Team NewPipe lost some of your donations through a Bitcoin scam. The founder of NewPipe, Christian Schabesberger, explains the details of the attack in an open letter to the community.

Dear NewPipe users/developer/maintainer,

Earlier this year, on 26 June 2019, I fell victim to a bitcoin scam. Unfortunately, we, the team, lost all the donated bitcoins we had received until that date.

My intention was to sell all the coins, as the current trading rate was at around ~10.000€ per coin at this time. The amount of coins we lost back then was 0.12728048 BTC ~ 1200€. The attack has been successful on a lot of people. It’s been an issue within the Electrum bitcoin wallet and has been described in detail in this issue.

I reported the issue to the German police right after the incident, providing as many details and digital traces as I could collect, and as far as I know, a bigger investigation about this scam attack is being worked on by German federal law enforcement. I also learned a lot from this attack, and have implemented measures to reduce the chance for another such scam attack to work on me in the future.

A careful user found traces for an incident on the Bitcoin wallet and asked for more details on GitHub. I have to admit that I totally forgot that I intended to write a blog post like this, explaining the incident in detail and what actions have been taken. I did not intend to hold back information, but simply forgot about informing our donors, contributors and users.

I sincerely apologize for this incident, I am very sorry about what happened and we are working on moving financial project responsibilities away from me. @TheAssassin and @TobiGr have plans on founding a NewPipe e.V., a public not-for-profit association under German jurisdiction, to take over maintenance of the project and handle the financial aspects (i.e., the donations, and what will be funded by those). This way, a set of people will decide about the money and share the responsibility.

Yours sincerely

Christian Schabesberger
aka Schabi
aka @theScrabi