Bitcoin Forum

hi

i checked about 20 spreadsheets of bounty campaigns. and in these lists i found about 15 private keys to ETH addresses.
people post their key instead of their address.

all the addresses had nothing in it. maybe somebody else already emptied them.

Then they really deserve to lose their tokens because its clearly states what is the address and the private key.

One may wrongly enter it and it is so immediately listed on the spreadsheet. They probably aware of it and move their coins immediately to another wallet. If not so, they are obvious newbie.

Thanks your info! I alway check before sent any think! but one times, i  had mistake, so very sad!
 >:( >:( >:(

How is it possible? ETH address has the easily identifiable beginning 0x.

This is what happens when without getting full knowledge about the procedure to join a bounty campaigns and do their own method of work and then after making loss they realize their mistake.

That is foolishness, if someone can no differentiate at this stage the difference between wallet address and Private keys. 15 private keys is a huge number

I do notice it to, there are lots of misunderstanding of sending information on participating campaigns some participants sends their private key instead of their address and this can lead to another victim of Hackers.
On my experience on participating i notice one of participants who accidentally put his/her private key on the address information, you can tell it even by just looking. As you notice in myetherwallet all address are started at 0 digit and x character, first of seing his address with an starting string of 45c76***********************************************************(if im not mistaken) I already noticed that its not an address rather a private key.
To check whether my conclusion is true I accessed his/her wallet and It surely are the private key so I check the balance but unfortunately its been already emptied I already saw the past transaction 14 hrs ago 5 different token had been transfered into different account.

So everyone should be inform and warn by these, better review all the information that you are about to send on others.

This can also happen, when users login to their wallets with private keys, mark their addresses and forget to copy. In this way private keys instead of addresses are pasted. That happened to me, but I fortunately saw the mistake, before I posted the key.

This is a common thing which I do observed that people do mistakenly posted private keys instead of their own Eth wallet address.You would really be able to be hacked and people will surely get in on that wallet and took all the funds on it. Chances on hitting a jackpot on stealing other peoples coins,if you are careless then you would really make such loss but as far as I observed most people posted private keys are newbie or low ranks which most of those wallets are newly created.

I don`t know what companies you`ve checked, I`ve saw this trick only in few airdrop forms

Op, thank you for this wonderful observation as I think this is very possible and hackers can take advantage of this and steal people ethereum. What on earth would make some one to post it private keys in the place of his ethereum address. I agree with op that some one most have hacked those accounts and stole those ethereum balance.

most bounty hunters store addresses and private keys in one notepad and are located close together, so a fatal error can result in private keys that they keep secret, even published.

they should use MetaMask, and save a separate private key with an ETH address

It will only takes minute to empty all those wallets and there are people posting thier private keys in public with balances but the thing is you cannot withdraw the funds on that wallet because once you send eth on that address, after  recieving the eth it automaticaly send the eth to unique address.

of course you can empty their balances as long as you have their private keys because private keys are the ones you will use in order to open your myetherwallet account and most bounty campaigns especially erc20 related coins/tokens are required to get a myetherwallet account because it can supports all kind of coins and tokens whether it is old or new. but overall we cant do nothing about it and those people who actually do it are just careless  enough  or maybe they were just newbies that still confuse on what is a private key and eth address.

One should double check when posting the addresses.

sometimes someone is in a hurry to follow a limited number of camps and fill out a hasty form that leads to a lack of thoroughness in reading campaye terms.

how can users be such a fool to place a private key instead of an address, for sure someone is in a hurry to get their coins in any case, we must be very careful thank you for writing about this, perhaps users will become smarter and will keep track of their info.

I often find that people, by their inexperience or inattention leave their private information. It's good that you created this topic and remind you that you need to be careful

maybe they forget because it is not careful.
I've done something like that too.
therefore for your newbie must be meticulous and meticulous again

So what probably will happens. The hacker will write scripts to automatically check bounty spreadsheets for private keys. So immediately after posting your private key the hacker will get the key and empty the wallet. That is sag but if you use your brain, everything is fine.

They carelessly post their personal key instead of the wallet address. I'm sure they will lose all of their tokens because of this silly mistake

Usually this happens to the newbie, they have not understood what is etherwallet address and what is a private key. for that we must be careful to fill the form bounty.

Thanks for sharing this observation! I haven't joined any bounty campaigns and I will keep this mind.

It is like one enters password of an email account instead of email address  ::)

In fact, it is quite common mistake, especially among users who has very limited knowledge about blockchain and other stuff. For example, ETH wallet address and private key look absolutely different (at least in my view) but that fact does not help at all because one does not know that ETH address starts with 0x. And ofcause one has to always double check when submit the wallet addresses.

There are lots of users that are been scams for that the same mistakes and always stating that Myetherwallet is a scam,
Getting scam on myetherwallet is kinda supper hard for an scammer to do, the easiest way to do is to get the private key itself using fake website such as phishing sites, having these phishing sites around makes once users unsafe on browsing their wallet online, it is always says and advice for all that you should bookmark the right sight to avoid these phising sites and also keeps your private key in safe and secure.

I use myetherwallet as my ERC20 wallet and as of now i never encountered such issues. so I may say myetherwallet is still safe. :)

Today, too many newbie in cryptocurrency, who not understand how dangerous when they lost private key

When joining bounty we should use separate wallet.Thanks for sharing this observation. ;D ;D ;D ;D

I think they forgot or they are still in the learning stage to play bounties. We must always be careful when we register or run bounty.

this is a bad situation for these people)) for sure they first dealt with the bounty and got their wallets to work with the bounty, and did not understand what is the public address and what is the key password))

just newcomers realized that you can make money with the help of the bounty and started registering your wallets without realizing what a public address is and what a private key is)))

2 Newbie members bumping out a thread with having the same thoughts and construction of sentences turns out that you are just the same person.

Going back into the topic, its common for those mistakes where privatekey is being inputted instead of their public address.Usually newbies on eth wallet do commit such thing, sometimes there are veteran ones which do made such error.

Yes! This happened usually, It happened once in my campaign, that guy PMed and I removed his Private key.

There are those who specifically place the secret key in the public domain.They will leave a few coins there, and when you try to get them out, your etherium automatically goes to another purse.

yes, i saw this too. the leave tokens in the address and post the private key. people try to claim the tokens and for this they need to send ETH to the address. but as soon as the ETH arrive they are sent out and it is not possible to transfer the tokens. its a lazy trick but it works.

Those who unintentionally put private keys to their eth address has surely lose all the ethereum in their wallet. They are ignorantly putting it and somebody has taken advantage to take all their eth. They deserve it since they are the one responsible for their action and not anybody else.