The dangers of trapping has once again reared its head in the city of New York with CNBC reporting (archive) a 28 year old man who attempted to sell bitcoins via craigslist met with a purported buyer who then lead him to a vehicle to finalise the transaction. Hidden in the back seat of the car was another man who ordered the seller to transfer the bitcoins to his wallet at the point of a gun. In addition to the USD $1,100's worth of bitcoin, the bandits stole the man's mobile phone.
Whether it be a rogue government employee, ransomware, extortion, kidnapping, theft or friendly fraud, many people it seems are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure they own some bitcoin.
How come these sellers don't just show up with a signed transaction printed on a piece of paper?
Buyers are generally too incompetent to broadcast a transaction by themselves, so you'd need to bring, and risk, a laptop or phone to do it yourself. And in any case, they could also steal your piece of paper at gunpoint, so you're also still risking the coins.
You avoid this shit either by using the wot (or your IRL sort-of-equivalent), and knowing who the buyer is beforehand (references). Or, at the very least, meeting in a café, library, &c, where they are less likely to rob you. Renting an office with private security is also an option if the deal is large enough to merit it (you can rent them inexpensively by the hour in many places).
Getting into some random unknown guy's car with $1k cash in your pocket is probably not a wise idea to begin with. Like running Windows or keeping coins in your phone. Just like no one could have predicted that you'd get robbed, extorted, botenetted, ransomwared, or otherwise raped.
In point of fact the buyer would just need an OCR app to scan the paper and then push the hex gibberish to a public broadcasting endpoint.
Anyway I guess you're dead on. You shouldn't be dealing with random nobodies in the first place.
I heard they "trapped" the Office of Personnel Management's servers too.
GBANGA!