Help - I lost $6000 on Trustwallet - learn from this

[Justbillywitt]

Op I feel your pain and frustration, this is really not a good thing to happen to anyone. $6k is not a small money just to lose like that. This is just like sending money to the wrong address. This your case has reminded me about an incident that happened to me as as a beginner in this space. When I sent a huge amount of money to a wrong address. An address I copied from Trust wallet too. I never saw any risk warning nothing at all. I was really inexperienced and I sent the coin from cex to Trust wallet that was how I lost the funds.Trust wallet lack of customer protection is really worrisome. I left Trust wallet due to many complaints from other users. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

[Cricktor]

On some tokens, the fake BUSD token included, when you go into the token details page it only displays an error message. So you would not even see the contract address or any further information on the Trustwallet app. I consider the name Trustwallet as false advertising in itself. I wonder how many other people have been lulled into a feeling of security before they lost their money in a similar fashion?

I wonder then if you got the error message you displayed at least two times, why did you proceed with the swap when you couldn't verify the token you chose? Especially considering the amount of money that was at stake, the less I can understand why you didn't stop. It could've been a glitch of shitty Trust Wallet, it could've been a bug, whatever.

For the desktop there's only a browser extension as far as I can see. Did you try to check there before you proceeded your swap?

Have you abandoned to use Trust Wallet? If not, why not? A wallet that needs "trust" in its name is kinda suspicious in the first place and its it's to my knowledge closed-source, so not trustworthy.

Sorry for your loss, an expensive lesson.

[goldkingcoiner]

On some tokens, the fake BUSD token included, when you go into the token details page it only displays an error message. So you would not even see the contract address or any further information on the Trustwallet app. I consider the name Trustwallet as false advertising in itself. I wonder how many other people have been lulled into a feeling of security before they lost their money in a similar fashion?

I wonder then if you got the error message you displayed at least two times, why did you proceed with the swap when you couldn't verify the token you chose?

The information button does not work with some tokens. I have never had the problem of confusing two look-alike tokens that have the same name before.

But yes, a mal-functioning system should have been my first red flag about Trustwallet.

[Mrbluntzy]

@goldkingcoiner, why did you choose to swap to BUSD when binance already announced that they will discontinue BUSD?

In a formal statement issued on September 1, 2023, Binance announced it would discontinue support for its proprietary stablecoin, BUSD. The company advised users in possession of Binance USD assets to migrate to First Digital USD (FDUSD), with the conclusion of this transition set for February 2024.

Are you talking about the migration from BUSD on the BEP2 chain?

No, what I meant was that, you should have swapped your asset to the normal $USDT token under bep20 chain because binance announced last year that they would discontinue the the BUSD token which I think they have already done that because  if you try to search and trade BUSD on the binance centralized exchange and all other centralized exchange, you can not find BUSD again, which means that it's possible that a lot of BUSD you will find on DEX are fake. This is a slight mistake, it's possible that it could have happened to anyone, but sorry you lost that huge amount.

[Bluebird1357]

I am one of the users of Trust Wallet. If experienced users like you are being scammed like this, then what will happen to new users like us. Now I feel that some features of Trust Wallet should be improved and changed for security. I am sincerely sorry for your loss but one thing everyone should remember and that is always be conscious. you were damaged but warned everyone on this site, it's really great ! Everyone should warn everyone in the same way so that no one like you loses money and gets into trouble in the future.

[goldkingcoiner]

After a bunch of back and forth with Trustwallet support, they obviously only give me the copy paste answers that are always the same:

They acknowledge their broken info button and the lacking safety features but they refuse to take responsibility for their defective and unsafe UI/UX .

All I hear from them is: "We don't hold your funds therefore we are not legally liable" even though the issue is not who holds the funds but their broken UI which led to my loss of funds.

Since Trustwallet refuses to implement a safe UI, we need to put some public pressure on them until they do. So now I am searching for other people who lost money on Trustwallet. Please post in this topic if you are one of those people or in support of this action.

[tbct_mt2]

Since Trustwallet refuses to implement a safe UI, we need to put some public pressure on them until they do. So now I am searching for other people who lost money on Trustwallet. Please post in this topic if you are one of those people or in support of this action.

Why you have to waste your energy to change them?

If you don't see they are good enough to use, leave them and there are other wallets for you here, even better.
Trust wallet is close source, while you can have other wallets that are open source, not only have better and safer UI.

https://walletscrutiny.com/?platform=allPlatforms&page=0&query-string=trust

[avp2306]

After a bunch of back and forth with Trustwallet support, they obviously only give me the copy paste answers that are always the same:

They acknowledge their broken info button and the lacking safety features but they refuse to take responsibility for their defective and unsafe UI/UX .

All I hear from them is: "We don't hold your funds therefore we are not legally liable" even though the issue is not who holds the funds but their broken UI which led to my loss of funds.

Since Trustwallet refuses to implement a safe UI, we need to put some public pressure on them until they do. So now I am searching for other people who lost money on Trustwallet. Please post in this topic if you are one of those people or in support of this action.

What can you expect from them? They already think they don't have liability to the situation happen and they are just giving you a generic answer on what you have been asked to them.

If I where you better to leave that wallet and find other alternative ones. Since that actions shows that they have lack of accountability on these situations happen. So for sure that they provably act the same if there's situation happened.

And you already see how bad they approach on this situation so that's a great statement that they are not good listeners and will not take action on this issue.

It seems they really had terrible reputation if we base it on the reviews they got on trustpilot https://www.trustpilot.com/review/trustwallet.com

[Son Of Blockchain (SOB)]

I am one of the users of Trust Wallet. If experienced users like you are being scammed like this, then what will happen to new users like us. Now I feel that some features of Trust Wallet should be improved and changed for security. I am sincerely sorry for your loss but one thing everyone should remember and that is always be conscious. you were damaged but warned everyone on this site, it's really great ! Everyone should warn everyone in the same way so that no one like you loses money and gets into trouble in the future.

That's his reason for creating this topic, so newbies would be careful not to make same mistake, this topic has showed that experience in the crypto space isn't enough and one has to be extremely careful when dealing with stuffs like token swap, P2P and even trading on wallets and exchanges cause the slightest error could make you lose huge funds just like he did.
 I feel so sorry for him too cause $6k is a huge money to lose out of mistake and I believe that lots of people who's come across this post have taken note of that error, cause I personally did immediately I read it, like he said, cross-check multiple times to ensure you're doing the right thing.
 I admire his generosity, despite losing such huge amount of funds he still had time to pass a massage and warn people concerning his mistake so they'll learn from it, well I heard that some people were able to recover their funds in situations as his and I hope he does too.

[KiaKia]

Sorry for your loss but how exactly you got scammed?
Did you swap to 3rd party site? And in what site? So that other people are aware about the site.

Trustwallet have builtin swap feature why you didn't use the builtin feature?
Or maybe you swap them inside the app? But how exactly you've been scammed?

TrustWallet is a bit buggy there are some reports that after they swap their coins to other coins in different network their coins are gone but the fact is the network where they swap is disable it needs to be enable if you want to see your swapped coins. So maybe you have similar case?

I did use the built in swap feature of Trustwallet. Same network swap but the BUSD was fake or something. Look at the transaction hash.

Token: 0x035de3679e692c471072d1a09beb9298fbb2bd31

Binance USD (Wormhole) (BUSD) is the name

This is the symbol, when on the Trustwallet UI, is made to look extremely similar to the original.

Transaction Hash: 0xec94cb8c6b92625fb9f6d114efcd66501a3e9401ec171f8af53044d41d7fdcfb

My address: https://bscscan.com/address/0xcead2244f04ca3ff2824708e545aa6bb1c24dc0c

I always feel somehow using Trust wallet because of this reason.

Pls correct me if I am wrong, you don't add the token yourself right? It was available in Trust wallet list of BNB and BUSD list right? I've seen similar thing with USDTs available in Trust wallet too, and they are fake, atleast not the real one.

My question is why did Trust wallet allow these fake tokens in their list of coins available to switch on and use? They deserved to be dragged because of this, I mean if a legendary member of this forum can fall victim then newbies can fall victim too.

I am sorry for your loss, $6000 is too much to be kept in Trust wallet normally, for me I would have move such amount into a hardware wallet.

[pawanjain]

I thought of myself a veteran when it comes to cryptocurrency, but one small mistake and almost 6k gone.

I can say that from your avatar that you are indeed an old timer and it's very rare for old timers to commit such mistakes.
May be it was just an oversight from your end but yeah, the loss is real and big.
It's not a small amount and your case is a wake up call to everyone to check their transaction multiple times before initiating it.
Nobody would want to lose such big amounts just because of a mere oversight.

[Cricktor]

Pls correct me if I am wrong, you don't add the token yourself right? It was available in Trust wallet list of BNB and BUSD list right? I've seen similar thing with USDTs available in Trust wallet too, and they are fake, atleast not the real one.

I was about to check this again because from OP's post-mortem screenshots it's not clear to me why he chose the wrong token. Some posts later I see probably the picture a little more clear than I initially thought.

But from this quote (highlights by me):

I did not bridge anything. Both the SOL tokens and the BUSD (Wormhole) tokens are on Binance Chain, as is the real BUSD. I did not add any tokens. I merely used the swap function. When you search for a token before swap, it shows you the options. At the top it showed me BUSD but this was not the real BUSD.

he didn't see what he showed in his initial post screenshot of search result (I took his screenshot and edited in my interpretation of how it likely looked like):

My question is why did Trust wallet allow these fake tokens in their list of coins available to switch on and use? They deserved to be dragged because of this, I mean if a legendary member of this forum can fall victim then newbies can fall victim too.

If Trust wallet allows to still show some fantasy tokens in the internal swap dialog when you search the swap target even when you didn't select or made those tokens active or to be shown, it's a complete fuck-up and terrible UI by Trust wallet. And of course they don't admit the UI issue here, nor an explanation why the "real" BUSD token wasn't shown as top hit anyway. (I can't prove what OP said that the "real" BUSD wasn't shown to him; we have to believe him.)

Take my comments on this with a grain of salt because I'm not familiar with the internal swap feature and UI details of Trust wallet at all. I don't trust Trust wallet, I read too many issues with their software crap.

What irritates me most is that OP got a lame error message while trying to inspect details about the swap target token AND still proceeded with the swap. By no means I want to sound any superior here, anybody can be fooled, me included. Just want to highlight that it's likely better to stop at such red flags and investigate further rather than to deep dive into muddy waters.

I am sorry for your loss, $6000 is too much to be kept in Trust wallet normally, for me I would have move such amount into a hardware wallet.

I wouldn't put even temporarily such an amount in a mobile phone wallet as I consider mobile phones less secure and controllable, but that's my security paranoia.

Could a hardware wallet prevented this? Not sure as it wasn't a security issue of the mobile phone software hot wallet. With a hardware wallet you're still responsible to inspect all transaction details and know what you're about to sign a transaction for. If you choose the wrong swap target and don't realize this fact, then you could easily sign such a desastrous transaction also with a hardware wallet. The problem lies elsewhere.