A friend got $16K of crypto stolen, I mention it and I get inundated with scammers (updated)
Read this *before* you or a friend are robbed of cryptocurrency. This is what will happen immediately after you discover you’ve been robbed as you search for help, and it’ll be your second theft if you fall for it.
Updated Dec 20, 2021 (pics at bottom of the spam comments here)
I got a call yesterday asking if I’d take a look at a laptop for evidence of a keylogger. The quick and dirty is that at 5am or so guy’s crypto accounts were drained, money transferred to a new wallet, etc. I told him I was not a security expert, that laptop was not stepping foot on any network of mine, but I’d be willing to take an offline look, flash the bios and install a stock Windows install but I wasn’t making any claims that it wasn’t infected, rooted, backdoored, etc.
His laptop would never touch my networks.
Basically I know what I’m good at, and detecting a custom built, probably rootkit, employed by heavily funded cryptothieves is not my forte.
I made a mention on Twitter that I knew someone now who had crypto stolen from them. I immediately started receiving offers to retrieve it, the same story every time. Basically someone got their crypto stolen, and it was recovered by some dudes on Instagram – in the screenshots below, it was David_billcyber, and Carl_hacker45, and @cyber_secure01 – all on Instagram.
I received tweets from at least three people I have screenshots of, all Twitter accounts that have been around for a while – here their twitters are (Theresa, Tom, Harry,) cutting and pasting the same basic thing over and over for what appears to be quite some time. These three accounts have so many tweet replies I have not managed to get past of day one of their tweets and replies, and they’re all basically the same copy and paste with no changeup to hundreds of people who have been scammed, hacked, or robbed.
Sort of something you’d think Twitter would be capable of seeing and flagging as spam. It’s the same pasted message again and again and again telling people who have just been robbed someone on Instagram is a potential savior. Because, you know, you go to a photo sharing site for crypto investigation.
25+ years ago my car was burgled while on a trip to Atlanta with a couple of friends. While we were making a police report a man came up and, at least according to the officer, attempted to scam/rob us by claiming he would lead us to where the burglar stashed our stuff, but would not with the police around. This feels very much like that.
It appears from a simple search if you look at any tweets mentioning a Tik Tok ban, Crypto and robbed/loss/etc you’ll find plenty of people pointing you to someone with an underscore or a number in their name on Instagram. Searching the underscore names you can see a few accounts that mentioned them have been banned, but not all.
Anyway, when your or your friends cryptocurrency is stolen, that’s a when guys, be ready for the offers of help flooding in from people who claim to be able to get it back for you. People in a panic tend to forget that while you can trace anything on the blockchain, it’s absurdly simple to cash out by either selling off in countries that don’t care, or hiring someone locally who thinks a potential criminal record for cashing out 20K of stolen crypto is worth a thousand dollars or so.
The last part is essentially what happened when someone forged checks on my bank account 15 years ago. A group hired a homeless guy with ID to commit multiple thefts via foged check cashing, in person, at my bank.
Updated: spam comments
So also since posting this, this page has been hit by the same scam comments as above – here are some of them.
