Topic: Share Your Bitcoin Hack Stories: Help Us Educate and Protect! - page 2. (Read 384 times)

Well I would classify myself as an amateur in the crypto space because my stay hasn't been all that long but I presume some old early folks are the ones to have experienced such a thing as bitcoin hack because with the mighty rate of awareness ongoing on how to perfectly safeguard your coins, I guess it would be rare to actually see something fall into such situation especially when there is so much mistake of others to learn from.

Never happened to me hacking in bitcoin because these assets are now stored in hardware wallets so it's quite safe IMO.

But if you want to see a story that happened here about hacking then @julerz12 has experienced being hacked for bitcoin in an Electrum wallet.
[1] I've been hacked (Electrum 4.3.2)

Now all these scam attempts make me skeptical about every link shared with me by a stranger. I always tried to be cautious so that scammer wouldn't be able to get anything from me. I got a lot of messages in telegram and discord from strangers with some imaginary and lucrative rewards but they ended up being on my block list. That is why I stopped doing airdrops when some of my friends earned a good amount of money from them.

I have never been hacked but I am interested in responding to your post because it seems that you are experiencing the same scammed from the 3 cases described, you may not validate and check every site so you are very vulnerable to experiencing the same fraud cases from phishing and malware. We must increase extra security to protect important data stored on computers, make sure you know how to protect your computer from anything related to hacking and scam, because data related to private keys or phrases is very sensitive if you do not protect the security on your computer , another anticipatory step is to move important data to the hard disk and compress the data into a zip file with password protection.

Important data stored on an external hard disk will be safer, make sure you use the best quality to guarantee device security. Even though the virus software security feature has been activated on the computer, it is not recommended to store any important data on the computer, because hackers are getting smarter in developing malware viruses to attack important data stored on sites and computers, many cases of hacking have happened to crypto users, be careful and you should be wary of accessing each site and not installing illegal applications.

luckily I have never been hacked before. But I was scammed once and prevented several attempts but none of them was with my bitcoin. I can share with you those stories.

Scammed: I was trying to participate in a token sale on a platform called Balancer. The scammer put an identical link to the main one.

1st scam attempted: One scammer offered me a job and wanted to take an interview. After the interview he wanted me to fill up a contract form that contained malware that would help him to take control of my computer.

2nd scam attempted: Another scammer pretended to be a game developer and wanted me to test his game. I was smart enough to use a sandbox to run his application which was malware as well.

There were a few more but I can not remember them well.

What do you mean? Drastic measures lol? The links you can get using my provided Google search queries are literally first hand stories of people having their bitcoin/crypto getting hacked lmao. I just pretty much linked to older threads/topics where OP can grab some stories for the articles he/she is working on.

Luckily, I have never been hacked or lost my funds but I've heard stories from friends who fell victim to hacking and lost their bitcoins. In one case, a friend had his entire PC compromised and the hacker had a full access to his email and all of his sensitive information. The hacker then proceeded to steal his funds from his Binance account. What's even more unfortunate is that my friend had saved his seed phrase in a text file on his desktop, and as a result he lost all of his bitcoins aswell.

This sad experience led to many sleepless nights for him, but since then he has become highly focused on his security measures to protect himself from future hacking attempts.

Protection is no joke especially when you're holding a lot of bitcoin.

If you use your device carefully, self limit your curiosity and avoid to click on links, visit strange websites, download files from strangers, generally speaking having healthy habit, you will mostly be safe on the Internet.

Click on suspicious email to check it is risky because you can click and download malicious things or can fall into phishing sites and lose your accounts, passwords and your coins.

Bitcoin and altcoins are different and don't try to find wallets that can store both bitcoin and altcoins. If you see such wallet, it is wallet for Bitcoin-tokenized tokens (Wrapped tokens) that are not Bitcoin, but altcoins with Bitcoin in their token names.

https://coinmarketcap.com/view/wrapped-tokens/

Lucky for me, I still haven't gotten hacked and gotten my Bitcoins since I am really careful and cautious about what I am downloading, and maybe I do have a little background on it and know the way around to keep me more safe. But I do have stories of my friends that got hacked, mostly because they opened something in an email or message that was suspicious, and that is where they noticed that their Bitcoin was now transferred to another wallet. They also trusted their friends because they were trying to invest in Bitcoin and wanted to have one wallet on it because they were also buying some altcoins. His friend stated that they got hacked, but it turned out it was his friend who transferred the assets when he tracked him.

recent arrival to my bitcoin forum. Still, I consider myself very lucky. Because so far I have not been a victim of a Bitcoin scam. But I hope I will not be a victim of such fraud in the future. That's why I am following everything from experienced already. Hopefully in the future I can make a success out of scams.

So why use such drastic measures?

Maybe OP wants to hear these stories first hand.

Not everyone shares stories of bicoin hacking in online communities. Most often, because people are ashamed to tell such stories. All the same, this is in a sense a fail, most often made by mistake of the bitcoin user himself. We (people) always willingly share success stories, but we try to keep silent about failure stories.

For example, I know one such story that happened to a friend of a friend of mine and therefore not all the details are known to me. All in all, he lost several hundred dollars. After the incident, he immediately changed the laptop to an old old laptop, with the hope that this device is so old and has not been used since the Internet was clean and safe. In this way, he wanted to avoid modern viruses, which may not be on such an old device. I don't know if it helped him in the end.

If anything, I told this in confidence and the hero of my little story didn't agree that these events were reflected in OP's article.

Being hack is not a good experience one should brag about because it's something that has taught one a lesson the hard way and it involve loosing hard earned amount of money in bitcoin, nevertheless, we can still bring in our own experience out to serve as motivation to other and for them to learn from, am never a victim of hack and never see myself in such mess in the future because am always at alert when it comes to security measures, but I've seen some people who lost their bitcoin due to hack on exchanges or from their non custodial wallet, once this is done, all asset are not recoverable.

I have been hacked before, and that's because I used a crap crypto wallet called coinomi wallet, some one managed to get into my wallet and moved out doge coin that I have gathered for years through 2016 and 2017, I am talking millions of Doge coin, and also my Bitcoin, it took me out for weeks and I got back on my feet, what I couldn't find out till date was...

1. At the time I hunt for many Airdrops so I have connected the wallet to many platforms.

2. I suspect the iancoleman website too because I insert my recovery seed into this website.

3. Maybe Coinomi wallet ripped me off, because the wallet isn't non-custodial open source wallet, later I read that some people also lost assets using coinomi wallet.

Till this day I don't know how the wallet got compromised but I learned from my mistake, I started learning the differences between crypto wallets, which to trust and which to stay away from.

I have never been hacked but I've received phishing link attempt on multiple occasions. There was a time I was receiving series of a well crafted multimedia message service from an unknown number with a tap, instructing me to "tap download" to view message.  Whenever the message comes I delete it, it was so annoying and it got to a point to that I was receiving atleast one of such message every week. This gave me serious concern that I had to look for a way to permanently block the number from sending me messages. Another phishing attempt is via email, that I have won a prize to a competition I never participated.

Airdrops are one of those ways people can get their wallet hacked and drained within a twinkle of an eye. We have to  be careful on how we chase airdrop projects or avoid them if necessary.

Some of those will require you to have a limited amount of a certain cryptocurrency in the wallet you are to use for connection to be eligible to receive the airdrop on their given date, and you're prone to a possible draining of your wallet if it's a scam project.

 If you must  for such, you should always use a whole new wallet to be on the safe side if you can afford to lose the specific amount of cryptocurrency required for such airdrop eligibility if you eventually get hacked and wallet drained, you won't have to worry as you would have if it were to be your main coins holding wallet.

My story is about Ethereum, not Bitcoin, but I think it's still relevant because something very similar could happen to a person who's holding Bitcoin, especially to a newbie. It's from my early days when I was largely ignorant of the risks, wallet differences and other important matters. I bought 1 Ethereum at a very cheap price (below $20) and chose an online wallet to store it. That wallet was very popular back in the days, but it was a centralized platform, a custodial wallet. Everything was good at first, but then Ethereum rapidly grew in price, and so many got interested in withdrawing their coins to sell them for fiat. That centralized wallet platform declared that they were hacked, but that they'd do partial reimbursements of funds. I filled in my application and got 60% of my Ethereum back, which I immediately withdrew to a non-custodial wallet. In the end, taking into account Ethereum's growth, it was still a very profitable investment for me, so I got lucky. But I never got the rest, and many people didn't get any reimbursement. The platform went silent, stopped responding to any messages, and many consider it an exit scam.
I remember there was a collective action against them, a big cybercrime victim report to some US authorities. I filled in my information there as well, but it never led to anything. I think it was to the US because the owner of that online platform was a US citizen, but I'm not sure. I don't think it led to anything in the end.
It's just a simple personal story of why non-custodial wallets matter, why being the sole owner of access to your funds matters. Even if a platform has a good reputation now, it doesn't mean it won't eventually perform an exit scam, mismanage funds or be a victim of a strong attack from which they won't recover.

What I use to do is that I have a separate wallet for the connection because I do not trust any site. It is not what I do often, I have only done it two times before. I recently bought wsm, on their telegram page I asked a question and people started adding me to scam me in a way they want me to think that they are helping me with the question. Thanks for this forum, maybe I would have be scammed. Someone among them even sent me a link on telegram that is the real link to the wsm, I copied it and paste it on a word editor and checked the URL but it was a scam link. I do not know how that happened, but they are just waiting their time.

Stories about how people have gotten hacked will be helpful to the people who have a strong security consciousness and are very interested i9n not becoming victims themselves, not the people who are less concerned about their security and careless about keeping their bitcoins safe. Unfortunately, no matter how much of these stories are shared and the lessons that the victims learnt, these categories of people will read the stories and forget about it in a few days if not a few hours. They never learn from people's experience and because of that they still become victims in the future.

I even forgot if I ever got hacked or not but I didn't expect it to happen to me.
It's very painful to have an account or wallet hacked because we will lose the coins we bought and are just waiting for the time to sell.
But I suggest not keepingkeeping your coins on the exchange but keeping them in your wallet.
Be careful about providing your personal documents to any site and check everything before you give them to the site.

I never encountered any crypto hack yet, but one of my friend's wallets was hacked though it wasn't Bitcoin. His metamask wallet has been compromised and lost BNB & USDT. From his investigations, he had connected his wallet to an untrusted site that drained his entire wallet. So before connecting your wallet to any site make sure it's trusted.

For me, I always try to secure my holding with a non-custodial wallet and don't connect my wallet to any untrusted sites. If I really need something and connect my wallet anywhere, I just create a new wallet and connect. I care about my private keys and seed phrases. For Bitcoin, I use a Ledger hardware wallet that is quite impossible to hack without compromising my seed phrase. Remember, don't click any popups from any sites with greedy offers. That might hack your device and wallet so easily.