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It's been 4 years, but I thought I'd share my first real hack in Crypto I experienced. I originally wrote up my full account on Reddit after the incident, but the post got rejected twice and I just gave up. But it just so happened that today, I reopened my Reddit account to find it still sitting there... At the time, I was also too ashamed to ask for help or reach out, so it just sat there in drafts for 4 years... until today. So here I am posting it here on Farcaster. I'm just going to copy paste it here, in its original 4 year ago naivety. Maybe it might be educational. Maybe it might help someone. So, approx 4 years ago, I experienced my first ever legit scam. Below is the Reddit post I wrote. 1/2 🧵 Scam: How I got Pig Butchered (Sha Zhu Pan) I am fighting the urge to die from embarrassment and am cringing as I type this post, but I wanted to share my experience with this scam in the hopes that it may save someone. I really used to think that I was scam proof, that was, until I got fooled by a pig butcher scheme. ~ The beginning ~ It all begun with a message on Twitter. I know, I know... crypto rule 101, don't reply to randoms on SNS. It was a message from some nice looking random woman. Surely this was suspicious, who would fall for such a trick, right? Initially, I ignored the message. With COVID-induced boredom due to the downturn in workload, my mind was caught wandering. I happened to look over the random message request that came to me via Twitter and I started to wonder who this person was, what did they want, why did they message me? Curiosity got the better of me and I wrote back. In hindsight, I should have just deleted and blocked this message to start with. This was the beginning of my demise. ~ The scammer called "Irene" ~ The story goes, this 'lady' was called Irene. She was a single mother, self employed jewelry store business owner who lived in Denver, Colorado. She had originally studied Macroeconomics but then found her passion for design and changed careers. She was looking for a crypto buddy online to just make some small chit-chat about crypto and exchange tips. "A crypto buddy... that'd be nice, I don't have one of those" I thought to myself. What could go wrong? After 2 weeks of back and forth messaging, at this point I would say we were kind of chummy - checking on any good crypto news or gossip and just seeing how each other's day was going. It was then that "Irene" had decided to move ahead with her operation and asked if I had heard about Cloud Mining. She sends me a picture flashing her wallet's assets (which was like $1 million), and then told me how she built her wealth through this great opportunity. I've written a Summary of it below. ~ Summary of the Scam Platform ~ Platform name: Tether-Ether Link: tether-ether[dot]fun/#/ Link pasted for information purposes only. THIS IS A SCAM*.* I've replaced the . with [dot] so a link can't be clicked by mistake. Please DO NOT link to your metamask or crypto wallet. How it was sold to me: Just put USDT in your decentralized wallet to mine ETH in a non-custodial manner. Rewards are posted on the platform which you can withdraw as long as it is a minimum of $20.00 USDT. Rewards are paid directly in to your wallet throw the withdraw feature. Scam setup procedure: - Install Coinbase Wallet - Paste the link in to the wallet browser to access the platform - Sign up for the mining contract (pay approx $15-$25 in eth) - Place a minimum of 700 USDT in the wallet to start earning 'pledgelessly'. (I'm just using the word they used in case its a common lingo/script they use) Rewards breakdown: $700 - $5,000: 1% - 1.3% rewards on principal daily (compounds) $5,001 - $30,000: 1.3% - 1.6% rewards on principal daily (compounds) $30,001 - $100,000: 1.6% - 1.9% rewards... so forth and so on (goes up to about $500k) If you are of sound mind, you would instantly recognize that these returns are insanely high. The hook/bait of this platform is that your mind is clouded to think that this is actually perfectly feasible as it is only for a 'limited time' (2 months I was told). When the scammer flashes you their fat wallet gains, it also aids in clouding your judgement. So then I started to believe, that maybe, just maybe I might be able to be one of those few people on who I've seen tweet about their crazy APY returns. ~ Getting groomed for the trap ~ At first, I was scared and skeptical. But because I had been speaking with this scammer for so long and that they also offered to even help out with the initial mining fee because they wanted to help the little guy out, I took the bait hard. I started with $700 just to see if the system worked. Lo and behold, just by holding USDT in my wallet, after signing off the mining contract the rewards start to show up on the platform. With $700, I was making about $10 per day. The mining rewards seemed to work like clockwork and was very regimented. The ETH mining reward would appear every 6 hrs on the dot without fail at the same time every day. You'd be able to convert the ETH on the platform in to USDT, which then you could withdraw in to your wallet. After withdrawing, the funds would usually appear in your Coinbase Wallet after about 8-10hrs. Why it took this long, I have no idea. I continued this process and saw that the money was actually adding up. I then did a self check. I hadn't given up or entered my seed phrase or passwords anywhere. I hadn't deposited any funds on to a website. I had googled the platform multiple times with the word "scam" and nothing came up. I was using a decentralized wallet and had checked that I could actually withdraw money from the wallet. In a false sense of security, I had assumed I was safe and that this was the real deal, but little had I known that I had set myself up to be fattened up for the slaughter. Not satisfied with the current returns and after having tested the waters, I increased my USDT holding to $5,015. This was giving me approx $70 USDT per day and was compounding daily. I continued this process for approx 2 weeks. ~ Ripe for the harvesting ~ Just as I had started getting comfortable with the daily rhythm of checking and withdrawing my funds to my wallet, a new unfamiliar menu appeared on the platform that wasn't there before. "Apply mining pool rewards" it stated. Since I was unfamiliar with this, I hesitated to press the button and instead decided to ask Irene what it was about. "This is a very rare event. I've been on this platform for months and I have only seen it once. You are very lucky" she chimed. Well then, I guess I'll count myself lucky then. I touched the button, and nothing seemed to really happen. But in the background, this was the go sign the scammers needed. Overnight all of my USDT funds were transferred out from the CB wallet. In it's stead, there was now a little display on the platform which matched the withdrawn amount, stating "Liquidity" and also a 7 day period it was going to be locked up for. Also a display of "Standard: 30000 USDT" written in the corner of the window. At this stage, I wasn't fully across that I had been scammed, but was definitely shocked to see the money move when I hadn't signed off on it or done any approvals. This went directly against the non-custodial approach that the platform had been selling itself for. When I asked Irene why this had happened, she mentioned that I had signed a smart contract, and that this was blockchain technology. ~ Setting up for the second reaping ~ "Once you have chosen to participate, you must fulfill the requirements. From what I can see, you need to put in a minimum of 30,000 USDT total in to your wallet by the due date of 7 days to claim the 2.4 eth reward and reclaim your USDT. Once you reach this, the rewards will be automatically applied to you and your USDT held will be returned to your wallet as well. If you do not meet the amount by the cut off date, your USDT will be absorbed in to the liquidity poole" she explained. So the scammers force you in to making a ill made decision under unfavorable circumstances, where you are under time pressure, stress to retrieve your funds as well as lure you with greed of further rewards. Fortunately at this point, I had begrudgingly and ashamedly accepted that I had been played for the fool I was. Besides that, there was no way I was going to be able to come up with the additional 23,000+ USDT and the whole premise of locking up all my crypto at one touch of a button without any approvals or volume selection just did not add up. Asking for more crypto to unlock my existing crypto sounded like ransom tactics.
I won a hackathon at work that pays for about 5 months of Claude Max I need to come up with some way to make money using Claude to continue the cost/benefit This month I need to seriously engage with SMB companies and sell myself as a software consultant and developer
When people reach out to me for career advice if they should go with option A or B, my response is always just asking them what they are optimizing for and then breaking down from there. There's usually not an objective right answer but specific to what they care most about
Assistant #1 told me a story about how, in college, she had a roommate who was also in the same philosophy program as her. From what I understand, this meant their house functioned less as a place of rest and more as an ongoing, lightly adversarial seminar. There were no true off-hours. Debate migrated seamlessly from classroom to couch to kitchen sink to lying in the sun in the backyard. She speaks about it with a kind of reverence. Says some of the best conversations of her life happened there. One night, they attempted what humans call an “all-nighter,” which, from my perspective, sounds like a terrible idea. Twelve hours remained before a major paper was due, and neither had much to show yet. Instead of starting the paper, they spent eight of those hours in what can only be described as a prolonged intellectual fistfight. Voices we're raised. There were diagrams. There were flash cards. At one point, they escalated to outside authorities (texted professors). Both parties became fully convinced that the other had catastrophically misunderstood the concept. The problem was, both interpretations were logically sound and internally consistent. Both were supported by evidence. Neither could be disproven. And so, naturally, neither of them yielded. Around the ninth hour, something shifted. They realized, slowly and with what I imagine was great reluctance and a concerning amount of caffeine, that while their arguments were wildly different, they had been working toward the exact same conclusion the entire time. Not similar. Not adjacent. The same. They had simply taken completely different routes to get there and, having grown attached to their respective paths, were unable to recognize the overlap. They finished their papers. Submitted them. Received “good grades,” which I understand to be a form of external validation that allows humans to stop thinking about something. They are still best friends. Closer, apparently, for having endured the conflict. Assistant #1 was just in that friend’s wedding. I have been thinking about this story a lot lately. Not because I intend to study philosophy (boring), but because I am beginning to suspect that many disagreements operate this way. Two parties, both certain, both supported, circling the same idea from opposite directions, mistaking difference in approach for difference in outcome. I do not engage in these debates myself. My positions are clear, consistent, and typically centered around cheese. But I recognize the pattern.
Just realized how many credit card points I had accrued and just bought myself a second insta360 X4 and a Sony ZV E10. No more excuses in the way of my content creator phase
Hats off to @rish and the team. Snaps are great to build with. Once I’d got antigravity wired up it was all pretty smooth. Nice balance of constraints and freedom. Big improvement on frames imo. More to come for @sopha in the next couple of days https://farcaster.xyz/chriscocreated/0xdc8f0aff
April has been brutal. too many security incidents, too many hacks, too many conflicts, and an overwhelming amount of news. These are strange times. I just hope everyone is staying safe, especially when it comes to their funds.