If I understand the gist of the commens so far, he's sitting on 100 million US dollars, and is hoping to build some crypto enhanced flying cars using free labour from volunteers he found on Discord?
Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
381–390 of 423 posts
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
He had $130 million wrapped up in an ERC20 token called Aave wETH (aWETH). ERC20 tokens let you approve another address to spend those tokens on your behalf. Basically, the scammers tried to trick him into approving all of his Aave wETH by creating a fake website designed to make him think that he's approving a different token with the same aWETH symbol.
So besides getting scammed, what use are these ERC20 for?
They're basically receipts for putting money into a lending pool. In this case he's lending about $130 million, on which he's earning interest, and can get his money back by redeeming those tokens.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
170k is a pittance after taxes.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, they weren't: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/constitutiondao
The value of the PEOPLE tokens on the secondary market proceeded to increase nearly 10x in the weeks following the dissolution of the DAO. Even though market cap is declining, at $327M mcap, it is still many multiples of the amount raised.
PEOPLE tokens in circulation are still redeemable for the underlying ETH, but the monetary premium has increased as a result of the dispersed liquidity to so many holders (16K+) as well as the novelty of retaining the token for a failed, yet valiant effort.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
170k is a pittance after taxes.
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Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's rare that buyers of houses and property are that thorough. On the contrary, my friend recently bought a plot of land for which the sellers did not own the title. The title company, who's only job is to verify this, completely missed it. The fake sellers made out with tens of thousands of dollars and the real owners, who are from Germany, are still haggling with my friend and trying to get her or the title compan…
Where is the land mentioned? Is there no land registry there? In many jurisdictions, titles to land are registered through a government operated registry where would-be buyers could look up information on the situation of the land rights.
AFAIK you don't need to be a title company to do this, any buyer could do it themselves.
And what if you don't know enough about land law to make sense of everything? That's when you need companies to do it for you.
Is checking the chain of ownership of cryptocurrencies easier than land? It depends whether you're talking to a real estate lawyer or a NFT seller.
I'm neither, and I don't see the intrinsic difference.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#387This 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.
Well, Thomas did apparently got to have $100M+ in his wallet amid all this frenzy, at least on paper.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#388This 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…
Thomas also mentioned in the thread that it seems "Space Falcon" is a real NFT project. The actual domain ends in .io though, and somehow the scammers managed to acquire the .com domain and I'd imagine they'd then only need to replicate the frontend UI instead of coming up with an all-new one. Still very sophisticated for sure.
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#389I 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.
> Does this mean I have to check every transaction I enter to run arbitrary code with full access to my wallet?
No, for the same reason you don't check the code on every website you visit, if you want to be even more secure then just stick to blue chips like aave, curve, etc you can see how much is sitting in popular defi contracts here: https://www.defipulse.com/
You also don't give an ethereum contract full access to your wallet, you need to approve access to however much you want the contract to have access first then you get a second prompt to allow the contract to run.
You're talking like one accidental misclick and all your money is gone.
If you're super duper paranoid you might want to look at something like argent wallet (https://www.argent.xyz/) which lets you do common trades, defi, staking etc from within the app so you don't have to worry about random contracts and there's no seed phrase so no need to worry about that either.
This went on way longer than i expected
Re: Social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of all the scams happening over TCP/IP every day! They built this thing where anyone can pretend to be a bank website? No checks or security? It's laughable. I'm in disbelief. And this is the web?
There are checks in place to make difficult to buy an SSL certificate for the official domain of a bank. At least Chrome tracks malicious websites. By comparison, there seem to be no checks in place to prevent writing an ethereym contract that drains a victim’s wallet.
> There are checks in place to make difficult to buy an SSL certificate for the official domain of a bank.
Who said it needed to be a real bank?
> At least Chrome tracks malicious websites.
That's not TCP/IP, the chrome equivalent would be on Trustwallet, argent, metamask etc to implement.