Bitcoin Forum

A person lost $71 million on Crypto scam, an unbelievable trick surprise the world

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPQzWLJfU2Mau5nRHMmDVDUQcA9cQouJ_LZpFRej7_PErcWiE5EsIZAMUOmdrtJJyM9vIDYFePi8JEZIHZDDhUeTzQsST3K9ij1DVW4cTuhXHqx4J81pwTntEckMxqSHK3S6iTQ4KOAJ35vc629GoviZrBoCmbsuG35NXbWW9PscxKadUu7kv1JPBYjDqI/w640-h638/Screenshot_16.jpg

The cryptocurrency communities are really surprised by hearing about this type of tricks to make scam, also demanded the urgent need for increased awareness and education on the risks associated with digital asset transactions.

more...
https://www.cryptocrit.xyz/2024/05/a-person-lost-71-million-on-crypto-scam.html (https://www.cryptocrit.xyz/2024/05/a-person-lost-71-million-on-crypto-scam.html)

I cannot imagine what that person must feel right now. That is a huge amount and to think that it was taken just like that almost with no force would definitely leave a dent.

I do not know whether that investor isn't just careful enough or the scammer was just that sophisticated and smart. Well most likely this is not a work of just one person but a group of people. Otherwise id be very impressed.

He lost everything. He can create token again since his first token pepe was successful. You can read more about his story here https://twitter.com/pauly0x/status/1786880342147875216


Scammers used almost all of tricks to fool its victim. Even a big influencer can also become the victim from the scammer. I think that majority of cyber attacks being initiated by the group of scammers and hackers. It's quite impossible to think that if this structured attacked being initiated by the personal.
This is why we are always seeing massive attacks happened in the X. So many accounts were impersonating the legit account and they act like they were the real accounts.

There are so many scammers now. Just always be careful with your money. Scammer everywhere now.

Certainly, scams in crypto industry have become more common now and Millions of dollars are stolen every year by hacker through  malicious tactics  . This issue is truly killing the industry and is major obstacle towards widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies. It is a challenging situation for exchanges and DEFIs industry to develop fool proof security systems to stop such criminal activities to protect people's money.

Scams will always exist in the crypto world and they will develop new methods so that many do not realize they are being scammed, but I.m not sure that this is the real story, because $70 million is a lot of money and I'm sure anyone who has that kind of money would be very stupid not to care about security when making transactions, especially when reading from the replies to his post, many people doubt this story, and I didn't find this story also published on a trusted crypto website like Cointelegraph, just a personal blog with full of advertisements.

How can someone who has $70 million crypto asset not have other forms of assets in real life because he said on his X account that it is also his wife's savings and also his kid’s tuition.
https://twitter.com/Pauly0x/status/1786882420140306787

Is this story true?
None of the links you have provided are official and credible to seek news from. It is indeed quite questionable if someone with that big amount of money got scammed as easy as that.

How did someone with huge amount of earnings get infiltrated? How did the scammer know that the person was going to send the wbtc? The story needs a whole lot of validation

Whether this story is true or not, scams in this crypto space aren't new, but they continue to evolve, catching even seasoned investors off guard. This case highlights the need for greater awareness and education regarding the potential pitfalls of engaging in digital asset transactions. We need to prioritize security measures and continuously educate ourselves on the latest scam tactics.

It is very sad if your story is true but scams in crypto are not new as day by day demand for crypto is increasing and scams are increasing. Most jurisdictions lack cryptocurrency regulation. Many people do not understand this well enough to protect themselves from scammers. Where regulation is weak or non-existent, scammers can operate with impunity. It is important to take precautions to stay safe here. That's why you have to research the market well first and know about the strategies of the scam.

The link wants us to go with another link, @OP if you're going to share some stories, make sure that they're real.
If this is all about the crypto scams that are revolving in the community, anyone should be careful with whatever that's making them greedy. That is the sign that they need to be careful when they're already feeling too bad already about such investments that they're seeing.

Scams are quite normal in this era and scammers are now getting better equipped and smarter every day by using new technology. It is the responsibility of everyone dealing with crypto to keep oneself updated with new scams and always follow the safe way of dealing with anyone online. In almost every scam the scammer will give an offer that is hard to resist as it is the greed that takes over. Being careful, diligent and not believing in anyone is the best way the fend away scams.

pauly is a piece of shit, no one would cry over him getting scammed

I have read the news and I received news that today the money has been returned to the owner's address. I'm not sure if this is a scam or not but my personal speculation is that this is not a scam but rather a kind of security demonstration to educate people on the importance of checking and rechecking addresses very thoroughly. Most senders only check the prefix and suffix of each address even though the demonstration showed that fraudsters can manipulate the prefix or suffix of an address with the same letters and numbers.

Right now the situation is not clear, there are some theories that maybe the supposed victim and the scammer are the very same person and this is just some kind of financial move.

Another possibility is that the hack was real, but the victim and the hacker came to an agreement that allowed the hacker to keep a portion of the funds stolen, while the victim recovers the bulk of that amount and agrees to not pursue the matter any longer, so we will have to wait and see how the story develops as things are too murky at the moment.

Whether this story is true or not, scams in this crypto space aren't new, but they continue to evolve, catching even seasoned investors off guard. This case highlights the need for greater awareness and education regarding the potential pitfalls of engaging in digital asset transactions. We need to prioritize security measures and continuously educate ourselves on the latest scam tactics.
[/quote]
Regardless whether the story in the OP is true or not, there's still a very big lesson to learn from it, and it's for us that are in the crypto space to understand that scams and hacks in the industry are very real. Most of us often makes that mistake of copying addresses into our wallets without verification, to crosscheck if it's actually the correct address that we're pasting in the wallet, because any mistakes of sending to a wrong wallet will be very costly. A mistake of sending coins to the wrong address can not be reversed, so the lesson of this story is not to be lazy, but to take a few minutes to crosscheck before sending, also I've heard a of a few occasions that clipboards will malfunction or where hackers have compromised a person's system, like the story we heard.

Most times such institutional scam or company scam are game plan and sometimes the victims is still the actor just a story to cover up, most of the fake guys that created platforms that scammed innocent investors all start by saying either their hot wallet was hacked or even claiming an insider job, and some times it end in lies if proven.
Although I am not saying this situation is entirely same but what we need to consider is the possibility of such occurrence, many times we need to make extra effort into proving all this thing's before believing them wholly since this is not the first time we experience such set up and bad scams 71 million is quite a huge amount.

This is what can happen if you went all in on one asset class like crypto.
This is what can happen if you don't know how to secure your assets.

Losing a thousand dollars for me is already a big one. I just can't imagine how you the person lost that huge amount of money and can't spend on securing his funds. Instead of diversifying it, he focused on one asset class and what's worse is that, even their savings and tuition of his kid is also there as well. Well, if this is true or not, I guess that person really learned from this mistake. The only problem is that, it caused him around $70 million dollars to learn from this.

Anyway, I just hope that one or two people here learned from other's mistake. Focus on securing your funds first before storing huge amounts of money on it.

If i am not mistaken, that guy offered 10% bounty if scammer return all the funds, and they actually did. I saw on Twitter that a scammer returned all the funds in ETH from 100 different addresses. Crypto became a nightmare for some of the users due to their mistakes, or you can say lack of knowledge or overconfidence. The scammers are getting innovative so the users needs to be updated with their scamming methods so that they can be more careful when dealing with their crypto assets.

This is too general term to say on someone who was tricked by a scammer. This is not a problem of securing his assets this is due to bad practice of sending funds. Copying address from the block explorer to send funds is something that people shouldn't try, always copy the address from the wallet it came from or generated from or sending it somewhere you only knew.

At least you could have given some information on how the scam happened or how it is supposed to work, so the rest of the community which is heavily involved in alternative currencies can be aware of the modus operandi of those thieves and prevent us from also losing thousands of dollars to scammers as this unfortunate person did.
Also if this unfortunate news happen to be true it could easily be one of the biggest thefts I have read about on the internet, to be honest.

The biggest proven amount I saw being lose to scammers and which involved Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies did not surpassed the hundred of thousands of dollars, losing over 70 million to a single scammer is simply a new level of foolishness and pain to be suffered from the rest of one's life. Hopefully it is true the scammer and the victims agreed to meet half way and make a deal, otherwise it would be one of the biggest thefts to a single holder in this current year...

I would like to read more about on what happeed, but I don't feel like clicking of those news webpages, which I have never visited before. I feel extra paranoid now.  :P

Never worry, with that kind of money, I'm pretty sure that authorities will be on the hunt for the people that have perpetrated such crime, they're probably on the case already and seeing how this is in dollars, the authorities are definitely going to work hard in solving this one, it's a sad day for this person though, that much money would've been enough for someone to retire for about 3 lifetimes, I would probably be in panic if that amount was stolen from me too. In regards to the scam, I think that it's a combination of the person letting their guard down and not being vigilant about their safety and the sophistication and novelty of the scam that has led to all this crazy situation.

The amount without a doubt guarantees the authorities will get involved, but there is no way to know if they could recover the money lost, after all even if the hacker was arrested, depending on where this happened they may receive just a few years behind bars.

Being that the case they may decide to not cooperate and never to reveal where that money is, so when they get out of jail they can move to another country and start all over again with all of those millions on the wallets they control.

This is the reason you need to have the crypto knowledge before going into crypto investment because there are a lot of temptation you will come across in the crypto community, you will apply wisdom to escape the scammers.

It will be difficult for someone that have the knowledge of crypto, to lost $72m to scammers because you will know if you are dealing with the right person base on the details the person will provide before the transaction will take place.

If such thing happen in my country, the money is gone forever because you can report crypto issue to government when you know it has been banned in the country, but if crypto is not ban in the victim country, I guess he or she will recover the money back with the effort of the government.

I really wonder how careless they be especially when they spend such huge amounts, 71million is not a small amount for anyone so they can't simply copy the address shown in the last of his TX history and send it without even cross referencing.

This is just due to the silly mistake and decentralisation comes at certain cost predominantly being responsible with your money.

We can be smart enough to outrun these scamming projects in the space but the vast majority are greedy. They fend to become greedy simply when they face offers from objects and mind you, these offers are simply out of the picture because they're compromised for the purpose for baits and luring investors into deep traps. We can continue to make significant losses but we'll always belt up. People will continue to lose huge figures because they've failed to learn the basis of the system.

May this story serve as a warning of what could happen. We really can’t verify the truth in this story however this could be a hypothetical situation where it might actually happen in real life.

What I would suggest is for everyone to not just hold all of the coins they hold in just one wallet especially something as huge as 71 million dollars. Secondly, do not ever make a transaction with all of it. I mean where would you even put it? I suggest cutting it to sections so at least if something like this were to happen, you wouldn’t lose all of your funds.

I'm not sure if it's this story, but I've heard about some agreement that has been reached between victims and hackers, but in this situation I also express my skepticism about a form of attack that is not too strange in space and still got such a large amount of money, my initial thought was that it was a play in periods when the market atmosphere did not have much shocking news.

Anyway, perhaps from a receptive perspective, I think it is also a lesson for all of us about protecting property against attacks.

I mean it's not really a surprise.  Scams like this have been happening since bitcoin has had a value.  Because of the irreversible nature of crypto its ripe for scammers.  This sucks but I always tell people before they start buying crypto that they need to learn how to securely hold and transfer crypto before they dive in.

As far as I know, there are no scammers who are not smart; that's why they are able to steal millions of dollars because they are smart, and it is also possible that they are not the only ones.
I can agree with you on this we are talking about.

You see, articles 71 million dollars is a huge amount; it is impossible that only one scammer will benefit from that; there are accomplices who are hackers, for sure.

We call many people smart but have no awareness of manners. They are experts in technology but use it to steal, indirectly. I try to always copy a new address even if it's a small transaction on my same wallet as my savings or airdrop work, I keep it separate. The point is that I discipline myself that sometimes any address from manipulation or my mistakes in transactions.

The ease of blockchain to learn for those who have the basics is a new loophole for scammers and increasingly subtle actions. Although crypto is a new type of asset from the traditional in the art of saving and profit but I believe it will be easier to identify these cases as time goes by and I hope many observers and legal experts will start studying crypto including the flow of funds, although it is difficult because of privacy but not impossible, because crypto is real money that is highly liquid. And more and more people are using it.

It is high time we need to ensure that we take our privacy very serious.  The rate at which investors are losing money in the market is just so confusing making some new investors to keep asking questions about their own safety in the market.
We just need to keep holding and making sure we keep our tokesn from people that have the potential to steal from us.
I am still very much prepared for what is to come than what is available currently.

Yeah it saddens ne everytime to see how investors are losing it out to scams and the worst part about this is the fact that there are various methods used to scam people and this will come to conclusion that people will be too scared to invest and stick to traditional methods. Atleast when it comes to crypto they should keep everything private and be right lipped to avoid unnecessary traps.

OP has plugged in his website through this post, a website that contains more ads than content which is frustrating. How can one be interested in reading news on a website where there is a popup coming up every five seconds and any place you click accidentally opens up a new window with an ad? I understand that you need money to maintain the website and earn some money from it for the work you do, but it shouldn't be this annoying.

Coming back to the topic, I don't understand how can one get scammed so easily, if the scammer had created a transaction with a similar-looking address, the sender should always double-check that they have copied their address from the right place, why would someone copy their address from the transaction history in the first place?

Crypto scams are getting trickier!
Scammers now impersonate legitimate companies, use targeted phishing attacks, create fake ICOs/DeFi projects, and run pump-and-dump schemes.

Always verify platforms before investing.

Check out this list of 1300+ of known scams to stay safe: Crypto Exposed Scams List (https://cryptolinks.com/cryptocurrency-scam-sites).