Three separate online petitions have been opened by individuals who have reportedly lost their investments in the defunct HashOcean Bitcoin mining company. They are seeking to get the interest of the relevant transborder crimes department of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, CIA, Interpol and MI6.
The petitions include FBI - EUA: FIND HASHOCEAN.COM by Hugo Trombini in Brazil, FBI - EUA - CIA - MI-6 - INTERPOL: FIND OWNER HASHOCEAN.COM by Adam A. from the United Kingdom and FBI And Interpol Hashocean 700,000 people swindled by Gonzalo D. from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina. The three campaigns have gathered over a thousand signatures so far.
Hugo Trombini has also opened a Facebook page Find Hashocean where he seeks to gain support of other HashOcean scam victims on the need to ‘centralize information’ to achieve a common goal which is to get those behind the website.
Victims’ plea for help
Trombini, for example, says he has made efforts to contact organizations of interest with the hope of sharing the information he has, including IP addresses and contact details. With these details he thinks it will help to trace and locate those behind the vanished site.
His petition campaign says:
“The website HashOcean.com is off-line and took with them millions of dollars from approximately 700,000 users worldwide. Since there are neither regulating institutions nor reliable sources of information, we have decided to open this channel to all users and supporters of cloud mining - people who believe in a transparent mining process. We created this petition to be able to ask the FBI and other similar institutions to trace those in charge of www.HashOcean.com - Cloud Mining. 700,000 users want their money back and the supporters of Cloud Mining deserve a reliable mining process.
If you lost money with www.HashOcean.com - Cloud Mining or you are simply a cryptocurrency supporter, please help us to raise awareness and get specialist help to trace the people responsible for HashOcean.com. Please sign the petition and forward to as many people as possible in all social medias. Let´s unite and raise awareness as soon as possible.”
Why start the petition?
In a Facebook chat with Cointelegraph, Trombini said he started the campaign because he had lost about $10,000 dollars - everything he had and six months of work: “I see others want justice, so I started to search for my own.”
On why he directed his petition to the FBI and what he expects them to do he said:
“The first thing I thought was: they have a well-structured department. They have a large team for these sorts of cases. As crypto coins are a money of the world, I think they don’t want this money to go into arms and drugs, and neither do I. So I think many people put all this money into the system and now they are very sad.”
He said he will be disappointed if the FBI does not find the HashOcean team or choose not to find them.
He explains:
“If they find them, we will then have an example and we can create some parameters to determine if a site or a mining cloud company is a scam or not. We have to set minimum rules to trust a website or a cloud mining site like a registry or something to tell us that this farm is working ok. So if the FBI can’t find or don’t want to find them, I think then anyone can create their own scam, and nothing will happen to them.”
Hoashocean.com now worth $44 million
According to Kypertech hackers, the HashOcean.com site is now worth $44m and is up for grabs. In response to a claim that says the group’s Polish hacker could be hacking the original HashOcean website, the group posts on its Facebook page:
“Wow! So now people are blaming us for #hashocean shutting down while we have been doing nothing but trying to fix things!?! Our Polish hacker didn't even touch their website until AFTER IT WAS DOWN. People will say anything to get a fix nowadays. We did not originally ‘hack’ hashocean. THEY PARKED THEIR DOMAIN AND ARE TRYING TO SELL IT WHICH, IF WE MIGHT ADD, IS CURRENTLY WORTH $44 MILLION DOLLARS.”
A list of suspicious cloud mining sites to follow
Kypertech advises that miners should be careful with any further dealings with cloud miners.
The hackers say about other cloud mining sites:
“For those interested, we are not recommending cloud mining sites at this time. We have already found four more sites which are still running, yet are scams, according to forums we have found on the deep web. Our list of them will follow soon. Please refrain from posting links of sites with referral links because we CANNOT validate these sites and with the current trend of shutting down, it seems no site is safe. Even though you have been paid out for months or it looks legit we all know what happened when we said the same about #hashocean.”