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

261–270 of 423 posts

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

#261

Post by donkarma »

dimgl wrote: post #238
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.

cryptocurrency is fine. NFT, smart contract, web3, tokens, and pretty much anything related to Ethereum isn't

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

#262

Post by donmcronald »

suikadayo wrote: post #250
djur wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 is questionably valuable and arguably harmful, 2 is increasingly untrue, 3 and 6 aren't inherent benefits of Ethereum, 4 and 5 aren't true, and 7 is speculative and begs the question.

Decentralization increasingly untrue? Ethereum consensus and execution layer nodes are at about 6k, under Bitcoin, and way above other projects.

If the network grows [1] at 2MB/14s that's:

    2/14*3600 = 514MB per hour
    514*24 = 12.3GB per day
    12.3*30 = 369GB per month
Even if the underlying blockchain is decentralized, I have no practical way of participating without doing it via some centralized exchange.

How many nodes will there be if ETH hits $0? What will happen to the services like ENS?

1. https://www.bitrates.com/guides/ethereum/how-many-ethereum-a...

Is the above accurate? Wikipedia says the whole network is 1TB, so that doesn't quite add up for me.

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

#263

Post by thebean11 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #254
thebean11 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has some obvious downsides. It probably doesn't matter for you personally but being able to take someone's domain away for political reasons isn't ideal.

Ownership as a concept is backed and secured by law (and enforcement), an inherently political system in democracy. It's the most ideal system successfully practised around the world today. The next best thing is securing one's property by practicing personal violence, and as I've no interest in shooting anyone for mere robbery, I'll take political ownership any day of the week. If my very countrymen (and women) coll…

Not everyone in the world has access to a government that will uphold their ownership in a just way. Like I said it this likely isn't valuable for you personally, you are not looking past your specific situation.

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

#264

Post by betwixthewires »

I can get behind cryptocurrency and stuff, but the idea that anyone can write a contract that says "I get to do what I want with your money" and then build their own custom, one of a kind UI with no way to limit what the user thinks the button does for you to sign such a transaction, it's got to be the biggest, most massive security hole I've ever seen brushed off. You want me to put the title to my house on it? You want code to be law?

This shit isn't ready for the mainstream, and some of these architectural decisions are indicative of engineers who are in over their heads (but that's almost all code nowadays, even mine).

They build a mechanism that enables me, at the click of a button, to give away control of my fortune, and they designed the system so that anyone can design whatever interface they like to get you to sign any transaction they like. It's laughable. I'm in disbelief. And this is web3? No thanks, I think I'll stick with bitcoin or whatever, keep it simple. At least I can tell what a bitcoin transaction does without having to learn a programming language.

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

#265

Post by blihp »

herodotus wrote: post #224

So I don't know anything about crypto, but stories like this make me think that crypto can never become mainstream. I have been programming since 1970; I worked for major computer companies; I was a computer science professor; I have apps on the App Store. In spite of all of this, I have not the foggiest idea, even after reading the thread, how someone who offers to give me something can use the gift to steal from me…

Basically it was the smart contract[1] that came with the NFT where the victim is essentially executing foreign code that gets granted access to their digital wallet. That's the reason the scammers were so insistent that he did it on his main wallet (i.e. where the funds were)

[1] Think of these as being similar to Word or Excel macros embedded in a document... nothing bad ever happened with them, did it? ;-)

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

#266

Post by orasis »

betwixthewires wrote: post #264

I can get behind cryptocurrency and stuff, but the idea that anyone can write a contract that says "I get to do what I want with your money" and then build their own custom, one of a kind UI with no way to limit what the user thinks the button does for you to sign such a transaction, it's got to be the biggest, most massive security hole I've ever seen brushed off. You want me to put the title to my house on it? You…

When it comes to code, we’re all in over our heads. I can reason about significantly more complexity than most developers I know and it’s still laughable how little complexity I can manage.

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

#267

Post by woodruffw »

Qub3d wrote: post #237
woodruffw wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Yes, that's called "base rate neglect" or "base rate bias."

In a twist of irony, you can see another example of it in the distribution of terms reinvented by internet rationalists :-)

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

#268

Post by sofixa »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #87
elil17 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is censored when you use paper currency?

The amount. A real example is CNY, which is limit to 100 yuan notes, deliberately to make it hard to move large sums. 1000 USD bills exist but are very rare. 1000 euro note exists but I think that’s on the way out. Your point that cash is censorship resistant is good, yes and we need to make sure it remains, however the physical limitations are defacto censorship.

How is it censorship? Moving large amounts of cash is impractical due to physical constraints, but is still possible. And there are legitimate concerns at play for those limitations.

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

#269

Post by hypertele-Xii »

thebean11 wrote: post #263
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ownership as a concept is backed and secured by law (and enforcement), an inherently political system in democracy. It's the most ideal system successfully practised around the world today. The next best thing is securing one's property by practicing personal violence, and as I've no interest in shooting anyone for mere robbery, I'll take political ownership any day of the week. If my very countrymen (and women) coll…

Not everyone in the world has access to a government that will uphold their ownership in a just way. Like I said it this likely isn't valuable for you personally, you are not looking past your specific situation.

But everyone in the world has access to a cryptocoin that will uphold their ownership in a just way?

Is that the argument? Crypto is "more just" and "available globally" and affordably?

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

#270

Post by suikadayo »

donmcronald wrote: post #262
suikadayo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization increasingly untrue? Ethereum consensus and execution layer nodes are at about 6k, under Bitcoin, and way above other projects.

If the network grows [1] at 2MB/14s that's: 2/14*3600 = 514MB per hour 514*24 = 12.3GB per day 12.3*30 = 369GB per month Even if the underlying blockchain is decentralized, I have no practical way of participating without doing it via some centralized exchange. How many nodes will there be if ETH hits $0? What will happen to the services like ENS? 1. https://www.bitrates.com/guides/ethereum/how-many-ethereum-a... Is…

It’s about 1.1TB for full sync geth nodes, and growing. Ethereum researchers are looking into statelessness and state expiry which aim to make it even easier to run nodes with little need for space.

People will continue to run nodes regardless of the price of ETH, just like Bitcoin.

ENS is a smart contract protocol, so I don’t see how it’s related.

Post reply on HN