After going through a scam event a couple years ago, I knew I was smarter now and virtually unscammable. Well, "virtually" isn't 100%. I learned some new tricks yesterday.
I was home in the evening, and I get a call from some woman claiming to be an LAPD officer, they arrested some Mohammed guy in Agoura Hills, CA, and he had a bunch of fake IDs from various people, and my name and information was among them. Specifically she claimed to be a Diana Kent, badge #10438, and case number 2025781492. The 818 area code covers Agoura Hills.
So she asked a bunch of questions, did I know this or that, did I have anything stolen, etc, bank accounts, crypto, etc. I did tell her about one account on Coinbase. She seemed knowledgeable and said she'd forward my information to Coinbase. CB is in California too, so nothing was ringing an alert for me yet. For security, I went to Coinbase and changed my password, probably should have done that some time ago.
So I end up getting another 818 call from some annoyingly polite english accent guy on CB, we went through a bunch of details, I need to get forwarded to their security department, etc. This leads to a call from a 650 area code phone number and another annoyingly polite english accent guy.
So we go through my account, how much of what coins I have, I had never set up Coinbase Vault, so I asked about doing that. Do I have a hardware cold storage wallet, etc. So we go through that procedure, hold up my drivers license to the webcam, then my face, then turn head and read numbers, etc. The URL I was getting to access the vault was
https://coinbaselive.com . I had never tried to set up the vault before, so I didn't know if what I was seeing was legit or not. I got the 12 word seed code, wrote it all down, etc. I had to do the drivers license and webcam thing for my real CB account, so it didn't seem unusual.
So the time comes to transfer coins to the "VAULT". I picked one of my coins randomly, one that had a few hundred bucks worth of coins on it. Open a new tab, go back to the vault, select the coin type, copy the receive address, and come back to the normal CB site and do the send coins transfer. I can see that the coins got there. I had refreshed my screen after a few minutes, and after that, I could not log back into the vault site. I tried
https://coinbaselive.com both with and without the https://, different web browsers, nothing worked. Finally, I accessed it from my cell phone, which has no crypto apps on it, and I was able to see the full value of my coins in the vault.
At this point, the english accent guy wants to transfer another coin, and he picked the one that I had the most money in, thousands of dollars. This is where I began to wake up. I refused to do it until I could get back into the site, he keeps trying to "help" me regain access, etc. At this point I've been on the phone for an hour and a half, my dinner is waiting, and I had to pee. So I said forget it, we will resume tomorrow, call me back tomorrow night.
After messing around with it, and clearing all the history from my cell phone, now it can't even get back into the "vault" anymore. I just get a blank page that says "Premium Domain - Inquire now" on it, a gray and white page.
So after dinner, I calmed down a little and called Coinbase Support, the real support. I told them the whole story and get the "Yes, that's an external wallet, we can't get it back". Great. How the hell am I supposed to go to sleep now with this on my mind?
I called LAPD this morning, and heard what I suspected. That's not an LAPD badge number or case number, we get calls like this often, etc. No surprise there.
I don't like losing some cash, but I'm more annoyed about their complex scam tricking me a little. Well, experience is the best teacher, so if I was "virtually" unscammable before, I am super duper mega unscammable now! I'll have to spread my coins around a bit to different exchanges, no more single point of failure.
And now of course, when I call the 818 927 1550 and 818 860 0852 and 650 492 5701 numbers that called me last night, supposedly from California, all I hear is "The google subscriber is not available".
Come on whales, do something to make coin prices blast sky high so I can sell out with a huge profit and eliminate the threat of another scam attempt. I don't need the headache.
