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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

YMMV. I don't put any value on most of the above.

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

#202
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, it's what not being embedded in a peculiar subculture is like.

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

#203

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…

Incomprehensible gobbledygook.

But I'm not worth $100m so I guess the joke's on me.

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

#204
post #142

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.

You're mixing up reversible transactions and court system. If someone defrauds you in an irreversible transaction, you can still sue that person for damages if you know who they are. Similarly if someone defrauds you in reversible transactions, you can't just wave a wand and get your money back. You can sue them if you know who they are, or you can request a reversal from your bank/cc provider (may or may not be hono…

> Most fraud happens in fiat and there are real victims out here.

We had multiple threads about base rate error on HN just yesterday!

Most financial activity happens in fiat, and so of course it stands to reason that most fraud is also done in fiat. The real question is whether the legitimate-to-fraudulent ratio is higher in cryptocurrencies than in fiat.

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

#205
A couple of things shook me about this - firstly I guess is the amount that was up for stealing - 100M just "sitting there" seems crazy - how many other multi-multi millionaires have their wealth just sitting in one bank account?

Second scam is the wrong word. A confidence scam originally mean the mark had to bring a suitcase of cash to give confidence to the scammers that he had the means to join their get-rich scheme - and of course he would walk away with a suitcase of old newspapers.

But this is almost a new kind of crime - he did not present or move his money, he did not give away any keys. it is the very mechanism of money transmission that is the issue.

SWIFT is rarely seen as part of crimes - but crypto is pointing towards a new world. Imagine "permissioned blockchains" ie Bank Of England coins, this would still be a real viable scam. Proving you did not mean for people to take your 100M and rapidly move it would be a slow process. Stop orders would be a common place activity, potentially holding up long chains of transactions.

Even without permission-less crypto the move to a digital native currency is a long process

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

#206

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 ; )

[deleted]

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

#207

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.

Like she did with bank wire transfer fraud when she lost +300k? [1]

I could find literally thousands of other stories like this in a minute scraping the web.

[1] https://youtu.be/9cJxpKu_P0A

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

#208

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…

> scammers are getting more creative and advanced in technique including standing up professional front end websites to give the appearance of legitimacy

It seems like this is becoming the minimum standard for scam operations. For example, there is currently a BTC phishing scam going around that tries to convince the user they've accidentally received an email meant for someone else, which just happens to include a link to a million dollars worth of BTC. The website looks legitimate, albeit amateurish, to the point that it could even be convincing to another web developer. The rest of it is much like the OP's scam.

It starts with an email from the hacked account of a real bank manager in an Italian town, and is addressed to a real self-proclaimed stock market "guru" from the UK, now living in the US. The email states that 19 BTC has been deposited into an account that was created for them on a site called Coinlux, and they provide the username and password for the account. The Coinlux name was even used by an actual company at one point, so searching for any of the names or details surrounding the scam generates very real and convincing results.

Upon visiting the page, you're presented with a moderately professional-ish looking site that asks which fiat currency you want to use and lets you login. You're then prompted to enter a phone number to "secure the account" which, surprisingly, initiates an actual phone call from a number in the UK using a Twilio-like service. After confirming the verification number, you're allowed to view the account, which has some realistic dummy transactions in the history and other features that make the site somewhat believable (it even has a fake chat system and working account recovery).

After initiating a withdrawal of any amount, it provides a warning that you should make a small test transaction first (of 0.0001/$4), to ensure that you're sending to the correct BTC address -- after all, you wouldn't want to send 19 BTC to the wrong place and lose it all. It takes much longer than a normal transaction (likely because the scammers are manually initiating them), but it does eventually go through, and they've now succeeded in convincing the user that there is real BTC in the account and you can actually withdraw it.

However, if you try to make a larger withdrawal (or a second one at all), you're now presented with an error stating that you're not withdrawing enough, because of a "minimum withdrawal amount" defined when the account was created. This minimum amount happens to be 19.01 BTC, or 0.01 more than is in the actual account currently. So you've successfully withdrawn ~$4, but you have to deposit ~$400 if you want to access the entire 19 BTC.

As if it weren't obvious enough at this point, checking the address[1] which sent the 0.0001 makes the entire scam plain as day. This means that anyone with any amount of tech knowledge is probably not susceptible to the scam, though I do think that certain personality types could get caught up in the excitement of potentially "stealing" a million dollars. On the other side, non-techies will likely fall for this in droves, and the transaction history on that address does show there have already been successful victims -- though this particular person's scam has been massively unsuccessful so far, and they may actually be in the red overall.

[1] https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/bc1qt80xra3r2df8gvzr0...

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

#210
post #92

This highlights how scary it is to interface your savings with these “smart contracts”. Most people have no way to know what they’re actually going to do; the tiny slice of people capable of investigating can hardly remain vigilant at all times. Like, if you ask me to log into something with my bank account, all alarm bells would go off; if you ask me to stake this, approve that with my eth wallet, well, just another…

Yeah this makes me terrified of Ethereum.

This kind of scam just wouldn't work on BTC. You're passing tokens around. At fanciest you're time-locking wallets or using M of N signatures. You're not like, installing arbitrary code in your bank account.

I find ETH very technically interesting but it feels like it's full of sentient foot-guns.

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