Not just exchanges but if you dealing with big funds or planning to send funds from one wallet to another wallet, be very careful about double or triple checking the name before you hit the send button. Yesterday there was a sad incident where one of the top and highly reputed witnesses on Hive Blockchain transferred funds to the wrong address and it ended up losing funds.
Smooth is one of the highly reputed witnesses on the Hive blockchain. It is usually an assumption that people with a good reputation do not make any mistakes. But that's not right and every human being will make some mistake at some point in time. I feel very sorry for Smooth 18000 USD is not something that is a small amount to lose. At least for me or for people in my country.
What happened?
In short Smooth sent 18094 HBD to an account called Bittres. His intention was to send the money to Bittrex but he misspelled it while typing and the amount were sent to the wrong account. Unfortunately, the owner of the account @bittres is @noganoo who appears to have created such accounts on Hive to make some profit out of it. It is obvious that people make some mistakes and when they do so, noganoo makes it an opportunity and earns his bread from that.
The details mentioned in his profile clearly mention that he is a hacker and also a treasure hunter who would definitely take this as a treasure. This may not be his only alt account. I'm sure he would have created so many alt accounts that have names similar to exchange accounts to grab opportunities like this. No wonder that he didn't return that money back to Smooth. If you look at the transaction history, the money was already sent to Bittrex and taken to his pocket. It is a huge loss for smooth.
It is a lesson for everyone
I wanted to write this post specifically to take this message to many people so that we can be a little safe while transferring funds. Especially when we are dealing with bigger funds, it is very important to double or triple check the receiver address. It is always better to copy-paste the receiver address instead of typing it by hand. Even if we are doing the transfers from our mobile devices, it is very important to check if the receiver address is correct or not and most of the time copy the value and paste it.
On other blockchains, the addresses will usually be a big alphanumeric string that is not easily rememberable. The only option would be to do a copy-paste. Though it is easily rememberable for Hive users, problems like this are also a bane for us. So, it is the responsibility of every individual to be careful while doing the transfers. Hopefully, we shouldn't be doing a mistake like this while transferring funds to accounts.
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