Pastor Phil Vollman discovered Bitcoin in 2013, and despite a modest wage and a tight budget, he began accumulating small amounts. Over the next five years of disciplined savings, he managed to amass 14.2 BTC, along with 507 Litecoin.
Now this was no prosperity preacher plan, with dreams of lambos and luxury living. Rather, Phil, hoped to secure the financial future for his wife and children, including an adopted daughter, whom suffers from a disability.
Unfortunately, on July 29 last year, Phil's Bitcoin hopes were dashed when a scammer stole all of his 14.2 BTC and 507 LTC. This was not because he kept his crypto on an exchange that got hacked. In fact, Phil stored his private keys on a Trezor hardware device. However, on this particular day, when plugging the Trezor into his laptop he was prompted to do a firmware update. What Phil didn't realize was, that although the website appeared identical to the official Trezor site, it was a fake, set up by the scammer.
Despite his better judgement, Phil followed the prompt to enter his seed words, which then allowed the thief to transfer away all of the Bitcoin and Litecoin. After so long taking the utmost care with crypto security, one mistake and years of saving and sacrifice were gone. And the reality is that at 68 years of age, with the current price of Bitcoin, there is no way that Phil will be able to acquire that much again. That is unless...
... the crypto community pulls together to help. We did it for Andreas Antonopoulos after Roger Ver questioned his investment choices. Some even did it for Peter Schiff, in an attempt to warm him up towards Bitcoin, despite his net worth already being 70 million dollars. So can we do it for Phil? I believe, yes.
With the backing of members of the crypto, business and Christian communities, a support site and fundraising campaign has been set up to get Phil and his family back to where they were before the thief struck.
A list of those supporting this campaign can be found here.
You can donate and follow the progress of the fundraiser on Tallycoin.
While I have only touched briefly on it here, Phil and his wife have lived an extraordinary life of serving and caring for others, particulary sick, disabled and unwanted children. You can read their full story, written by published author, F. Daniel Somrack, here: Bagpipes, Bitcoin and Broken Dreams.
In addition to this, crypto YouTuber, Brian the UK Bitcoin Master, hosted a show where Bitcoin storage and security expert, Rocky Palumbo, interviewed Pastor Phil about the loss of his Bitcoin and the events leading up to it. You can view it below and really get a feel for the heart of this man.
This article, Crypto Thief Fleeces Pastor of 14.2 Bitcoin and 507 Litecoin was originally published at BitcoinToTheMoon.com