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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

#91

Post by Animats »

matkoniecz wrote: post #81
grp000 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it that way at all. The NFT vector is arbitrary. The point was to drain his accounts and nothing more. If a less suspicious method was available, I'm sure the scammers would have taken that one.

Is there any case of NFT that is not some combination of get-rich-quick scheme, Ponzi scheme, search for a bigger fool, FOMO-powered stupidity, extracting money from naive people or satire of NFT? And NFT part adds anything substantial and is not replaceable by regular transfer (either transfer of money or BTC-like)?

If anyone knows of one, please post. As far as I know, there are none in the Metaverse area of NFTs.

Discussion on Reddit's r/metaverse [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/metaverse/comments/sr0sqz/what_meta...

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

#92

Post by oefrha »

This highlights how scary it is to interface your savings with these “smart contracts”. Most people have no way to know what they’re actually going to do; the tiny slice of people capable of investigating can hardly remain vigilant at all times. Like, if you ask me to log into something with my bank account, all alarm bells would go off; if you ask me to stake this, approve that with my eth wallet, well, just another weird smart contract thing, right?

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

#93

Post by MPSimmons »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #26
keithalewis wrote: post #2

News flash: you were social engineered into buying ETH in the first place.

Eth is a premine scam sure, but the dude has $130M Of it, so I don’t think he is crying over that part

How much purchasing power does that afford? If he wanted to buy an island, pay for it to have infrastructure added, and then also hire security and business payroll, could he actually exchange the Eth to the applicable currencies? I know the numbers line up, but is that amount of liquidity in the system?

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

#94

Post by judge2020 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #52
muh_gradle wrote: post #33

I don't understand why in the world Thomas wouldn't directly communicate via phone and video chat to any of these people first before doing serious business and potentially traveling across the country for random anonymous folks on Discord. Social engineering is so much easier when you engage in faceless, voiceless communication. This could've been shut down so much more easily if they put a real human being to match…

"Discord" by itself is a pretty big red flag to be honest. I would personally not engage in any business or industry where that is the main communications platform.

Tons of business happen on WeChat and that's the 99% marketshare in some countries.

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

#96

Post by randomhodler84 »

MPSimmons wrote: post #93
randomhodler84 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eth is a premine scam sure, but the dude has $130M Of it, so I don’t think he is crying over that part

How much purchasing power does that afford? If he wanted to buy an island, pay for it to have infrastructure added, and then also hire security and business payroll, could he actually exchange the Eth to the applicable currencies? I know the numbers line up, but is that amount of liquidity in the system?

Good question. Mostly yes, but it would take some coordination.

At $100M you would want to split trade across exchanges and probably some defi too, but yeah, you could. Eth has about $10M/-2% on major exchanges.

Not that you would need to convert to fiat. If you ran your own island, just pay for goods and labor in Bitcoin or Ether directly.

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

#97

Post by logifail »

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.

> 1000 euro note exists but I think that’s on the way out

€500 was the largest, but as of April 2019 is no longer being issued.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/html/index.en.html

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

#98

Post by randomhodler84 »

logifail wrote: post #97
randomhodler84 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 1000 euro note exists but I think that’s on the way out €500 was the largest, but as of April 2019 is no longer being issued. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/html/index.en.html

My mistake. That’s that one I was referring to, the 500, being phased out. Thanks

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

#100

Post by KennyBlanken »

grp000 wrote: post #73
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…

I don't see it that way at all. The NFT vector is arbitrary. The point was to drain his accounts and nothing more. If a less suspicious method was available, I'm sure the scammers would have taken that one.

I think parent commenter might feel the same way I do, which is that when I read him say "eh, a scam but she's helping us, no harm in me voicing support" my sympathy for him diminished significantly.

If you don't know much about NFTs but think they're kinda scammy, maybe you shouldn't default to "support / lend your reputation to them."

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