How I got scammed yesterday...
This is the story of how one guy tried to scam me. High quality scam.
I know a lot about scammers, fishing, etc. And I am always aware of it. I have a cold wallet, where I save most of my assets (NFTs and tokens). I have burner wallets. I check almost every transaction instructions if I sign anything on an untrusted website.
But…
One guy wrote me in Discord a few days ago, and we started to chat. He seemed legit, and it looked like he was trying to help. We began to talk about the grant opportunity for Danger Valley so we could speed up our building process and launch more tools in a shorter amount of time. To be clear, I am looking for a grant. I send many requests to Solana Foundation, Superteam, Workmhole, Instagrants, etc. I even thought about getting a grant from Polygon, but cmon, we are on Solana, and we love it :)
So, it was not a surprise for me that someone reached out to me to discuss the grant opportunity. He started asking legit questions about our team, the product we built, our plans, our collections, why we can do it, etc. So, I thought he was legit and wanted to give us a grant.
We made a deal! We are dealing with a $50k grant in exchange for 3.6M BEAK tokens. That’s the token’s current price because I consider the BEAK price 1 SOL = 5k BEAK.
So, we started to talk about how to proceed. I was looking for a tool that would allow us to make a p2p SPL-to-SPL swap on Solana using a trusted escrow. And… I found nothing! Do you know that there is no p2p SPL-to-SPL swap tool? I think I’ll build it :)
So, I wasn’t able to find any trusted swap tool and offered him to do it manually. So after he sends me 50k USDT, I’ll send him 3.6M BEAK and both of us will be happy. And to my surprise - he accepted! That was the first sign that he was a scammer because I would never accept a manual swap. Anyway, I sent him my wallet address and started to wait. Actually, I went to put my son to bed, and when I returned in 30 minutes, he wrote something like
My funds are locked on Binance, I can’t send you anything.
Can you send me $30-40 for the transaction fee?
This time, I finally understood that he was a scammer. But I spent time with him, so I wanted to have fun. And I agreed :)
I asked for his wallet address, but I sent him some SOL. Of course, not $40, but only 0.01 SOL. This is enough for 1000 transaction fees on Solana.
He was pissed.
You ask me about $50k and can’t send me $40?!
I had so much fun.
The morality of this story - always be careful!
Don’t send any funds to anyone untrusted.
Don’t connect your wallet to an untrusted website.
Always use a burner wallet.
Buy a Ledger and store all of your valuable assets there.
Don’t send your passwords or private keys to anyone.
Just be careful and take care of yourself.
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Love you all. See you in the next post.