Steve Wozniak does not take money very seriously, probably because he has so much of it as co-founder of Apple. Consider, for example, that he carries (legal) pads of perforated $2 bills just to freak people out.
This is probably why he doesn’t seem all that upset that a scammer stole seven bitcoins from him worth over $70,000 USD at today’s prices in a sale gone wrong. Wozniak told his sad tale at the Economic Times Global Business Summit in New Delhi, the Economic Times reported on Monday.
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“I had seven bitcoins stolen from me through fraud,” Wozniak said. “Somebody bought them from me online through a credit card and they cancelled the credit card payment. It was that easy! And it was from a stolen credit card number so you can never get it back.”
Seemingly, the scammer made the blockchain and the credit card industry’s inherent characteristics work against each other—and for them. While Bitcoin transactions cannot be refunded by anyone except the recipient, credit card charges can be disputed and reversed by the card issuer and the issuer usually sides with their customer. So the scammer leveraged Bitcoin’s irreversible nature against the more flexible dispute-driven system of the credit industry.
Wozniak said he sold the coins because he “didn’t want to watch the price everyday,” so if peace of mind was what he was after, that’s what he got in the end. Still, $70,000 would have bought a lot of novelty perforated $2 bills.
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