What's with all the pending/unconfirmed transactions with the "STOLEN"?

Question

I've noticed that every few seconds transactions show up on live Tangle trackers with a tag of:

9999STOLEN9IOTAS999F***9YOU

Here a pending one valued at $144k which appeared 3 minutes ago: iotasear.ch result.

Using http://iota.cool I can see that there have been at least 500 of these transactions in the last minute, all of which are as yet unconfirmed. https://thetangle.org shows that there have been over 22,000 transactions with this tag.

This tag isn't a one-off example, either, there are other tags like "PC99STOLEN9IOTAS999F***9YOU, "D999STOLEN9IOTAS999F***9YOU" and "UG99STOLEN9IOTAS999F***9YOU" which I've noticed. I'm sure there are many others.

If I look at the list of richest 100 addresses, the top 5 all feature unconfirmed transactions with this tag - some spanning back to over a month ago.

Some of these transactions are actually marked as confirmed, such as this one valued at $1k:

How are they able to generate a transaction from an address like this?
Why are there so many of these?
Should I be worried about this?

A tag is not an address. the 9999STOLEN...... is nothing more then a comment in the transaction. — thashiznets, Nov 30 '17 at 12:32

score 9 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 04 '18 at 13:03

9

Anyone can issue a transaction for any amount from any address. Such a transaction won't be confirmed without knowledge of the private key. Your case is about an attempt to pretend that funds have been stolen.

edited Jun 04 '18 at 13:03

answered Nov 30 '17 at 09:39

Come-from-Beyond

1,540
9
15

What about the 779.46Mi transaction mentioned in my question which was confirmed? – James Donnelly Nov 30 '17 at 09:48
1

That one was real, it's not hard to buy iotas and then send them to an exchange to sell. Exchanges don't care what tag you use for a deposit transaction. – Come-from-Beyond Nov 30 '17 at 09:53
$1,000 worth? Why would you want those tagged with "9999STOLEN9IOTAS999F***9YOU"? – James Donnelly Nov 30 '17 at 09:56
2

Because you own 200 coins of an obsolete blockchain technology and spreading FUD is the only way for your coin to stay on the top. – Come-from-Beyond Nov 30 '17 at 19:08
Obsolete? In what way? – James Donnelly Nov 30 '17 at 19:39
2

This question is not related to the main question, please, create a new main question. – Come-from-Beyond Nov 30 '17 at 20:46

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 30 '17 at 21:57

As others already stated, these transactions are not valid as they do not have the correct signature (some of them even have some text - stating that they don't have the correct signature - tryte-encoded in the signature field).

The reason why creating these transactions is so successful: Currently tangle explorers do not validate transactions well enough (they don't check signatures and they don't check whether the balance from the source address is actually there), thereby causing confusion for the users who use the tangle explorers.

Thank you. I hope the Tangle explorer developers can do something about these before IOTA gains too much media coverage, as for me it was a bit of a shock. — James Donnelly, Nov 30 '17 at 21:59

What's with all the pending/unconfirmed transactions with the "STOLEN"?

2 Answers2