Hello Forum,

I'd like to shed some light on scams and hack experiences in the crypto sphere.

I recently went through one of the most horrible experiences in my life, I fell for a phishing XLM scam, thanks to the Ledger database leak I've been receiving phishing emails on a regular basis, stupid of me I fell for an XLM staking competition (XLM cannot be staked, even bigger mistake...)

I basically send all my XLM to the fraudsters, the phishing website was a clone of the Stellar website, it was an early Monday morning and I didn't think it properly, just wanted to stake my funds, I lost over 35k USD...

When I realize I had been scammed I freaked out massively, these were my life savings, went to the police (didn't get much help) and then started to contact crypto recovery companies (wrong move).

Whatever you do, NEVER, hire one of those “crypto recovery companies” they are a total scam, they would only make you lose your time and your hard-earned money.

What you need to do (As soon as possible):

1 - Report to the IC3 if you are in the US (action fraud if you are based in the UK).
2 - Seek legal assistance, the best crypto solicitors I found are the following:

Silver Miller Law: silvermillerlaw.com
Crypto Legal: cryptolegal.uk
Roche Fredman: rochefreedman.com

Upon checking the options and the fees for their legal services, I decided to go with Crypto Legal, communication was great, they trace the funds, basically, the scammers have converted my XLM into BNB and have sent it to Binance.

The solicitors manage to flag the funds as stolen and freeze the scammer account in Binance, it took some time, around 6 weeks, but I'm happy they have managed to recover most of the stolen assets.

Lesson learn the hard way... always DYOR before moving your funds or stake them, also you can use this browser extension to check for malicious websites: phishfort

Stay safe out there in the crypto jungle!