It is unbelievable and unfortunate that the blockchain industry’s scammers keep on doing their shady business and, sadly, thriving on it. In this article, I write about three incidents that came across to me lately, and here they are.
I assume you all heard about the Kucoin hack, but I’ll collect some bits and pieces about this mystery hack in Singapore 26th of September. It was a colossal scale hack, which resulted in around 280 million theft from the respectable Kucoin trading company based in Singapore. The good news is that approximately 160 million of the stolen assets have been frozen.
This hack tells us lots of different things about the cryptocurrency world in general. The first thing that comes to mind is exchanges and trading platforms volumes have multiplied lately to gigantic proportions. This kind of rapid growth makes platforms more vulnerable to hacks and or information breaks. I think the Kucoin hack proves me right. Even hackers didn’t get cold wallets. They took the coins from the hot ones.
In any case, this kind of hack raises questions, one being the clearest: was there inside man with the hackers, or was somebody indeed so sloppy at Kucoin headquarters that slipped safety keys accidentally to someplace where they could get into the thieves hands? Let’s see how the investigation on Kucoin hack proceeds and let’s do after that conclusion to this Huge scale theft of the year 2020.
A few days ago, I stumbled upon 1 of the rudest and meanest scam I have ever seen. It was, I hope, that it is not anymore there on the net when I’m writing this. Curve.fi, you all know it’s an open-source-based pool, with over 1.5 billion USD in assets and counting. I am registered there, which is the ONLY reason I didn’t get compromised by the villains. I googled curve just because I didn’t remember the .fi ending, and the search engine shows me the result of the copied curve as a paid advertisement, and therefore it is number one on the first page of my search. I was so sure and ignorant that the domain under it was fake, so I DID click myself to 100% similar curve—fi copy site.
I almost start to do operations on this magnificent pool, until it asks me to give it my ethereum wallet address. The alarm clock in my head stopped me, and I started to investigate this. And after few checks on the web, it was undeniably truth: the devious con artists had copied the page, and not only that, they had paid with cash to Google that their paid add could jump to 1st position in Google search. How fcked up is that? I have to write about this here. And please, dear readers, keep on sharing this because this one was indeed executed quite flawlessly, I have to admit.
I took my responsibility to inform the curve. Fis staff and other places I could know, and I did get some results I hope, curve.fi, the real one, told google about this crime, and they were hoping that google acts fast, but sometimes it is not fast enough. I hope my messages were sent early enough. What arrogance and ruthless, devious mind could achieve this kind of misrepresentation, and how colossal damage could have been to hundreds or thousands of people? Let us knock on wood and pray that I was acting fast enough.
Last but not least, at least in the magnitude of the scams was coming to my eyes when I was studying Etherscan.io and learning how to get as much data from transactions in ERC-20 as possible. It is called forsage.io. Maybe it will give you the magnitude of this company’s fraud when I put to numbers: 958.000 participants joined in total. Yes, it is a pyramid scam, almost a million people lured into it.
The third biggest ethereum GAS spender in the last 30 days was a well-known Ponzi scheme and calculated by other Etherscan.ios numbers, and massive damage will be thrown upon the victims of their fraud.
The company had spent on GAS, according to ETHERSCAN: io, almost 26 million USD in the last 30days, being the third-biggest gas user in that time, in that massive volume, we can only speculate what are, or will be the volumes of their con in total? From the bottom of my heart, I hope that all readers, all authorities, all those of you there, who cares, will raise to the barricades with me, against the evil villain hackers, scammers, con artists, or phishing masters out there. This blog post is Call to Arms, joining me to fight this terrible threat to cryptocurrency and blockchain blooming stopping force now.
Please share this article with anyone who you think might need it.