Some
interesting alpha regarding the 80,000 BTC transfer that occurred two days ago:
Before the 8 transfers (10K BTC each), someone sent OP_RETURN messages to those wallet addresses saying things like:
"We’ve taken over this wallet"
"Prove ownership by Sept 30"
It is just a scam method and a lazy one at that. But it may bait a victim or two. You can't claim ownership on anyone's coins, legally or illegally.
Total coincidence.
The real owner saw the messages and moved the coins to be safe.
Or maybe someone’s trying to fake a hack story to avoid proving where the BTC came from.
Okay, yeah — it’s a scammy move, no doubt… It might actually work in some cases, and about “claiming ownership” of someone else’s crypto.., there’s definitely some legal weirdness there.
I had something super similar happen to me. I had this ancient Coinbase wallet — like, 10 or 11 years old — totally forgot about it, then out of the blue, I get this email from Coinbase saying, “Hey, you’ve got leftover funds, better withdraw them.”
So I try to log in — boom, password doesn’t work. Turns out they shut down those old wallets completely. And what do they do next, they hand my money over to some law firm in Delaware, and now I have to jump through legal hoops to prove it’s actually mine.
So yeah… when I saw this recent thing, my first thought was — these scammers are literally copying that same logic.
Yeah but that is not the same
case even if the method is similar. Those were not your coins, you had an IOU
withfrom Coinbase. Never leave anything on any platform, because exchanges are basically like banks. They can even withhold your money for illegal reasons and with illegal practices, and it may take you years of lawsuits to get it back. But no, you can't claim someone elses coins legally as long as they actually do own the coins. To really own them, you must hold them yourself.