Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 423 posts

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

#231

Post by jazzyjackson »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #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 sche…

> 100M just "sitting there" seems crazy

By virtue of converting the ETH to AAVE wrapped ETH, they're earning interest by loaning out the underlying ETH. Who is taking out loans and paying interest for ETH I have no idea.

Plus, even without the AAVE wETH, they expect ETHs value to accrue faster than any other asset, so there's no cost to letting the money just sit, as opposed to your USD in savings depreciating over time.

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

#232

Post by hypertele-Xii »

nfw2 wrote: post #171
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)

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…

In the same way as if you lend cash to someone, you have to read the contract you're both signing attesting to the fact they owe you that amount, or they can just disappear with the cash.

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

#233

Post by abecedarius »

woodruffw wrote: post #198
abecedarius wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forteiture scenario 1: cops take your cash. It's on you to sue them and prove to a court that it's legitimately yours. Scenario 2: they take your hardware wallet, then they must prosecute you and prove to a court that the money is not legitimately yours, to get the key. IANAL, but am I wrong?

The answer to this probably depends on your local jurisdiction, thanks to America's unique system of legal devolvement. Instead, I'll point out that the answer does not matter : from the moment that they have my hot wallet instead of me, I can no longer use it. It doesn't matter to me whether they can actually liquidate it or not. And, as I pointed out earlier, I'd harm my own case by attempting to liquidate my asset…

My main point is the change from presumption of guilt to presumption of innocence. If they are effectively able to freeze it (but not transfer) before the court ruling, that main point still holds. Your claim was that crypto makes no difference, or worse.

I'm not saying technical solutions make the rule of law unnecessary. But they can defend against some violations of the rule of law, depending on the parts of the justice system that are still just.

People effectively defending themselves against a national disgrace help towards getting the disgrace fixed.

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

#234

Post by djakaitis »

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…

The real takeaway is that decentralized financial accounts are at extreme risk of deception with little reciprocity.

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

#235

Post by hypertele-Xii »

HWR_14 wrote: post #9
dpeck wrote: post #4

Generalizing, anytime someone is giving you a “gift” but is putting expectations on how you receive it (in this case the wallet destination) that should be a huge red flag. Whether that’s cryptocurrency or a sandwich.

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.

That's not a gift of a sandwich, that's an invitation to dine.

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

#236

Post by thematrixturtle »

kenjackson wrote: post #53
muh_gradle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an extremely basic check. If I'm going to be getting on a plane to see someone, I want to do a basic background check.

But what are you checking with a call? That just seems like creating a false sense of security since there is virtually no additional “useful” information that is being sent over the audio channel above and beyond what is in text.

If Ms Linh Nguyen turns out to be a burly Nigerian dude on video, you just acquired some "useful" information about their legitimacy.

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

#237

Post by Qub3d »

woodruffw wrote: post #204
bko wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See also: the "Chinese Robbers" fallacy[1] -- just because you can find a ton of examples of fiat fraud, doesn't imply its worse -- without context it only implies its the most common form of currency.

[1]:https://www.lesswrong.com/s/XsMTxdQ6fprAQMoKi/p/DSzpr8Y9299j...

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

#238

Post by dimgl »

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'm surprised anyone reading this story wouldn't conclude that the real takeaway is to just not engage with cryptocurrency at all. This ecosystem is so convoluted it just turns me off at every level.

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

#239

Post by Qub3d »

jozvolskyef wrote: post #122
ttiurani wrote: post #34

"She tells me a bit about her metaverse project, Space Falcon. I'm not really sold on it, but I'm not really an NFT person so I didn't have any reason to think it was a bad idea either.[...] It seems kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme, but again, that's kind of how I see a lot of NFTs. With all that she's doing for Arrow, there's no harm in showing a little support." The real takeaway from this is that it's dangero…

That sounds a bit harsh. Did OP break their moral compass, or did they just give the wrong person the benefit of the doubt?

To restate what the twitter user was saying: "It seemed like this was a get-rick-quick scheme, but this person could be useful to my goals, so I decided to overlook that"

I guess you can argue that get-rick-quick does not necessarily imply scam, but it certainly reflects poorly on a person to ignore their doubts because the source of the doubts is useful. Its not a unique problem to NFTs, its a similar problem that a founder might face when, say, entertaining an acquisition by Meta.

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

#240

Post by 0x64 »

progval wrote: post #183
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.

"Staking" was definitely not invented by this protocol as a term, and is not really related to the consensus protocol, barring the fact that you lock up ("stake") some underlying token in a smart contract. Various protocols offer staking as a way to lock funds, which might distribute a pre-existing token allocation to the people staking as a form of interest. This could be done for a myriad of reasons, like getting a governance token in exchange, or in order to limit the liquidity/dumping of new tokens. I can't say that I were too well versed on what has been happening in the defi space in the last year, but it's definitely not a new term.
Post reply on HN