Phishing Scam Alert: Have I been scammed?
A few days ago, one of our readers visited our website seeking information about crypto scams. Before leaving, they submitted a form titled “Have I been scammed?” Her story is heart-wrenching, as are the stories of many who have fallen victim to crypto scams. With her permission, I am sharing her experience to help others avoid the same fate. Here it goes.
Everything started in May of 2024 when someone from a website called Chainslama contacted her to invite her to invest in the platform, promising her high returns in cryptocurrency. They told her to download crypto.com and Guarda app (which are legit and secure apps) to manage her funds. The first one would be to transfer money from her bank account into a wallet to do the conversion, and the second one would be to transfer the funds between crypto.com and the platform. The scammers convinced her to put in around 4.7373 ETH, which at the moment of writing this article is around $16K.
“The scammers convinced her to put in around 4.7373 ETH which at the moment of writing this article is around $16K.”
They started to trade, and they were able to convert the $16K into $70K. However, when she tried to pull the money out of the platform, they sent fake USDC tokens to her Guarda app, and she was not able to convert them into ETH or do anything with them. She went and asked the financial advisor the reason why she couldn’t do anything with the money, and they answered that for her to do that she had to put 25% of the money in the Guarda app within 3 days to be able to do the conversion. The financial advisor also mentioned that this kind of lock on the funds and the request of 25% of the funds was a normal process that anyone who would transact in USDC experiences. She tried Googling this kind of lock and she couldn’t find anything. She started to feel that all this was a scam and that is when she started to try finding answers on some friends, websites, and Reddit.
When she posted on Reddit, a lot of people reached out to her claiming that they could recover the funds. However, all of the people who reached out to her asked for money in advance and one, in particular, had a website that was created two days before she contacted the person and, on the website, the form to retrieve the funds asked her for the wallet’s private keys. After that, she decided to remove the posts and that is when she reached out to us so we could clarify some questions and put the matter to rest.
When she submitted the information on our website, we went and did some digging and we found the following:
When looking at some of the transactions on her wallet address, some of the To addresses had the nickname Fake_Phishing. She mentioned that this was not there when she transferred the funds and I believe her as these nicknames have to go through an approval process. However, is always recommended that before transferring the funds, we do a little bit of digging into the address to which we are sending funds and make sure that there is nothing strange with it
When she mentioned that she withdrew the money from the platform into the Guarda Wallet, she mentioned that the financial advisor requested her to put the private keys in the form to submit the withdrawal. This is a BIG RED FLAG, as the private keys are the most important thing to secure your funds and you should never share it with anyone.
The USDC tokens that she received from the platform were flagged in Etherscan as fake tokens and part of a phishing scam.
Key Takeaways:
- Too good to be true: if they promise you high returns in a short time, it’s likely a scam.
- Verify before investing: do some investigation before putting money in a platform, no matter how many certificates they have on their website (anyone can put certificates on their website).
- Don’t share your private keys: if they ask for your wallet’s private keys, it is a scam!
About the author : admin
