That Time When Scammers Almost Got Me!

Scammers reading this will feel excitement but also disappointment.

“Aw, we almost got him! So close...”

It is a probable reaction, if they ever read this article.

Well, to tell you the truth, it was very close.

I was just a click away from sending thousands of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency to scammers. Yes, this wasn’t just going to be a small gamble, but a huge mistake that would have cost me all my holdings back in 2017.

So scammers, rejoice! You almost got me, but I got lucky instead! You are going to read about the one time you almost got me and how I eventually didn’t fall for your scam.

Of course, I don’t recommend this article just to scammers! However, I will not give them any pointers or explain their mistakes either.
Scammers, by reading this you will not get better at scamming!

The real target audience for this article is the honest people in crypto. Those that invest, those that work for crypto, and any crypto beginner. Even some more advanced crypto enthusiasts can find this information useful.

With our knowledge, we will together reduce the menace of scamming from the CryptoVerse.

hive dividers10.png

What Happened

Image from: Piqsels (free download)

I found it on YouTube. It couldn’t be anything else but a fake Ripple airdrop! Yes, these scams are running for many years with the same format.

Not a giveaway, though, as scammers advertised them as airdrops then. I remember studying Ripple in 2017 and read somewhere about a plan for a huge airdrop of all those XRP that Ripple was still holding.

About 50 Billion XRP was supposed to be airdropped but Ripple delayed that decision after the exit of Jed McCaleb.

As a beginner with no experience or knowledge of how scams worked in Crypto, I was convinced this was the real deal.

I don’t remember the exact details, but I am certain I visited a website that was on the links of that YouTube channel and the rest was the same old scam that was supposedly going to send us back double the coins after we first make the first deposit.

I visited the scam website and there was an address to deposit the XRP. Then I logged in to the exchange I was holding the crypto.

I owned BTC, ETH and XRP and I was about to send all my XRP to the scammers address. (Later I felt completely brainwashed and clearly remember I was exhausted when I found that fake airdrop. I was almost sleeping at my desk while watching YouTube. The worst possible timing to make any financial decision.)

It was pure luck that saved me, though. As I was getting ready to transfer my XRP investment to the hands of scammers, my phone rang. I just had to copy and paste the scammer’s address, as I was already at the withdrawal page on my exchange.

It was a friend of mine on the phone. We discussed for like 10 minutes, and after that I went outside for some groceries having forgotten what I was about to do with my XRP.

I returned home an hour later, and when I sat on my desk again, I was facing the same screen, my exchange and on the browser of the scammers website with the address of the XRP I was about to send one hour ago!

But now it was all different. It was the same page, but I was thinking more clearly.

I instantly recognized a trap that an hour ago I was about to fall victim to.

It feels that I was hypnotized by the fake promises of doubling up my crypto wealth in just minutes. I’ve felt shame for my previous actions to not consider this was a scam.

I also think that this scam, while it was very simplistic and naive on its own, they made it this way to attract beginners. It was because someone new might have read that Ripple was planning an airdrop in the past, and why not, to try to claim this airdrop by sending XRP to the displayed address.

A ridiculous scam, that however, seems to work every single time.

See for example, the millions of dollars collected by the Twitter hackers last year. They had all these high-profile Twitter accounts hacked, and promoted their fake BTC giveaway. We have seen it all before, it looks like a ridiculous scam, but this is not the same for someone that hasn’t seen how these scams work before.

So, there is the story.

I’m writing it to let scammers know how close they got to me, and in the end, it was luck that saved me. But I also foiled scammers’ plans frequently and notified entire communities how to avoid getting scammed.

hive dividers10.png

It is Never the Victim's Fault

If you got scammed, it is not your fault. The blame is 100% on the scammers.

Anyone entering the crypto world is doing this for the money. And everyone has read many stories of getting rich quick. Although this is something we later learn is not so simple.

Calling a beginner idiot or greedy because they lost their money to a scam is an arrogant approach.

I instantly dismiss anyone that jumps to this conclusion immediately and tells to the people that got scammed that it was their fault.

i) Not it wasn’t their fault, it was a mistake, but the fault is on the scammer’s side

ii) Everyone in crypto is ultra-greedy. Calling anyone greedy in a negative way is so absurd.

iii) Anyone bashing and mocking the victim of a scam is a completely ignorant and unsophisticated person.

Being strict to a beginner to make them understand how to properly protect themselves differs from mocking them and this strategy could work.

Being friendly and underlying the importance of knowing the dangers they will certainly meet, this is the best approach that will have the best results.

hive dividers10.png

Conclusion

That’s what I knew about when I invested in Crypto back in 2017.

But back then, it was even worse than now. When I was trying to look for exchanges accepting euro, Kraken and Coinbase weren’t the first options on google results.

Some shady exchanges appeared, and I almost ended up sending my money in one that later exit scammed.

I’ve always been an open book about my experiences in crypto and have been trying to help by writing my articles as easy to comprehend as possible.

Becoming a crypto expert is mostly about understanding the code, something I will probably not learn in this lifetime, unless I get serious one day and put all effort into learning a programming language.

The developer’s job is to code, perfect their code, debug, and perform upgrades to the code. They can explain but will have to do that in jargon, but most cannot understand.

I still remember the confusion in my first days while learning.

I thought that Bitcoin and the blockchain were the same. I understood P2P but didn’t even understood most of the basics.

The people that were informing me back in 2017 were deep into Bitcoin since 2013. They were those that bought at $1,000, those that bought in 2014 at prices between $200-$400. A smaller part, some of the earlier investors, were those that indeed knew what was going on.

If something did not scam though me, it wasn’t because someone else informed me and the scam to a beginner wasn’t obvious. It was luck that helped me. Anybody that claims is too smart to get caught makes a big mistake.

And any scammer that thinks he is intelligent makes an even bigger mistake.

Originally posted at Read.Cash

Images:

Lead Images from: Unsplash

Writing on the following networks:

I'm also active on the following media:

Check Bitworkerss! A new jobs marketplace for online freelancers!

purplediv 1.png