Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
331–340 of 423 posts
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but stories like this make me think that crypto can never become mainstream. We had illegal p2p sharing where you could download a virus from bad people and then Jobs came along and made iTunes which set the standard for streaming. I am sure someone will come along in the crypto space and make crypto easy for the rest of us.
itunes isnt p2p
You missed the point.
People wanted easy access to music, itunes provided that service.
Right now with the world of crypto is confusing to the average guy, so hopefully in the future someone will create a good UX and the underlying to protocol for instant decentralised payments.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-point: there is currently another submission on HN suggesting that crypto "off-ramps" are really problematic and difficult at the moment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30322296
Breaking news: "off-ramps" to centralized currencies is centralized. It's not difficult if the source of your cryptocurrencies is legitimate, while difficult if you have a hard time explaining how it's legitimate. I think the system works as intended.
I'm confused then, are you in support of cryptocurrency? Because what you're describing (the "system") sounds an awful lot like reinventing banks from first principles but much less efficiently. If that is how it's intended to function then why are we bothering with this at all?
And aside from KYC issues, another recently posted article pointed out that when a single individual tried to unload around a 1500 BTC (%0.03 of the coins in circulation at the time) it caused a liquidity crisis that crashed the market by 20%.[1]
In this case the individual in the Twitter thread has an amount of ETH of that magnitude.
Basically because crypto is performing the job of a speculative asset it results in the liquidity issues that you would see in things like company stock.
[1]: https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html?m=1 (see footnote 11. The gist is that this sale put enough pressure on the order books that a lot of leverage positions cascaded into selling as well causing the flash crash)
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there is value in being able to write up an online contract (code) that is able to manage money for two parties without needing to go to a bank or some third party to act as the middleman. It's the same thing as reading the terms and conditions.
Human transactions can 'easily' be undone in a court of law, and yet are still so painful to undo as to necessitate a trusted escrow agent in many of them.
This is making it so there is no "undo", and no escrow agent. There's value, for those looking to take advantage of others.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#335This 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…
> when he went to stake his NFT, they asked for an approval for spending aETH from his wallet. Approvals such as this are normal when interacting with smart contracts, since the contract has to be "delegated" responsibility over the tokens in order to move them. However, what wasn't normal is that the approval was actually for Aave ETH.
I'm a reasonably technical dude (senior data engineer at GAMMA/FAANG/whatever we're deciding to use nowadays), yet I don't have a damn clue what this means. And that's not an indictment of your communication. How on earth could I expect my wife, my brother, my parents, my kids, any of my friends, etc., to understand this?
On the other hand, all these people understand the concepts of bank accounts, credit cards, fiat currency, etc.
I'm open to learning more and having my views changed, but I'm so far convinced that there's absolutely nothing about crypto that is a simple, reliable, demonstrably real solution to a problem that isn't already handled by our current financial instruments.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
easier than you think. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/15/how-one-familys-nightmare-il... https://www.nar.realtor/wire-fraud
Those are all intentionally sending money; you just have had someone tell you the wrong account. Which is just as easy with crypto. And, just like with crypto, you can always reach out to the party you are trying to send money to via another means to confirm the address.
When I purchased a house, I Googled the recipient, confirmed the certificate, Googled the number found on their website separately to confirm it was listed elsewhere as belonging to the company I expected it to belong to, called it, and got them to tell me the account details for the wire transfer, confirming it matched what I had been sent. Which, to their credit, their instructions also told me to do. And I initially sent the down payment, confirmed they received that, and only later in the process sent the remainder.
While there still are some ways to beat that (compromise the recipient's infrastructure, change the website, lock out the recipient from their email, insert into the email exchange, get a wire transfer done before the recipient can proactively call the target to warn them), it's a lot harder to pull off than "find a target that won't read the code very closely".
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#337Earlier 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…
I’ve had a PayPal failure, a PayPal success, an apple pay failure.
It’s definitely not a guarantee. Most of the Venmo type scams where people “accidentally” send you money and ask you to send it back or pay for an item with bad funds are not reclaimable from those services based on TOS. In those cases you’d be better off with BTC.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#338I 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…
> it's got to be the biggest, most massive security hole I've ever seen brushed off. Well said. This goes hand-in-hand with the victim blaming that goes on in cryptocurrency circles. Any time a story like this appears, defenders come out of the woodwork to insist that it's the victim's fault for doing something or not doing something else. Even the linked Twitter thread is full of replies from people suggesting that…
> Crypto seems to appeal to people who like to think that they are smarter than the average person and therefore will succeed by self-managing their finances right down to the private keys.
I've been calling them Dunning Krugerrands for this reason, and I suggest others do as well.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#339I 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 I heard about Ethereum this was my exact fear. Programmable money sounds like a terrible idea from the perspective of business owner. Does this mean I have to check every transaction I enter to run arbitrary code with full access to my wallet? That is of course assuming the code isn't able to break out of any other protections there might be and pay for the ETH I'm getting with my data.
It boggles the mind that someone looked at money and thought "you know what, this is too simple, let's shoehorn in a Turing complete programming language - that'll fix it!"
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#340This 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…
> when he went to stake his NFT, they asked for an approval for spending aETH from his wallet. Approvals such as this are normal when interacting with smart contracts, since the contract has to be "delegated" responsibility over the tokens in order to move them. However, what wasn't normal is that the approval was actually for Aave ETH. I'm a reasonably technical dude (senior data engineer at GAMMA/FAANG/whatever we'…
It is a specific technical detail of how ERC-20 tokens work. Your wife/brother/kids etc make transfers online from their bank account without knowing the technical details of how that transfer works.
Ideally wallets would have better UX where concepts like this could be handled safely and in an accessible manner. I think crypto isn't really ready for general consumption yet.