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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

#371
post #18

I feel incredibly dumb for not getting the details of how it happened.

Hacker sends NFT to Thomas. Since NFT's are subject to heavy criticism of their existence, a lot of people are developing extra things you actually can do with them. The market is interested in that being done right, so its interesting to be a part of projects that are trying. This extra thing required Thomas sending the NFT to another service they developed. Smart contracts in Ethereum Virtual Machine environments (…

Thanks, this was a great explanation.

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

#372
post #18

I feel incredibly dumb for not getting the details of how it happened.

Let's use cash as an analogy. Someone comes to you and says "I'll give you X Euro if you let me hold onto your Y Dollars until you give me X Euro back." You think, well Euro are useful, maybe you need Euro specifically to invest in an European business. So you agree. But when you review the contract presented it just says you give Y Dollars, so you go "wtf?" and refuse to sign. Apparently, some people are dumb enough…

This is the best ELI5 in this thread. Thanks.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, no, of course you don't have to check every contract you engage with. At least, not with the help of my conveniently-IPO'ing DAO wETH unwrapper leaser startup. We'll take care of the heavy lifting, you sit back, relax, and pay us no mind (really, please, do not look behind the curtain). We're a Series F company filling the totally coincidental grift-shaped hole where Ethereum left off - contact our sales team on…

Shut up and take my liquidity in your farming pools!!!

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

It boggles the mind that someone is so lacking imagination that they couldn’t imagine a use for such technology. Ignorance is unbecoming.

Can you share some uses? Genuinely interested.

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

#375

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 catch was that 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." - this is a bit surprising - I thought the way to let a contract move tokens was just to send them to it? Approving a contract to move everything from a wallet works like sending everything from the wallet to the contract - it omits the step where you choose the amount that you trust the contract with, why is this the 'normal' way?

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then couldn't you just move somewhere else? I live in the Netherlands, near amsterdam. It's one of the most developed places on Earth (more so than most of the US) and my yearly salary is only 100k USD, which puts me in the top 1% on my country.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the banking industry won't do much to prevent Aunt Senile from wiring $80k to Nigeria, although I doubt they make it easy. Hell, I couldn't even phone-authorize a wire of 8k to buy a car two states over, but I guess that's just my bank. Had to bloody pay for the car on credit card, no joke. But the scenario in the OP is only possible in cryptocurrencies. You can't put a button on a website "Click here to send a…

It's a fair criticism. But the reverse is also true, in that money is frictionless to raise and coordinate in cryptocurrencies, such as the $45M attempt at buying a copy of the Constitution (which failed, but people simply got a refund), or the $56M that was raised for Julian Assange's defense last week. I'm able to work with total strangers, raise money, sell products, contribute to causes, commission art work etc,…

You’re aware that an enormous proportion of people’s constitution dao refunds were eaten up by gas fees, presumably.

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

#378
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, a world where taxes don’t exist and the S&P always returns 10%-20% a year and everything you really want in life is dirt cheap. Nah, I want cars, some homes, a yacht and a hot ass babe to pleasure me and raise nice children as we travel the world and dress fancy.

You think you need more than 170k per year to own a yacht, travel the world and dress fancy? I'm guessing you haven't actually done any of these things before, then.

Outside of silicon valley, 170k per year is a huge amount of money. Especially if you're going to travel outside of North America and Europe.

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

#379
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

So... Napster and LimeWire?

You can't break cryptocurrency's weakness for this kind of adoption without dropping decentralization. Same conclusion that iTunes came to. People wanted downloadable music, not a specific implementation detail about how that music is delivered.

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

#380
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I, for one, don't want easy access to crypto "currencies". No matter if it can be made safe.

I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I just don't see any sense or reason in the concept.

It's mighty arrogant from crypto enthusiasts to assume that everybody will jump on it as soon it just can be made mainstream and "safe".

Thanks, but no thanks

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