Last week an up and coming competitor to Jon Holmquist’s yearly BitcoinBlackFriday.com website appeared with the website BitcoinBlackFriday.info. The website looked slick, filled with information, animations, and a newsletter signup. The owner even sent out a press release earlier in Novemember so the site started getting picked up by news organizations (even SiliconANGLE).

Although people slowly started to become wary as the newsletters sent showed little promise for Black Friday deals.

When it first launched SiliconANGLE even reached out to the apparent makers of the site and never heard anything back.

The BitcoinBlackFriday.info scam unravels

Today, the Bitcoin community has discovered that BitcoinBlackFriday.info is a scam.

The links connected to its “deals” go to totally different websites unrelated to the deals it purports to offer.

For example, much of the Bitcoin community is familiar with Gyft, Inc., a merchant known for selling gift cards for bitcoins. The deal on the BitcoinBlackFriday.info page sends users to the URL “appgyft.com” when Gyft itself uses the domain “app.gyft.com” for transactions. Kudos to /u/foolish_austrian on Reddit for catching this one.

Others shortly discovered more inconsistencies in the deals being offered on BitcoinBlackFriday.info such as a TREZOR deal link that arrives at “buy-trezor.com” which is different from the actual SatoshiLabs s.r.o. site “buytrezor.com.” Kudos to /u/shayanbahal on Reddit for pointing this one out.

NLNico on the BitcoinTalk forums also decided to go through the top eight deals on the site and discovered that all of them redirect to phishing and scam-styled websites made up of fake domains.

How did this sneak up on everyone? Apparently, when first launched, the deals actually went to the web pages they said they belonged to. However, sometime during the day the website began to replace the legit deals with phishing fraud websites. All of the deals checked by SiliconANGLE go to pages that are obviously phishing attempts such as “bitmain-tech.com” when the proper website for Bitmain Tech Ltd. is “bitmain.com.”

This sort of scam is extremely insidious and makes clear that a certain level of scrutiny needs to be done whenever approaching any new venture.

Extra thanks to everyone who has worked to out this scam and bring it to the attention of the Bitcoin community.

Do not enter: BitcoinBlackFriday.info is a scam

If you’re looking for Bitcoin deals this Black Friday avoid BitcoinBlackFriday.info and go to BitcoinBlackFriday.com run by Jon Holmquist four years running. It’s been a yearly source of good, solid deals for the Bitcoin community and continues to do so this year.

“We’ve been saying since they launched that we aren’t associated with them,” Holmquist said in a quote to SiliconANGLE. ” It’s a shame that they took the opportunity to deceive shoppers during a holiday season and I feel bad for any consumers out there who lost out. The people responsible for the scam site should feel awful.”

For an appetizer of what you can find this year on BitcoinBlackFriday.com read up in this article before the day is over.

Image credit: A screenshot of BitcoinBlackFriday.info