How I got scammed and my wallet drained

Life is a school, some lessons are free, but the meaningful ones are expensive.

The crypto space is notorious for being a home for scammers and con artists, but also for the most innovative and futuristic thinkers!

I’m grateful that I got to see both sides of the coin, yes pun intended.

Regardless of my experience, you should know that security is your responsibility first, and taking care of your funds is your priority.

For starters keep in mind that if something was too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

I had to learn that the hard way and I hope my experience helps you to avoid it.

My first step towards security was to create a vault wallet separating my crypto funds and my NFTs wallet, in my mind, I was thinking since I am not able to obtain a hardware wallet I can stay safe by keeping a wallet offline and not connected to anything.

Thinking back to when it happened it was inevitable even if I was using a hardware wallet, to understand what happened next let me explain the concept of airdrops.

Airdrops are very common in crypto when someone sends you anything whether it is an NFT or cryptocurrency to your wallet without your permission, that’s called an airdrop. It’s usually for free, and it would be sent to multiple wallet addresses.

After I was finishing up with my new vault wallet, and all the transfers from different wallets getting all my NFT earnings in one place, I noticed that new tokens are available that I haven’t seen before, I checked the blockchain scan to see the transaction and I found it happened right after I transferred my funds to the vault wallet.

I thought nothing of it, but when I saw the dollar value on my wallet I was shocked!

I saw people getting lucky in crypto and turning their lives around. That was my first reaction and biggest mistake!

The coin name was zers and the dollar value of the coins I received was nearly 50x the amount I had in the wallet. I was excited to take that money and change my life, already thinking of vacations and new equipment, long story short I was blinded by the money, my greed, and lack of better judgment.

I did ask on Twitter about the coin and asked my friend who’s more experienced than me in trading and crypto, but Twitter was filled with scammer bots that are triggered by the name of the token, my friend was on the other side of the world asleep.

So, as expected from a not-so-experienced, greedy, blinded by the money person to do, I tried to exchange that coin for Eth, the only problem was I had to go to their website and do it from there, the website looked legit, and the connection to the wallet seemed okay, and til this point, I had no issues whatsoever, in fact, it made me think I was lucky to get this airdrop!

After connecting my vault wallet to the website thinking I’m on the highway to being crypto-rich, a signature request pops up and to my fault, I didn’t check it thoroughly, I just looked at how much gas it was costing me and signed it like it was my ticket to freedom!

The transaction went through quicker than a bullet, a bullet shooting through my heart :(

That signature gave full access to my funds and sent it to the contract, it’s irreversible and my money was gone for good.

I felt terrible about it for a while, I had opportunities to secure my funds but I was too greedy, I thought I was going to make it, BUT!!

It was a lesson for me to be humbled and grateful for the experience. Without this experience, I would’ve not started this journey of sharing and wouldn’t be writing this.

The amount of money that was taken from my wallet was acquired through grinding for 3 months on Twitter, and Reddit and by collecting royalties on the shrooms project.

I could’ve avoided the scam by:

- Waiting for my friend to reply happened 10 minutes after my wallet was drained.

- Moving my funds to a different wallet and then messing around with the tokens, which I don’t recommend if this happens to you, try it at your own risk.

- Doing more research on the token and checking the transactions on the blockchain.

- Reading the smart contract of the token is also considered research.

- Not interacting with the airdrop at all.

If you think I could’ve avoided it in any other way, let me know and I hope this never happens to you, if it does happen tho, don’t be like me, do better!

And as always, TRUST THE PROCESS.