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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

#171
post #165

> 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)

Same, and I am probably younger than this guy.

My really basic understanding after reading very slowly is he got some crypto asset from scammer, and he needed to approve lending it out to get some sort of crypto interest on it. But approving the "lending X out" action apparently looks exactly like the same as the "give Y away" action if you don't look closely at the contract.

Maybe it's just ignorance, but the whole system seems like a mess to me.

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look: if you want to clutch those hashes to the grave, more power to you. I think the Federalist Papers' authors wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry, but that's the wonderful thing about this little American Experiment of ours.

But don't delude yourself into thinking that any meaningful number of people, even cryptocurrency believers, share your position. It's all fun and games until the Men with Sticks show up, and most people understandably tuck tail at that point.

If I'm going to be made a coward in the eyes of a few LARPers, I might as well pay as few middlemen as possible in the process. But that's just me!

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

#173

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

We should make it blatantly clear and public that we will not he bailing out banks, pension funds etc that will inevitably get burned on some crypto scam.

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

#174
post #165

> 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)

No post body was provided.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My fear is it just becomes another side show. Ethereum is going to become ebay. Yeah you can trade rare coins but it’s mostly just trash changing hands and clogging up the mail system.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We should make it blatantly clear and public that we will not he bailing out banks, pension funds etc that will inevitably get burned on some crypto scam.

I would rather make it clear that the cryptoeconomy will not bail out fiat currencies when they fail. The first government to get a fat stack of Bitcoin probably wins. Game theory intensifies.

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

#177

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’m curious, does anyone know Thomas, or how did they amass 100M in ETH? The websites provide absolutely no identity of anyone involved (as is very common for crypto). The Twitter account is 4 months old.

No mention of the person or the Arrow company on the internet previous to this episode seems to exist. Other than looking at the chain records, how should we believe that any of these stories are true?

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

#178
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

no it's not a bad thing at all. it's not a systemic failure, it's division of labor and people need to stop being willfully ignorant of economics. Lawyers are good at reading contracts, Facebook is good at running servers. Medium is good at publishing your things and getting you ad revenue.

sending http and json over the internet is just as neutral of a technology as the blockchain. the reason people build centralized services on top of it is that we're collectively better off by specializing.

As a writer you're better off writing your content full-time than running a server, becoming a smart contract expert, casual coder and server administrator. no technology on earth is going to change that fact and it's why people buy their bitcoin on coinbase and their nfts on opensea.

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

#179
Some friends and acquaintances keep bugging me that I should get into crypto... but I would be too scared of loosing it all in one day, be it to a scam, sending to an non-existing address, loosing my hardware wallet etc.

Tbh I would feel safer having 10k in cash (at home at least) than in crypto. At least the attack vectors (fire, burglary) are known and tangible.

Imagine founding a startup, working your ass off living off ramen for a few years, every day worrying that it all might be for naught, and then through a combination of skill, determination and luck you do make it and your startup is worth a few millions... and then suddenly you make a small mistake and lose all your shares!

This is how crypto feels to me.

Maybe I am just not made for crypto.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unsolicited pizza, no trust. No keys for neighbors.. no way.

I don’t trust most Doctors either, and you probably can’t trust any medicinal organization with keeping records confidential, plenty of examples of breach of that trust.

I think you are not skeptical enough.

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