Bitcoin Forum

Hi!

Practically every day, we read of cases where people get scammed, accounts are being hacked and far too many coins are getting stolen. Almost all of these successful attacks are simply based on the fact that most of us are far too lax with their own data and accounts, or simply too good-faith (or greedy ;-). In order to sharpen the awareness of the methods of the scammers out there, I thought we could launch the series "How I met my Scammer". It would be great if every (near) victim briefly describes the story of how he or she was scammed, so we all have the chance to learn from others mistakes and to recognize similar situations in the future - and don't fall for the scam.

I'm going to start ;-)

Late December 2017: The ripple hype is almost at its peak. I open up Twitter that day and go through the tweets. One tweet catches my eye: A blog known to me is giving away 1000 ripple to everyone who retweets and comments their the tweet. I do so immediately.

A short time later, I am contacted by "the blog" that I would have won. The joy was of course huge, so I did not realize that the Twitter account was faked ... To receive my prize I had to sign up on a portal where I had a wallet which would contain my prize. Said and done. Unfortunately, the wallet in this account was not initialized yet, so I should send 20 XRPs to activate it, which of course I do immediately.
And indeed: Suddenly my wallet was "activated". The scamer now told me the price was not 1000 XRP, but 100% of the amount I send to the wallet. So if I send 100 XRP, I get 200 XRP as a prize. Now the alarm bells finally rang. I blocked the user, closed Twitter, and cursed myself and my lost 20 XRPs, which were worth $60 at that time.

I am very looking forward to your stories now!

Hi,

Unfortunately we can see such stories everywhere on the web and the common points is often greed ... There are many stories like that in this forum : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3490317.0

Greed and often when people give their private keys making an airdrop.

Each newbie should read this thread about security : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=935898.

Interesting (though sad) story, thank you for sharing. I believe that everyone should be brave enough to tell about scammers who stole their money, but so many victims are ashamed of being so naive. But we all need to know how exactly scammers work.

Well to be honest, you got scammed by a pretty common and in my opinion shitty tactic. The fact that someone asks you for money to give you money should be a dead giveaway. If something is too good to be true, it probably isn't.

Thanks for your feedback! The main purpose of this thread is to collect such stories and share it at one place. Like a handbook of failures ;-)

Ugh. That should've been obvious enough. It was too good to be true to start with, and it became a thousand times more obvious when they required you to deposit XRP to claim your prize. Well at least you learned your lesson for $60, which isn't too bad in my opinion. You could've lost more money if you were to learn about this in the future. I'd personally say it's a win.

Oh, that wasn't smartest scammers I've ever say. It's obvious scheme which are used by Nigerian scammers, so called Advance-fee scam - they will give you millions but before that they will ask to pay more or less money to cover fees or sth. Luckily, you lost only $60, other people loosing thousand bucks by giving it to scammers. It always hurts to lose money, but at least you learned from mistake.
But nowadays scammers are making more sophisticated schemes which can attract much more victims and more profit to scammers. Newbies and even more experienced people must be extremely careful in crypto world before investing.

Sorry for the loss and thanks for sharing. Others can share their experiences with scanners too, I think it would be enlightening. I also want to ask, some exchanges demand for private key before being able to trade or sign up , is this OKay?

Anything that you think is so good to be true is a possible scheme that will scam your money so stay away from those HYIP sites and other investments that could triple your money for surely it will take your investment down the drain.

I guess everybody needs to get scammed at least once in his/her life in order to experience it firsthand. It has a cathartic effect and it (hopefully) helps you avoid further scamming attempts on your person. So all you can really hope for is that the first time isn't too bad, e.g. you lose enough money that it hurts (a little) but not that much that it cripples you  :D

Remember that there is no actually an easy money or bounty, their offer is clearly identified as a bait to scam people. Emphasizing the word "giving away" is synonymous to "airdrop" in other words a free money.

Why do we need to pay for them to receive an airdrop or a give away?

Well now you have your lesson. Learn from it.

When you need to pay in order to get something for free that's the sign that something isn't right.
The best antivirus/anti scam/anti-anything is your brain.
Beating greed is the biggest challenge.

Thanks for sharing your story. I sent you some merit for it. I wish I could send *negative* merit to all those on this thread piling on with how you should have known better. I'm glad to see you treating this as a learning experience.

Here's my story. I got involved with Bitcoin a little over five years ago. Since money was really tight I couldn't buy much but I manged to earn little bits of it through faucets and sites that would pay you to complete simple tasks. I managed to amass about a half a BTC (at $90, so around $50 worth) in about six weeks. Then I came across this site called Mining United, which claimed that if you sent them some BTC, they would use it to mine more BTC and in four days send it back with what you'd earned mining. I knew nothing about mining or I would have been tipped off by the ridiculously high rate of return offered--25% in four days! My first batch came back as planned, so I put it back in, and then it never came back. I lost my entire cryptocurrency earnings. I still remember that icky feeling when I realized what happened.

The good that came out of it was I found this forum. My forum handle "wiser" came about because I sure hoped that with that experience under my belt I was now wiser. Unfortunately, as with pretty much anyone who shares their hard experiences with getting scammed on this forum, I got called an idiot by a bunch of know-it-alls, but I got past that and this is where I started to meet and network with really cool people and found projects where I could earn much more cryptocurrencies through writing and other things, and now I would say that overall I've done really well in the cryptocurrency industry.

I wish I could say that Mining United was my last experience with getting scammed, but sadly it wasn't. I've lost plenty through sites that got "hacked" and it wasn't always clear whether or not it was a legitimate outside theft or an inside job. I've also lost funds to ICOs and learned that about 97% of ICOs fail so I'm in good company.

I've learned a lot about what not to do, for sure. A really great resource on scam sites is thebadbitcoin.org. I also recently wrote about what sorts of things you should look for before investing in an ICO (https://steemit.com/ico/@wiser/a-critical-look-at-an-ico-whitepaper). I don't have experience with the messages that tell you to send a small amount of money in order to get a larger amount back, but I can see how one could make that mistake, thinking your wallet needs to be "activated." Once you learn how wallets work, it's easier to "smell a rat," but at the beginning it's really tough to sort it all out.

Thanks again for your courage in sharing your story, and I wish you much success in your ventures in the cryptocurrency industry :)

Thank you for sharing. Sorry about your losses.

All of us lost money in the fiat Ponzi scheme - whether we like to admit it or not, but I haven't lost money in a crypto related scam yet. However, I got close to it years back. Memory serves me badly, but it was around 2013/2014 when I bought into a crypto project that I discovered on here. I cannot remember the name of the outfit, but they ran away with our money shortly after the ICO closed. I was not ready to accept it. I contacted them via email and demanded that they pay back all of the money. I gave them 24 hours to pay it back or I would get my friends at Interpol to trace and hunt them down like rabid dogs. Surprisingly enough, they did pay back the money. I am not sure it will work the next time around, but I was glad those scammers were scared and/or decent enough to do the right thing.

Scam ICOs are becoming enough of a problem to have attracted some high level attention. Here's one example:

https://www.howeycoins.com/index.html

Read through it, see if you can find the red flags, and then at the very end, click on the link to buy the coins (but you won't actually follow through with it), and have a good laugh.

The crypto world has always been a shady place where all sorts of vile people crawl out of the toilet.

Masternode is the new word for scam.

Trust nobody, especially on here.

look at the lending forum, its reeks of 419 newbie scammers.

Had an unpleasant experience with Airdrop scum. I've got a link to an exclusive   high-necked Airdrope. Had to fill in the Google form and calmly wait for 50$. Before filling in the form, I've checked the company, of course and they seemed to be a big project, that was about to finish the airdrop. The Google form was enormous (20+ fields) and I have written there not only my personal wallet data, but also... PK! Yes, I was inexperienced and did it mechanically. I had no idea what a scum was. And, it is obvious now, that the form was fake. Naturally, I've lost almost  0,1 ETH and any desire to deal with Airdrops in the future. It's my fault, I know :-(. Had to be attentive and learn the experience of other people.

So these airdrop forms are actually asking for people's wallet private keys??? That's pretty low.

FYI, for everyone here, a private key is not needed in order to send funds to a wallet, only the public key, which is also known as the address. So if they are asking for a private key, at the very least they are asking for information they should not need in order to give funds away. They *would* need a private key in order to import the address and empty it of funds, though.

Yeah, and unfortunately a good amount of people actually fall for this for some reason. People always go straight to investing for "ez money", without even doing much thought and research on what the process is.

Thank you very much wiser, both for the merits and your courage to post your story aswell!
Followed you on steemit, impressivly well written stories!

The things I learned from the scam far excels the 60$ I ve lost:
- I was so pissed about myself and wanted to get back the XRP so I came across airdrops. I took part in some very well running airdrops like Poly and HYDRO
- I registered at this forum right after the scam, met a lot of very nice people and learned a lot of things.
- I discovered bounties and found a new hobby: reading whitepapers, summarize them and translate them to German
- ...
So in the end I actually ve to say Thank you to my scammer :D

I faced a similar skirmish act why trying to register for a partcular airdrop that required  me to input an activation code from my mail after registering to progress, on opening my mail i got a mail rather from my bitcoin wallet  account asking me to input an activation code because i tried accessing my account from a particular unknown IP address,,, then it dawned on me that my bitcoin wallet account has been hacked and wats remaining was the activation code from my mail,,,immediately i halted the whole process. Lesson try to make ur password to your wallets as unpredictable as possible and different from your mail password...lets secure our future.

sorry about your loss, hope that was the last sad experience for you.
thank you for sharing, your story could be a lesson for many people.

the most important thing is you can move on and be more careful.

Thanks! And hopefully it is a lesson for a lot of people. Eg. Twitter is full of scam attempts nowadays. It was definitly worth sharing If my story saved at least a single person from getting scammed

Well I guess this goes to prove the old adage, There's a sucker born every minute.

Thanks for the Steemit follow. I hope to post on there soon, but real life has been crazy busy lately.

I am so glad that you can see the good even in a bad situation. Not only have you learned from the mistake, but you have gone on to contribute within the industry in a meaningful and profitable way. It's that characteristic which separates those who become successful from those who get stuck in a failure. You took stock of the situation, dealt with the sense of loss and shame (the latter being often sadly piled on by people on this forum), treated it as a learning experience, and then went on to make some good contacts and find your place in the industry. I can tell that you will do very well.

I honestly think getting scammed at one time or another is more the norm in this industry. It's a sad commentary on the bad actors within our industry and not on the victims. And valuable lessons can be gleaned, and so ultimately it's not so much whether or not you got scammed that reflects on your intelligence, etc., but what you choose to do once you realize that it happened to you.

May many take heart and hope from our stories. Getting scammed does not have to define us, nor be the end of the world for us. It really can be just a setback that we overcome. Thanks again for starting this thread.

I was scammed once of my bitcoin out of my ignorance. It happened around 2015 when I was still new to cryptocurrency.
I was desperately in need of cash so I decided to sell of my small BTC. I met this guy on facebook who gave me a site on where to sell it, to him he can't buy BTC from me without using that site, so foolishly believed him. After transferring to that site, the guy's number stopped connecting.
Well I learnt my lesson.

This is a very good topic, thank you for opening this thread. Let me also share my ordeal. I was scammed recently of my hard earned Ethereum, through a link I got as an email. I received an email asking me to validate my ether wallet, unknown to me that it's a fraudulent link, immediately I clicked the link the hackers got access to my account and took all my Ethereum and other valuable altcoins. Please we all should thread with caution. Don't click on every link you receive in your mail.

So all you did to get your coins stolen was you clicked on a link? You didn't share a private key or anything like that? If so, that's really scary. Thanks for sharing.

I dont really know how this should be possible ... can you provide some details about what happened when you clicked the link?

It would be very nice if some of you could share stories how you got scammed. Its definitly worth it If your stories safes at least one person getting scammed ;-)

The beginning of this month, I received an e-mail from a fake Helbiz token official telling me they were organizing an airdrop that gives subscribers 5000 helbiz token, so I always excited about the whole deal because the stakes were too high as the last time I checked 1000 helbiz token was worth about 14$, so you could imagine how excited I was about the whole thing. In the e-mail I received, I was directed to a myetherwallet website which looked almost  genuinely as the original website, I was then instructed to connect my wallet to helbiz token smart contract address, I later realised how stubborn I was when I give my private keys out so easily like that. I remember I  felt really bad all day when it happened.

Sad to hear, but I am sure you learned a lot from your mistakes ;-) Did you lose any coins or did you enter a private key of an empty wallet?

I have also experienced being scammed few years back when I was still a newbie to bitcoin. My friend invited me to join an HYIP site. It's ROI is 3 months tops. I was hesitant at first since I don't know anything about bitcoin but one day I decided to join under my friend's referral link. First few weeks I was earning daily returns from what I invested. I was so overwhelmed hoping that I could reach ROI after 3 months as what the site promised but unfortunately, I was just paid for 13 days. I wasn't able to reach my ROI. My friend the one who invited me didn't even reach 3 months and lost some of his BTC investments as well. The site that we invested only last for a month. That's why today I won't trust any cloud mining sites or HYIP sites.

This is why there's the need for everyone to be careful on free offers and giveaways given to us. Scammers use this method of enticing to fish out the weak ones and probably greedy ones to dupe money from.

Haha. I almost got scammed by airdrops but saved myself by reading about those here and on google. One airdrop said that go get the coins, I need to verify my account and to do that I need to give my private keys. Googled it then and got saved. Second and then many more like that said that I need to sign my wallet to verify that I am the actual owner of that wallet but the site they referred to was a scam site with almost same name and spelling except for special alphabets in that.

I didn't lose anything in scam but I did lose a lot of money in ripples. Bought it at almost 4$ and then the next day it went down down and down :(

Thanks for your story, will merit it as soon as I got sMerits :-)
The schema "send me your private keys to verify that you are the owner" is very common these days, especially for airdrops. I don't know why this happens so often in the airdrop-space, but I think its due to the fact that airdrop-participants mostly new to the crypto space and therefor underestimate the importance of the private keys.

Due to the fact that the bulls are back and a lot of newbies are flooding into the market I wanted to bring back this topic to the first page once more. I am sure scammers are already preparing their feast and waiting for newbies to fall into their traps, so hopefully, this topic full of stories how scammers work prevents someone from losing money!

Would be very nice if you would share your stories guys!

We should share what we have experienced about the times we got scammed so that those who doesn't know about the scheme that the scammer used then we would be able to know and soon we will know what to do if someone is trying to scam you. We could also know what to do to increase our security.

Exactly, thats why I initially started this thread to give other people a chance to learn from my mistakes. Its worth the effort if at least a single person reads this and wont fall for a scam because of our stories.

Nice to hear that you try with this thread to protect other new users and give them the chance to learn before they fall into Scammers .
And yes exactly the same i am doing for warn people about Malware downloads and all kind of things thats happend to me , so they dont fall into the same misstakes i have done or got !
Keep that up  ;D

I would be very happy to share "How I met my scammer story" but luckily I was never scammed.

There were multiple attempts to scam me and when I read these comments and stories above, I see that I had the pleasure of being tried with all these scamming techniques.
I got phishing links in the email (from fake airdrops and crypto giveaways), fake metamask and other wallets, obvious Telegram scams with OTC trading and many, many more.

In last weeks I see multiple attempts on Telegram to scam me from people who offer amazing earning opportunities.
When I talk with them about the details, everything looks fishy and suspicious that is why I don't understand, why these scams are successful at all?

Indeed, they offer a lot of money, but for shady things, like to open a bank account for them, or credit cards. They even send you the money, but in a few days, you will be in big trouble, when they wash money, with this bank account from Paypal scam or other OTC trade. Of course, they say that to this bank accounts, only withdrawals will be sent from crypto trading activities, but this is just nonsense. Of course, you have to hand over full access to account or credit card.

When I asked such a scammer: "If this is so wonderful business why don't you take all your friends and family to give them all this free money"
Scammer answer: "Already have and need more every day".  ;D ;D ;D

This is my rule number one: check everything 3 times and when you are finished, check again. Never click on links in the email. Never believe people in social media, when they are talking about easy money. There is no such thing as easy money.

PS
Op you should report all this spammy post in your thread. Is just hard to read.

I didn't get scammed yet but who knows ^^
Scammers are getting better every day and I'm always surprised about their strategies.

I'm using Telegram and the number of scammers is extremely high there but they are not very intelligent. I've enabled PMs so that legit people can PM me (although I would advise Newbies to turn it off in the settings if you don't want to be PMed by scammers). Sometimes scammers PM me when I'm joining a new shitcoin group or ask something in existing shitcoin groups and it's quite easy to spot that they only want my coins (I guess 95% of all random people PMing me are just scammers).
It's quite amusing sometimes which stories they bring up to scam people or to promote their pump and dump group. Recently I had some scammers where they tried to advertise trading tools or other trading content. When they ask me if I want to make money with trading my answer is always: "I don't like trading, I'm HODLing" and this picture fits very well:

https://i.imgur.com/cFASO2j.jpg

Discussion finished.  :P

There are a few scammer strategies I had so far:

- pay money for someone from China where their money is stuck in exchanges because their account is frozen
- scammer pretending to be an admin of a shitcoin project PMing you if you want to invest
- scammer pretending to be an admin of a shitcoin project trying to "swap" your bought coins because they have issued "new" ones. (Just a method of the scammer to get your original ICO shitcoins)
- scammers promoting their trading tools / pump and dump groups or ponzis
- some scammers have PMed me if I want to purchase a video promotion for shitcoins (they thought I'm a shitcoin CEO)
...

Finally: better stay off if someone unknown PMs you, especially if you have to send money first on Telegram.

Thanks for listing those strategies.
Especially the one quoted is still very common at Telegram. You constantly see those attempts in various bounty groups, this strategy still seems to be lucrative.

@1miau
You should try joining a telegram group of a top exchange and see what will happen.
In the space of a few minutes you will get PMed with 'Hi, has your issue been resolved'?
I assume they are just monitoring these groups and checking for new users who sign up. If a user joins a telegram group of an exchange he is probably looking for assistance with some issues and the scammers know this.

Report and delete the conversation is the appropriate way to handle this.   

Yes.  :D

I've tried it once in a shitcoin ICO group when I was asking how to purchase tokens (just to see how many scammers would PM me). Surprisingly, there was no scammer PMing me. The only person PMing me was a confused Newbie who hadn't a clue how to purchase tokens...

Maybe the group was not big enough.  :-\

Or even scammers recognized that you cant earn money with ICOs nowadays and left the Telegram scene  :P

Great thread! I know the feeling and hate it, really...

I have learned the hard way when it comes to "trading funds"... I ve been unbelievably stupid and it even happened twice... Despite the fact I like to think about myself that I am tech savvy and not naive...

Well, I havent been scammed by some new shitcoin stuff... I was scammed when I wanted to exchange paypal funds for BTC --> I sent the paypal money (friends and family) first to someone who seemed legit, had 20+ trust. After having sent the money, it appeared that the guy had two accounts which were very (but not exactly the same) similar... meaning that in the end I didnt do the trade with the account having several positive trades (must have been self-generated) but with the other one, created exclusively for the scam. I realized I was scammed right after I sent the money and suddenly did not hear back... Checked on the two accounts and saw the little spelling differences... The guy who contacted me and whom I was talking with had the username "Hynea89" - after we agreed on a trade, he used "Hyena89" and I didnt notice it... stupid me,  I know...

I must have been scammed for around 500€ online - not a fortune but still...

Damn, thats a pitty! Thank you very much for sharing your story!

How did you get in contact with the scammer? Via an online forum or did you get contacted by him/her?

It is a very sad story when I was a novice and in my first months in the world of Bitcoin the first time I was scammed through the bot Talkram where they ask you to collect stars from the invitations of friends to buy mining cards but when you reach a certain limit they ask you to deposit on site and when you deposit is blocked
The second time, I had a friend from Australia who offered to help travel for $ 1500 from Bitcoin.
I bought and sent Bitcoin to him, but unfortunately he sent me a fake passport

It happened on another forum: elitepvpers, where this guy contacted me... Fortunately not here at bitcointalk.org

There is this new ways people are been scammed through airdrops. The scammers will create their own telegram platform that bears the same name and logo of the legit airdrop platform. For you to be rewarded in their airdrop is by having up to 10 referrals. By so doing they will ask you to invest and have up to 50% bonus and there is every tendency that many will fall into their trap

I thought I have seen it all but turns out I was wrong...  :D

This is not related to this forum but I really feel I have to share the story, its so amazing!  :D

Well, there is another online forum where I hired someone to write two articles for me - unique content obviously bla bla. The lady requested upfront payment via paypal, I didnt feel comfortable but I thought okay, lets try.

I received the articles and they were so bad, it hurt really...  :D I wrote her in private and she made excuses bla, called me a newbie who wants to scam her by saying the content suxx after having received it bla bla. I then posted my feedback in her sales thread and added that I am ready to post some of the content so others could verify what I am saying - not to get my money back but to warn others. When somebody wrote I should do that, I did. And now comes the best: The lady seriously replies stating that I am posting content that is NOT hers, I would just post any random content hahaha. She is so successful, having only satisfied customers and I am making up the story to save a few bucks, LOL. Best of all: Some so called client of hers joined the party, stating what a great writer she is and that I am lying, lol.  ;D

Why am I sharing this? Well, there is one lesson to be learned: Anything is imaginable online! And dont pay random "service providers" upfront, especially not via paypal f&f.  :D Other than that, I am just wondering how this person must be feeling sitting in front of her computer, stating such complete bullshit, lying big time! For what is HER content, SHE wrote it...  :D :D :D

That made my day really

Topics like this are emvery essential to be started for it will be of big help to beginners or the so called newbies. They say that experience is the best teacher. it is indeed for you will learn from it and will know first hand how things will end up once done. Learning fron your mistakes is smart but learning from other's mistakes is very clever and wise, you won't be needing to experience it first hand and no need to experience some loss. And this thread about "How I met my scammer" will be very essential for the crypto life the newbies will be having.