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Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

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Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#161

Post by dom96 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #11

This was a multi-week long social engineering scam targeted at Thomas. Thomas has a Discord for a drone transportation startup, and the scammers proceeded to embed themselves in the community and provide valuable labor such as web design and graphics design in order to earn his trust. Thomas's wallet is public and advertised on Twitter via his ENS domain. He had $100M+ in aETH, a derivative token provided by Aave whe…

For somebody with $100M+ I find it strange how excited Thomas got about the prospect of some strangers setting up a meeting with some random founders. With that much money would it be that difficult for Thomas to set up a meeting with them on his own?

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#162

Post by koonsolo »

MereInterest wrote: post #118
chrisco255 wrote: post #11

This was a multi-week long social engineering scam targeted at Thomas. Thomas has a Discord for a drone transportation startup, and the scammers proceeded to embed themselves in the community and provide valuable labor such as web design and graphics design in order to earn his trust. Thomas's wallet is public and advertised on Twitter via his ENS domain. He had $100M+ in aETH, a derivative token provided by Aave whe…

I like the takeaways, though I'd also add an additional one, that you should use systems that have reversible transactions. That way, when you fall victim to fraud, you can use the court system to recover your losses.

I guess you haven't seen "The Tinder Swindler" on Netflix?

Also here in Belgium, plenty of people are getting scammed by wire transfer, and no way to get their money back.

I think you have overly optimistic view on banks or the court system giving your money back.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#163

Post by blueboo »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #65
vmception wrote: post #47

The other thing to understand is that legitimate interactions look just like this in the crypto space.

Scammers ripping each other offer on discord. Today it’s apes, next week it will be houses. I can’t believe they can convince people to lend liquidity to bridges, myself.

Houses? How about pension funds, top-flight companies, countries… a lot of smart and powerful folks are face-planting into this griftspace

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#164

Post by paulluuk »

xwdv wrote: post #146
randomhodler84 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like the televangelist. Money affinity scamming. You need to conspicuously show your wealth on chain so people think God (vitalik) made them rich. Unless you flex with your $100M in aave on your main with an ENS name, how will your victims know you are rich and worthy?

If I had $100M, I find it hard that I’d care that much about things. I barely give a fuck now and my net worth is only 1/58th of that. I’d probably just build a passive income stream and chill the rest of my life.

Couldn't you already do that right now? If you put your wealth into S&P 500 you should be able to live from roughly 170K USD per year.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#165

Post by cmckn »

> The aWETH that I approved was not Armstrong ETH, but rather Aave's aWETH. On my main address, almost all of my ETH is sitting in Aave...

Just one example, but this entire thread is Greek to me. What the hell is “staking an NFT”? I am feeling so left behind by this crypto nonsense. Is this what getting old is like? (I’m not yet old)

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#166

Post by samarama »

Grim-444 wrote: post #137
throwaway8174 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid off all my student loan debt and bought a house last summer because I got scammed into buying ETH about 2 years ago. Thanks for your insight though.

As a thought experiment, replace crypto in this situation for beanie babies. You managed to buy a bunch of beanie babies before a beanie baby craze started, and sold them at exorbitant prices to other people coming in that were convinced that beanie baby prices would only keep skyrocketing. You took their money, and now I guess as long as they're the bag holders still holding beanie babies when it all falls apart and…

Except beanie babies have no inherent value, but ETH has vast inherent value in numerous ways

1. Immutability

2. Decentralization

3. Cheap, fast, secure cross-country money transfers

4. Protection against inflation

5. Independence of banks or arbitrary freezes of your funds

6. Access to a vast variety of financials services

7. Is quite likely the replacement of money

The fact that people still don’t get that in 2022 is astonishing.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#167

Post by vmception »

blueboo wrote: post #163
randomhodler84 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scammers ripping each other offer on discord. Today it’s apes, next week it will be houses. I can’t believe they can convince people to lend liquidity to bridges, myself.

Houses? How about pension funds, top-flight companies, countries… a lot of smart and powerful folks are face-planting into this griftspace

Its the wealth redistribution people have been hoping for

Cant keep your assets? Someone else who can code can!

Looking forward to the technocrat plutocracy

I’m being facetious as I think there will continue to be a balance and cat / mouse game.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#168

Post by cdata »

charcircuit wrote: post #143
kelp wrote: post #32

This was an absolutely fascinating and chilling story. The thing that struck me about it is the scam didn't work for a few reasons: 1. He typically had a practice of not using his main wallet for things like this. 2. He got wary and actually read the smart contracts. This is a level of technical competence required that's going to mean most people have to offload this to a trusted intermediary. And then what's the po…

>And then what's the point of all the decentralization ideology? Because we just re-invented banks. There's nothing wrong with centralized services built on a decentralized network. Take a look at the web. Sure you can use a centralized service like facebook to make a facebook page, but if you want you can host your own website.

Sorry, but that's exactly what is wrong with the web, and what we strive to "fix" about it when we build decentralized alternatives to centralized infrastructure.

It is a systemic failure that most users must "fail over" to a centralized service to publish on the web.

The conceptual improvement enabled by blockchain is that the data layer is a neutral plane and this theoretically gives users portability. But, to say that centralization is fine because it has happened on the web and that was also fine is rationalizing a bad thing as good actually.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#169

Post by paulluuk »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #60
HWR_14 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people who invite me over for a sandwich would be insulted if I entered their house, took the sandwich they made me and left. In fact, I probably would never get invited over again.

I’d be more worried about being poisoned. Who is giving away free sandwiches? Ya’ll far too trusting. Zero trust is the only way to go.

Zero trust is an impossible way to live.

Do you trust your neighbour with your spare key?

Do you trust your doctor with your medical history?

Do you trust your pizza delivery guy to deliver you pizza's that aren't poisoned?

Being skeptical is sometimes a good idea, like when it comes to "online research" or "alternative medicine". But having zero trust in even the most basic human interactions sounds like hell.

Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

#170

Post by randomhodler84 »

woodruffw wrote: post #160
bko wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ever heard of asset forfeiture? There's two sides to everything. Not really "owning" something is great if you're the victim of fraud, but has its downsides when you become a target and someone wants to arbitrarily capture your wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture

Civil asset forfeiture is a national disgrace. But it's also not a disgrace for traditional finance: it's a disgrace with respect to the latitude our justice system gives to individual LEOs and a sign that the government is willing to extrajudicially punish people instead of pursuing justice through the courts. Put another way: assert forfeiture is not some kind of "gotcha" against traditional finance in favor of cry…

Then you missed the point of this whole thing. Some of us would rather die with the keys then let the State steal funds from them. Cryptocurrency is the first technology that lets you take wealth to the grave and keep it there.
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