Good day my fellow Binancians,
today I am going to be giving you a caution note and as well tell you about my experiences with online scam and how to avoid being a victim.
Just last night, 20th of December, 2023, I fell for a phishing attack from a crypto airdrop trick scammer and I lost some of my crypto assets from my phantom wallet.
My first encounter with crypto scam was way back in 2018. Between 2017 and 2018 I was an admin of a crypto P2P group on WhatsApp which I started and I escrowed between two strangers who are willing to trade Bitcoin and other cryptos. I was highly trusted among the people and I was always careful not to make those people that trusted me so much to lose their money to scam. But unfortunately, on a particular day (18th January, 2018 to be precise) one of my followers contacted me that he needed $300 worth of btc very urgently and I told him I will help him source from people I know online. He sent the fiat equivalent in naira to my bank account and I jumped into action looking for crypto merchants who will sell Bitcoin for me at his rate. Unfortunately majority of the close friends that I know do not have btc to sell as at that time so I contacted another friend that I met online through MLM business and he assured me that he knew someone that has btc of that equivalent to sell at the rate I needed it, not knowing that this acclaimed person that he said he knew was a stranger he met online just exactly as I knew him online. Because I was so impatient, I wanted to quickly deliver product to my client who ask me to get $300 btc that was how I decided to try out this new merchant since my online known person assured me that he knew this other person like they are close friend who he can easily reach in case of any abnormality. At the end of the day he sends me the person's bank account details himself and I send money to the account being assured that I will be able to make this man accountable in case of any problem. Eventually after sending fiat money to his account, the so called btc merchant refused to send btc to the wallet I provided but instead sent a link to a watch only wallet as hash id. Without taking much of your time, the case was not an easy one because I eventually reported to the local authority and wrote a petition to the police Dpo but up till today the case has yet to be resolved because a lot of factors contributed to that which I may probably explain in another article. That was my first experience with crypto scam and since then I have been always extra careful.
Fast forward to yesterday 20th, December, 2023. I was on Twitter (X) when I saw a solana so called project launching information. The name of the so called project is Atom solana and the Twitter (X) page has over 60 thousands followers. This scam project uses social media hype and engagement to trick innocent people to click on their phishing link with the promise of claiming Airdrop or participating in presale. I have been seeing projects like that for a while especially on Twitter (X) and I have read comments of people complaining about being scammed with almost similar tricks before but that yesterday I was just so curious and eager to see to the end of the whole trick so I decided to follow up on the process. First, I followed the instruction to drop my Solana wallet address to a Google form with the request to join their Instagram channel and later saw another post claiming that presale is live and we can participate in presale but which I did not participate. Some hours later the Twitter account and telegram channel posted fake proof of Solana raised from presale, then provided a link for claiming presale token and airdrop for eligible people who have initially dropped their wallet address. I copied the link provided and pasted it in my phantom wallet dapp browser. After loading the page I receive a prompt to grant request to connect my wallet. Immediately my mind told me this could be a disaster so I stopped the process for a minute in other to stake my available solana before proceeding. In the wallet I only have some Solana and about 3$ worth bonk and 6$ worth planet (wormhole) tokens. After staking my Solana and leaving about $3 of Solana in the wallet with the two other tokens I decided to go back to completed the process. I pasted back the link I got from the scammer's telegram group to my dapp browser and I clicked on "claim Airdrop" before granting a connection request to my wallet. Within a few seconds, while I was still thinking why there was nothing showing on the page, I saw a withdrawal request of my bonk and wormhole tokens out of my wallet to the scammer's wallet without initiating or confirming anything on my own side. The phishing attack occured within a seconds and that was how I lost my bonk and planet token both with about $9 with the $3 sol making about $12 tokens to the scammer before I went to revoke the access to my wallet.
After seeing what happened I was highly grateful because I had the intuition to stake my Solana before the incident hence I could have been in a big loss. So what I did afterward was to check up the scammer's wallet on sol blockchain explorer and I was able to see all the transfer from all other victims wallet. This scammer has stolen quite a lot of tokens and nfts from people's wallet using same phishing attack and tricks and in my findings, I discovered he is a Russian scammer because I was able to trace a particular NFT to his origin and I am still going to do more research about the scammer but importantly I am writing this article to serve as a caution for all my readers and maybe you can learn one or two things from my story. I will be writing another article on common tricks and method use by crypto scammers to defraud their victims, make sure to stay updated by following me on Binance so as to avoid being a victim
See you in my next article....
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