How I Met My Scammer

[Lakai01]

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.

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

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[chris172727]

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.

[Tpq01349]

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.

[Lakai01]

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

[CryptAssist]

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

[wiser]

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

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.

[fortresscrown]

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.

[Kayj55]

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.

[wiser]

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.

[Lakai01]

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.

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

[Lakai01]

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 ;-)

[swaggerkeme]

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.

[Lakai01]

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?

[CottonGuy]

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.

[acheampong64]

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.

[Vineeta2october]

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 

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

[Lakai01]

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.

[Lakai01]

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!

[nakamura12]

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.

[Lakai01]

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.