That was too close for comfort. I nearly got scammed out of my Hive account. After over 7 years on chain, I almost made a fatal mistake. I was talking to who I thought was a trusted party but it turned out it was an imposter. Luckily I survived to tell the tale because if I didn't all my work at building this account would have been gone. I am telling this story to hopefully keep other safe and make them alert to the danger. There are a lot of scammers in crypto and there is no mammy you can run to when you have been taken for all you have.
The storm before the storm
My story starts on Thursday morning when I was getting error messages in Peakd about not being able to load messages and transactions failing. I thought it might be an API issue so I tried different ones but still the same problem. I checked the Speed on API nodes and they all showed an error. I shut down my computer and hoped a reboot would fit it. It didn't.
Later I opened Discord and asked if anyone was having similar problems. Nobody was. Then I got a message from Engrave[Witness} asking for my account name so he could check it out. That's service for you and one of the reasons I vote for Him as Witness. It's the same as my Discord name so I passed it over. They then sent me a DM so we could work on a solution outside the public eye.
Below is our conversation.
I was all in with this conversation up to the point where he suggested I use a site I had never heard of before. One that was outside the Hive ecosystem. I had never heard of validating a wallet before either. Something was fishy.
I decided I needed to do some more research before diving in. It was late and I wanted my wits about me before I did any mucking around with wallet stuff.
Then I saw it. His Discord name said he had only registered on July 4 2024. I knew Engrave had been around much longer than that.
What to do? I ran back to Peakd and between lots of error messages I sent Demotruk a private chat asking him what he thought. I have known Demotruk since I joined Hive and he understands the blockchain better than I do. I sent him some screenshots but because it was late he was offline.
Soon after I got more messages from Engrave[witness] on Discord.
He was trying to rush me into validating. I then knew for sure things were not right.
How was I going to play this? I wanted to be sure that I was not being insulting to Engrave if all of this happened to be legit but I needed to buy time to keep the potential scammer on the line.
I went back to Peakd and privately messaged Engrave there. I have never had any personal interactions with him and hoped I wouldn't be annoying him especially if it was one and the same that I was interacting with on Discord.
Luckily he was available and saw my message. (I won't screenshot them here out of respect for his privacy) He said It wasn't him and gave me some cautionary advice. I was so lucky I could reach him. I true gentleman and worthy of a Witness vote.
Back on Discord I sent another message to the scammer hoping I could waste more of his time. I now had my private key in hand and wondered what he would want me to do now. Unfortunately, I couldn't stop myself and made a joke which was obviously enough to show that he was found out and the game was up.
He quickly changed his screen name to @ Jamie, but the account name Wade09468 obviously stayed the same.
The real Engrave alerted the Mods as did I that a scammer was lurking around.
So that's that. I was lucky I had learned the first rule of Crypto club and that is to keep your keys safe and private. But, I will be the first to admit that it had been close. I was tired and could have very easily giving up the keys out of delirium and frustration that my account seemed to be acting the maggot.
Here is the site he sent me to. I looked kind of legit but the links at the top just bring you to the same page.
For the fun of it, I clicked on Validate Wallet So you don't have to. It brings up a whole list of cryptocurrencies. I wonder how many poor souls were taken in by this.
Hive was nowhere to be seen but at the bottom you could add other wallets and there you got this.
Simple enough to write in your private key and then all your funds and more importantly all the work you have been doing to build your account would be gone.
Be safe out there people. Your keys are yours alone. I would suggest using them once to set up Hive Keychain and then put them away safely from your computer. There are a lot of scum bags just looking to take advantage of technically naive people.
The saga continues
So where am I now? My account is still giving me issues with various error messages popping up like below. I don't know what is going and and I would appreciate any help. Just don't ask me to type my private key anywhere.
Error
Error retrieving comments, please try again in a few moments
Error
Error retrieving current conversion requests, please try again in a few moments
Error
Error during 'claim rewards' broadcast:
Failed to fetch
Sometimes it seems to work, other times not. Maybe it is some sort of configuration in my browser. Again, any help is welcome.
Thank you to @engrave ( the real one) and the @demotruk for messaging me the next day. Hope you don't mind the tag but thank you.
Update
After publishing this blog I did a bit more messing around and tried Firefox with the keychain extension. Everything is working now So the issue must be with either Brave or the keychain extension on there getting confused. I will try a reinstall as I prefer Brave and it is good that I have a second option if this were to happen again. Thanks for all the advice I've received.