“Negligence of Major Phone Companies Is Crypto’s Biggest Threat”. BitAngels’ Michael Terpin

These are international gangs. There's not just one, there's multiple.

So say this person gets access to your identity.

We've worked with 103 ICOs.

Okay. And you see this as an organized crime.

You could have gotten Amazon back then for about $4 a share.

Now that you're going through this probably.

Like, nightmare, I went to the FBI. They just ignored the long nuclear winter of like, you know, bitcoin is dead. Bitcoin is dead. I do pretty firmly believe that bitcoin is my own personal belief will hit a high of at least 50,000 sometime in the next three to five years.

Can you briefly introduce yourself in 30 seconds?

Sure. I'm Michael Turpin and I'm the founder and CEO of Transform Group. And I'm also an investor in various blockchain projects.

Right. And you've been in the industry a long time, as I remember.

Right.2013, early 2013.

A long time in blockchain.

Seemed late when I got in and I saw all the people who were in 2011, but I guess now being in five years kind of makes you an old timer.

So you have this big story right now with AT&T. But can you just like tell our viewers what happened there? What is going on? What's the case?

So the entire crypto community has been targeted by gangs, crypto gangs, for quite some time. And it accelerated as the price of bitcoin and other crypto assets went up. And, you know, they've tried all sorts of ways to, you know, get into personal files. They started out with, you know, kind of sending JavaScript and click on this and click on that. And, you know, pretty much most people who are sophisticated know not to click on a JavaScript file that's disguised as an invoice or something like that. And there's pretty good malware, software, et cetera. But right now, the biggest risk to anybody who's high profile in the crypto industry and really anybody who has identifiable involvement in the community, is the major phone companies promise you security and don't deliver it. So I've been hacked twice. The first time was last year. It's all in my lawsuit. Did not lose that much. The first time. I thought I was already pretty secure because I have all my major assets in bank vaults, on Trezors and ledgers, anything in ERC20 or Ethereum or Bitcoin. But as an investor and a marketer in this space, I have dozens of different cryptocurrencies that don't neatly fit into any of those profiles. There are some cryptocurrencies that you have to keep in a staking wall to be able to continue to get that. And they don't have Google 2fa any online exchange. I have, I have Google 2fa. There's been some fake news out there or just people not reading the lawsuit and just speculating. I think one article said, well, gee, it's Coinbase's fault if he lost all those bitcoins on Coinbase. I don't have a Coinbase account, I never have had one. So. And they weren't bitcoins, they were basically altcoins. And, and so the way that they actually got into them was pretty intricate. It'll come out of trial. I don't want to go into all the nitty gritty details. But it was not anything involving not using Google Authenticator or an exchange. The only reason that they did get in there is because AT&T allowed one of their reps in a store in Connecticut to give my six digit code that they told me when I requested a higher level of authorization of security. So all four of the major telco providers have this program that's called the celebrity program that gives you a higher level of security that I was told at the time that I signed up for. It cannot be overridden. So in other words, if I come into the store and I have my passport, 19 forms of ID, the Pope and all my relatives, I still can't access my own account with the phone that they gave me until I give them the six digit number. What they did not say is that any low level $10 an hour store clerk can override that. Normally when you think that there's a password that is supposed to be a high level password to protect you, it would be like a PIN number at a bank. I can't go in the bank and, and if they ask me for my, you know, if I go to an ATM and they ask me, put in your four digits, I can't go. Can you override that for me? Right. It's hardware based. It's something that is, you know, it has to be done here. It isn't. And that shocked me. And they never disclosed to me that any low level employee at, AT and T can go in and override the systems that they promised me. The first one is it said, I have a screenshot of my file the day that this happened. It basically says high security account at the very top. So it's not like the guy was stupid and couldn't see there was a high security account. And also, besides putting in that six digit number, you also have to then scan the person's ID to make sure it's a real id. It didn't scan. So they did a manual override. That's all in the records. So only one of two things is possible. Either the person is a complete idiot and cooperated with the hackers unknowingly, or which still shouldn't have been allowed under the way that they promised it to me, or he's part of the gang and just got bribed. And there's a lot of evidence that this is going on pretty wildly right now.

But the first time as I understood it, it was you didn't have that high security account and there was some other kind of identity fraud happening.

It was the same thing. It's just that this time it was a much smaller amount of money and it was actually AT and T and T Mobile and they hacked both of my accounts the same day within about an hour of each other. So again, either they found really stupid people who don't. Who don't, because again, even without the higher security, you're still supposed to have a scannable passport, a scannable id. I'm focusing on the second one because A, it was a lot more money was a half a bitcoin the first time, back when bitcoin wasn't worth that much. And B, this was after they had the high security in place and we have much more evidence showing everything that happened on the second one.

But I still sort of want to walk through this step by step because I think that helps people also understand how they can prevent this kind of thing if it's possible. So what that looks like you're saying is that a person goes into a physical AT&T store and says that they're you.

That's correct. Either that or because they erase the video footage pretty regularly. It's very possible that, that the person didn't even have anybody come into the store. They pretended someone is in there and they scanned a subway card and said it didn't scan and then did a manual override. It's quite possible that the AT&T rep did it with nobody actually in the store at all. They just simply, you know, case after case is coming out. And there have been several arrests in July that have in common ATT employees who were basically bribed.

So say this person gets access to your, well, identity, they're getting access to your phone number on a different phone.

Right. They are able to go in when an AT&T rep you know, a retail rep in a store turns over my digital identity. They turn over anything that would have access to my phone number without my permission after promising that that would not happen.

So basically what happens is that they now have access to changing passwords because they just confirmed with the phone number.

They have access to anything that has a phone number attached to it as a form of verification, which is much broader than wallets.

Why was that? In a place that was accessible by.

A phone number, it should not have been accessible other than being broken into and being handed over and having the hackers be able to go and prowl around all sorts of things that were within my network of computers because they were able to get access to that through this. So it wasn't as simple as, and it wasn't as has been misreported. Oh, I had a Coinbase account and they were able to reset that. That was not it. It was not an online exchange. It was not an exchange. It was a native wallet.

Because what you're saying is this is. These currencies were not, you couldn't store them in a cold storage.

Most of the smaller tokens, if they're not ERC20 tokens and none of these were ERC20 tokens or they'd be in my ledger, are not storable through that. They have to be stored in, you know, on a paper wallet or. And then you can't stake the new tokens. So they have to be, you know, they have to be stored essentially in the native wallet.

Now that you're going through this probably like nightmare with AT&T, can you give some advice to investors?

Sure. Overall, I would say if you are a recognizable person in the crypto industry, you can't use any of the major four phone companies, period. And you have to, if you for some reason need to use that, you have to make sure that anytime that you use any piece of software, not just, not just your crypto accounts, but your online email accounts. You were the first time that I got hacked. They actually hacked into my DNS servers and started to move my domains to India. I caught it in time. So in other words, any piece of software that ever asks for your phone number, do not give AT and T or any of the other ones because again, you're at risk of, of having any low level retail employee be bribed to go and just give it up. And they will take a lot more than your crypto assets. They'll try and break into your bank accounts, they'll try to break into any information they can find and anything that you have access to from any digital format. So the ways of getting around this, which is what I do now, is you have to have a Google Voice number, because Google Voice, basically you can't go to Google and say sim swap me. You can't go to a Google employee and say, move my Google Voice number. They're unmovable. So most places will allow that. There are some places that don't allow VoIP services. So then you have to perhaps get like a cricket phone or I believe Google Fi would also work under this. But you have to have something that does not have a retail store where a $10 an hour employee can be bribed to give up your information and your digital life. Okay.

And you see this as an organized effort. You said organized crime.

Clearly organized. Okay. There are hundreds of millions. I've been approached since this by so many people who had the similar thing happen. And they basically said, I went to the FBI. They just ignored me. I didn't know that there was anything I could do. And so I've got, like I said, dozens of people have approached between me and my attorney saying, you know, how do we get in? And we're not doing a class action suit, we're doing a single suit here. But I think other people have been hit in similar ways. In one instance for more money than I got hit for and another instance for pretty close to it. So this is not an isolated instance. These are international gangs. There's not just one, there's multiple. It's kind of like isis. They're copycats. But, you know, and the FBI has started to finally crack down on a couple of them. The arrests happened because they were able to penetrate a, a Discord server. They were able to go in and, you know, get one person who was in this OG users group. So, you know, all you need sometimes is one who's facing you know, life imprisonment or other. Really. I mean, Joel Ortiz, the one who got arrested last month, is facing 28 counts. So, you know, these guys are starting to rat on their friends. And so you follow. The FBI is very good at sort of like, you know, following the trail and they'll do what they do. And I'm certainly working with all of those law enforcement agencies and been doing that since the day this happened.

Honestly, before this story came out, I hadn't really heard of this as like a large scale problem. The problem I do hear about, and something I discussed yesterday with a different panelist is cryptojacking, which you mentioned, like JavaScript, but that's not the only way that that's done. But do you see this, just to clarify, do you see this issue with telecom companies as being bigger than crypto?

Bigger, much bigger. SIM jacking basically is the biggest threat to individual assets right now. And it's something that is surprisingly simple for these telcos to fix. Simply, if you're promising someone a higher security password, don't let it be overruled by a $10 an hour employee. Make it mandatory. With all their hundreds of millions of dollars of technology, they can have something where you says, please type in, oh, you entered a high security account. Please Type in the 6 digit or 8 digit password and if you type in the wrong one, it says, we're sorry, please try that again. That's not what they have. That's what I was led to believe they had by saying that it cannot be overridden. Same thing with the scanning of the id. If it's a fake id, it should say, I'm sorry, that didn't register. Please scan again. Not oh, a $10 an hour employee can do a manual override. That's what the facts say. That's what the screen capture that I have from the AT&T official records that day says.

You've been an investor in the blockchain space for a while.

Right.

And you have invested in a bunch of ICOs.

You mentioned 100 and my firm, Transform Group. Between PR Services and me being an advisor to companies, we've worked with 103 ICOs.

A lot of people say that the heyday of the ICOs was last year, the year before. And we saw some of the biggest ones before we saw the biggest ones like Telegram or something. So when we saw sort of in the 200 million range, and the landscape has clearly changed since then in terms of who's investing, I don't know how many people, jurisdictions, regulation, et cetera. Can you sort of like sketch out what is happening right now that you're seeing and if you think it's a good thing, kind of.

Sure. So it's still very early. I like to give the analogy, even though it's not exactly of the rise of the Internet and the rise of the blockchain. So the rise of the Internet, you know, there was a lot of skepticism in the early days that the Internet was viable. There was a big one page editorial in Newsweek magazine saying what a joke the Internet was. It's like, you know, you gotta be getting me. People are gonna go and actually read things online. Forget about it. Well, of course, today the biggest media companies in the world are online, and Newsweek magazine is out of business. So all the stuff that was said about why the Internet wasn't going to work, you know, insert crypto, and a lot of things sound a lot the same. And then of course, there was a couple of early sort of movements up and down. And then you had this wild ride from like 98 to the first quarter of 2000, where the NASDAQ went from 1000 to 5000, and that went down to it dropped by like 90%. And a lot of them went out of business. The reason a lot of them went out of business, of course, because they were public companies with boards, and they were like, okay, we're going to sell this off for whatever we can get. We have a lot of cash in the bank. Let's just get the cash out and sell off the wreckage. It was dynamic. I mean, if Google was a public company back then, they probably would have failed along with everyone else. It was hard for Amazon and ebay to sort of stay afloat. You could have gotten Amazon back then for about $4 a share. Now it's 1800, and I think it's a split or two later. So the rising tide lifts all boats, but then when the water drops to the bottom, you can see all the junk at the bottom of the harbor, and it's got to be cleared out before it starts going up again. I think if you look at the overall chart of Amazon, of ebay, of these other ones, it now looks like a little tiny blip in the price, the whole dot com area, to where it got today. So I think similarly, you may be looking at Ethereum five years from now and seeing this, you know, 30 cents to $1,200 and back down to 300 as a blip. If it's, say, 15,000, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, I'm not saying it'll be there. That's not my job. Prognosticating Ethereum price. I do pretty firmly believe that bitcoin is my own personal belief will hit a high of at least 50,000 sometime in the next three to five years. And it seems to be the most predictable thing in terms of the way markets have behaved, that you have a big run up about a year after the halving, when the supply and demand starts taking root. Now, as was mentioned today on my panel, you know, when you have the involvement of the CBOE and people being able to aggressively short things that are perceived as overvalued, hopefully that will be offset by the, the eventual etf, possibly by the same cboe. So people can go and hypothecate long. It tends to narrow the range. The first parabolic run up was the December after the first halving. First halving, November 2012, $4. A month later it was about $6. A year later, December 2013 or late November, early December, it was almost 1200. So that's a 300x run up. If you bought a bunch of Bitcoin at $4 and then sold it at the market top, you did way better than this last year when you bought at a thousand and sold at almost 20 and again the next. Then you end up having sort of the long nuclear winter of like, you know, bitcoin is dead, bitcoin is dead. But if you held onto your Bitcoin at 1000, you're looking fine now even at 6, right? So I think that when we're talking about the death of the ICO and this and that, I think it's too early to say that. I think that the format of token crowd sales of tokenization of new assets between security tokens, which I think will eventually be even larger than all but the biggest of the utility. I mean, if you take out the infrastructure tokens, I think security tokens will be much larger than utility tokens because we just don't have the formats in place right now. Because look, there's no reason why, other than the legacy systems, why you can't buy Google easily in France or why you can't buy Samsung on the New York Stock Exchange. It's all the different rules and you have to have these things called ADRs to buy sort of receipts against these things from foreign markets. If you had a token, it's global and you can pay for it in US denominated tokenized cryptocurrency like USDT or Tether, you can do it in a euro denominated one. So that's sort of the future. The regulators just have to keep up with how this applies. Cross borders. I'm an advisor and investor in Polymath and their solution is a utility token that lets you encode this into each of these new tokens that are security tokens. There's other people who have other things, but there's a wave of innovation going on now that's going to be enabling the next big security token wave. And again, I don't believe in any way, shape or form that we've seen the last innovation in terms of infrastructure tokens or of utility tokens.

You've been talking about various ways people can. Companies can use cryptocurrencies, but do you have sort of like a stance on that?

So I think that when you're looking at the overall revolution of the blockchain, decentralization is only one of many aspects that makes it revolutionary. Tokenization is just as important. So when you're talking about say tokenizing a stock, it's not decentralized. So I think that decentralization makes the most sense when you're talking about cross border payments. I mean, as Tone had said, that's why Bitcoin is so important that it's decentralized. So that you can go in and be sure that if you're sending a million dollars from party A to party B, it's not tied up in courts or banks or governments because oh, there's a judgment against this or they're wanted in a divorce court or whatever. If you own the keys here or you're sending it to someone who owns the keys there, that's all you need to know. Now outside of that, someone can go after the individual saying they think they did this or that. That's just what governments do to people. But in terms of the actual technology, the decentralization of bitcoin into a lesser degree of ones that base themselves on a decentralized consensus that's important for security of payments, security of knowing that a smart contract cannot be stopped once it gets initiated. But that's only one aspect, I think with more centralized look, in the very beginning of the Internet, decentralization and sort of uncensorability was a big thing. And there was a big wave of what they called the netizens back then, sort of the old guard of the Internet to make sure that there was never going to be any advertising on the Internet because they saw that as a bad thing. And that, I mean literally in the early days, I was representing Early.com companies with my at the time PR firm, the Turpin Group that got sold in 2000. Before I started Market Wire. That was something that I had early people. I had one company that started an ad network and. And they literally got viruses thrown their way and they got their fax machine burned up with black paper because they were like no advertising. There cannot be advertising on the Internet. Keep the Internet free. What are the biggest applications on the Internet now? Very centralized stacks. Google, Facebook, Netflix. And I think that it's not a surprise that dapps, even though they're called decentralized applications, do certainly have some aspects of centralization and if they're ideally the proper way that I think most dapps should work is that you should have a non profit foundation that basically is just responsible for having that technology proliferate and that there should be then a for profit that uses it, that buys the tokens. And that way you're sort of keeping the incentives of those who are looking to build a stack separate from those who are keeping the blockchain. You know, that's the way I recommend a lot of the companies that I advise. You know, one of your speakers exhibitors here is Aspire. We're looking at that foundation for them as well. I mean they're a platform, so they're actually infrastructure with infrastructure. Sometimes Ethereum is only foundation. But that didn't stop one of the founders, Joe Lubin, from creating consensus, which is a for profit. So you're gonna have multiple, ideally centralized for profits develop around sort of decentralized as the need is. But pure decentralization is tough when you incorporate even some security elements that have the points of like for example if you have medical records and you wanna have HIPAA involved or you wanna have something like that. So there's, there's sort of variations of being purely centralized and purely decentralized and I think they'll develop over time. And I think again tokenization is just as important in broad non money transference instances.

Awesome. Okay, thank you so much. Cointelegraph like subscribe and Hodl.

Sam.