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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

#181

Post by woodruffw »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #128
MPSimmons wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced it isn't crypto itself, and NFT is just an extension of that.

It’s degrees of suspension of disbelief. Software is just tricking sand into to thinking. I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable. The ability for people to copy this software idea? Not valuable. The ability for people to issue new tokens on existing chains? Not valu…

> I have no issue believing that an imaginary consensus stored ledger in thousands of computers all secured by massive amounts of energy and limited to 21M units over 100 years might be valuable.

It's not "secured" by energy. You can't convert a Bitcoin into the original amount of power required to produce it, which is the defining quality of a financial security.

It's more accurate to say that Bitcoin's value is retained by the ongoing commitment of power into the network. But that correctly suggests that the network collapses without a perpetual source of electricity, which is not the kind of positive connotation that I think you meant to supply.

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

#182

Post by skim_milk »

koonsolo wrote: post #162
MereInterest wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would one "accidentally" wire transfer millions of dollars? At $10k in America, KYC and AML laws force banks to step through extra layers of verification to wire such amount. It's virtually impossible for someone to accidentally wire millions, which would likely involve a mandatory in-person meeting with the bank customer to verify their credentials and purpose.

If somehow you get through an in-person meeting with a bank branch manager to unwittingly wire millions of dollars, and the topic of how much money you're wiring and the exact purpose of wiring such a high amount isn't brought up, and you somehow still accidentally wire millions of dollars away without anyone ever bringing up the amount and purpose of the transaction, then I'm sure you'll still be able to recover that money back because banks are required to actually validate transactions of that size with KYC, AML, etc. laws. Only cryptocurrencies allow one the ability transmit this amount of money in seconds.

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

#183

Post by progval »

cmckn wrote: 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)

This seems to be vocabulary invented by a specific app (probably to sound cool by association, because of Proof of Stake), described in the screenshot here: https://twitter.net/thomasg_eth/status/1492663229784408065

As far as I understand, it's just a synonym for "lending" here. They even use the word "leasing" for the people on the other side.

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

#184

Post by randomhodler84 »

paulluuk wrote: post #164
xwdv wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which might not actually be that much in some parts of the world. For real. A few million is nice but that doesn’t even get you a house in nice places.

The 4% rule is fairy tales, especially post pandemic economy. we will be working more for less as time goes on.

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

#185

Post by cdata »

Barrin92 wrote: post #178
cdata wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 centralize…

No-one is better off concentrating power in a centralized authority with the scale and (lack of) accountability of Facebook.

Specialization doesn't come into it, although it is worth observing: your comment presupposes that in order to benefit from specialization, one must subject themself to exploitation.

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

#186

Post by ricardobeat »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #112
whatshisface wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would someone borrow when they already have funds? For example I heard of one guy locking up $600k collateral to borrow $300k. Makes no sense.

There are reasons, firstly tax advantage in that there is no capital gain from selling the cryptocurrency; the other is that you don’t lose your position on the cryptocurrency, ideally over time you can increase your borrow as the underlying collateral increases in fiat value. One can also use the borrowed funds to speculate on other cryptocurrency, as a collateralized margin loan. Many lending systems offer incentiv…

> use the borrowed funds to speculate on other cryptocurrency

If you want to maximize your potential losses, that’s a great idea.

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

#187

Post by reese_john »

woodruffw wrote: post #144
gonehome wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the op comment wasn’t made in good faith. Try getting your money back when getting scammed via venmo or PayPal - rarely any better, and if you’re selling you’re more likely to get scammed with those services than crypto.

I have done multiple clawbacks via payment processors. In each case, I escalated (vendor -> processor -> my bank -> CFPB) until the dispute was resolved to my satisfaction. In nearly all cases, no separate restitution was required: the processor or my bank was able to reverse or halt the ACH transaction before the money settled. In the handful of cases where settlement had already happened, they were able to counterm…

Yes but, not sure this is a fair comparison. Doesn't ACH transactions take 1 to 2 business days to settle by design, as they are processed in batch and go through an intermediate clearing house ?

Venmo/PayPal/Fedwire transactions should be able to settle in real time, which can be more convenient at the expense of easy reversability

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

#188

Post by ryan29 »

whatshisface wrote: post #110
matkoniecz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any case of NFT that is not some combination of get-rich-quick scheme, Ponzi scheme, search for a bigger fool, FOMO-powered stupidity, extracting money from naive people or satire of NFT? And NFT part adds anything substantial and is not replaceable by regular transfer (either transfer of money or BTC-like)?

NFTs could be used to manage domain names, which might be a helpful replacement for ICANN.

I own one. All the blockchain domains are a dream come true for squatters and scammers. I'll take the oversight, stability, accountability, and mutability of ICANN and the current registry/registrar system every single time given the choice.

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

#189

Post by ReactiveJelly »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #149
MereInterest wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that you should use systems that have reversible transactions. OTH I'm pretty sure that if the mark had been using such systems years ago, he wouldn't have $100m+ worth of ETH now ; )

Almost nobody has $100M worth of anything, so...

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

#190

Post by bko »

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…

I'm all for the legal process and there is a legitimate way to seize assets. But asset forfeiture is not that. It's only enabled because it is trivial and is done outside of the normal legal process. It doesn't help that the beneficiaries are the very people that can initiate the forfeiture.

If someone goes through the legal process and is found to be guilty and their assets are seized that's fine. But if someone is pulled over, found to have some drugs, gets their car and cash on them possessed and is forced to go through a lengthy process that free up that money, then that's different.

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