As a software engineer, I was very lucky to be able to work from
home.what could possibly go wrong?
Being at home, I started cooking, exercising, watching netflix, crunchyroll, amazon video, ohh boy, after two weeks - 24 hours alone, everything became like a routine, very boring, unhealthy, I needed to find something interesting to focus my mental energy.
What?, Bitcoin, Blockchain, decentralized money, I was getting very
excited, all of this sound incredibly amazing; so I started investing my energy in crypto.
The first time I heard about bitcoin was in
2017, but by then I was more interested to buying cows than anything else :)
I got some ethereum, bitcoin, chainlink, and by the end of April I was getting very good investment returns. So what went wrong?
This is what I did wrong, yeah is all my fault and everything started with a Scam.
I subscribed to a youtube channel posting content about a famous businessman and book author. I want to clarify here, "it was not the official channel of the businessman". My big mistake.
By May 10, we had all the excitement about bitcoin halving. I still remember seeing in the channel the bitcoin giveaway. How it was supposed to work? you send some bitcoin and you get double amount back to the same address. I checked the site, and the transactions, everything look pretty real. I got very emotional, and yeah I sent some of my bitcoin to that address. 😅
I lost my crypto in a Scam, and the next days I was feeling very silly, stupid, how can I think people will love me so much to give me free money, hahaha.
The next days, I was thinking, Isn't there some place were I can report all of this cyber crimes?
After some research, I found a couple of options, but there is a company tracking the scams, so I created a request to investigate the scam I was victim of.
When creating the ticket I had to provide information like my email, phone, and the address where I sent the crypto in the scam. Everything was feeling like general information they will need to do the investigation.
well, maybe it was a coincidence, but 15 minutes later after creating that ticket, my account was accessed and all my crypto was stolen from my account in a very popular exchange.
How did the hackers got access? I felt like my password was strong enough, I had 2 factor authentication enabled, my Account seed was stored only in paper, and still someone enter to my account, converted all my crypto to bitcoin, and sent to an address.
I contacted the exchange, with the hope they can return my stolen bitcoin, but after some days, they replied back saying that all the operations were executed using one of my registered devices.
In some way the hacker got access to my computer, and also got access to my phone authentication code.
These are the suggestions I got from the exchange:
- Scan the devices with anti virus.
- Reset email password.
- Check unfamiliar rules, filters, forwarding addresses, recovery emails.
- Reset password in the exchange.
- Contact mobile service provider to inquire about security measures to prevent unauthorized changes such as SIM swap or phone port.
Because it was my fault, the exchange didn't do anything, but they offer help providing transactions details for local authorities. I sent another ticket to the FBI - Internet Crime Complain Center but I never got any replied back.
I was feeling down for a couple of days, the hacker stole the saving I got with a lot of hard work, but after some time I decided to keep learning and investing in crypto, I think is a really good opportunity, but we definitely have some risks to be aware of.
These are the lessons I learned. I hope they help new people learning crypto, so they don't make the same mistakes.
- Don't keep your crypto online all the time (hot wallet), get your hardware wallet. I personally got my Ledger and now I feel safer.
- Don't save passwords in chrome. If they get access to your computer, now they have access to all your online accounts.
- Don't share too much personal information online. We share a lot of information online, specially in social networks. For the sim swap, hacker will need your personal information.
- If you want to keep crypto online, don't keep all your crypto in a single account.
- Be careful when picking the sources to learn about crypto. Now I follow better sources of information, and mostly only official twitter accounts, and youtube channels. I highly recommend:
- Digital Asset News. The channels I was following before never mentioned the scams going on. This channel is fighting the scams every day. Now every time I see a Scam I also report to google.
- Ivan on tech.
- BitBoy Crypto.
- Coin Bureau.
- Chico Crypto.
- Altcoin Daily.
