information on you

wmb194

MrGumby said:

Hello.

Advice please!

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, had any dealings with crypto currencies. But I was called out of the blue by someone describing himself as a mempool 'Database Officer' who knew my name and some other details as well as my mobile number. He subsequently sent emails from an account at mempoolspacebtc.com.

He said I had opened some sort of account in 2017 and it still held 1.45 BTC, now worth £100K+. He would help me access the money for a 2.5% fee. I had to set up a crypto exchange, e.g. at Coinbase, deposit a percentage of the value into the account amounting to almost £1K to reactivate my 1.45 BTC. Or something like that.

He went on to say "Also we managed to set up a tracker which is connected to the wallet we have here so you can look at it on real time". He gave a userid and pw for https://cointracking.info/. The dashboard there does show the BTC and sterling values given above.

This all seems very odd. I have no recollection of getting involved with bitcoin. I diligently maintain a secure database of all financial accounts and also record them in Quicken. There is no record of anything crypto-related. Annoyingly, I recently lost all my pre-2018 emails, so can't check for a relevant email. Certainly, there have been no crypto emails since 2017.

Could this be genuine?

No, it's a classic advance fee fraud. Your basic details were probably leaked from somewhere e.g., a retailer's website was hacked. 

If you had ever done anything with crypto you would remember because it would have been new and unusual and you say you keep good records. 

Do nothing and don't talk to them.

booneruk

This is dripping with scam! First of all, 1.45 BTC in 2017 would still have been at least a few thousand pounds so surely you'd remember 'investing' that amount of money.

mon3ysav3r

MrGumby said:

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, had any dealings with crypto currencies. But I was called out of the blue by someone describing himself as a mempool 'Database Officer' who knew my name and some other details as well as my mobile number. He subsequently sent emails from an account at mempoolspacebtc.com.

"Database Officer" seems to make no sense when talking about Bitcoin, mempool.space merely provides data about the Bitcoin network (the queue of pending and unconfirmed transactions), by the nature of bitcoin there is no centralised database for anyone to be an officer of.

If mempoolspacebtc.com really is the domain they are using for emails then:

- They appear to have copied a similarly sounding real website name, mempool.space

- The registrar of mempoolspacebtc.com is namecheap.com which is popular amongst scammers

- This name seems for sale at this time

- It was registered only in September last year.

Eyeful

Its clearly a scam!

This website was created on  21 Sept 2024

Here is what one scam web checker thinks of it:
https://www.scamdoc.com/view/2250345

Check if any Email address you have used is in a known data breech. Type the Email address into this:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

MrGumby

Brilliant replies. Thanks, everyone. It's as I suspected (hence my question) but my ignorance of crypto currencies made me want to check.

MrGumby

Eyeful said:

Check if any Email address you have used is in a known data breech. Type the Email address into this:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Thanks. Did that. Just the 21 data breaches! From Dropbox and Adobe to Twitter and TAPAir. Changing my main email address could be painful though.

flaneurs_lobster

MrGumby said:

Eyeful said:

Check if any Email address you have used is in a known data breech. Type the Email address into this:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Thanks. Did that. Just the 21 data breaches! From Dropbox and Adobe to Twitter and TAPAir. Changing my main email address could be painful though.

Not that unusual.

What's more important is that your email account has a long, complicated & unique password (or you've replaced the password with a passkey) and 2FA applied. 

Worth changing your passwords on those exploited sites, if you still use them.

born_again

MrGumby said:

Brilliant replies. Thanks, everyone. It's as I suspected (hence my question) but my ignorance of crypto currencies made me want to check.

Do you have any?