My Loss

Posting with an alt account.

I've been heavily involved in cryptocurrency since I discovered Bitcoin in 2013. I did a college presentation on it and my whole class were astounded by the idea. I invested all of my 8,000 savings into a Scrypt ASIC miner from KNCMiner. They take deposits, in full, pending shipping at a later date. They take 12 months before they finally ship. When they eventually do, they shipped a weaker chip, multiple users having high failure rates, no possibility of turning a profit with it. I joined a class action to help get a refund for it, hoping that European consumer laws would apply, unfortunately they didn't, and my hands were tied. I had no choice to sell it – I made back 15% of the price paid by selling it in ebay.

I go back to my studies in Computer Science, graduate, have two beautiful kids and settle down with a job for a bit. Fast forward to late 2016. I get back into the crypto world. Start reading here and there, putting in small amounts. Discovered Ethereum and put in whatever I had spare at the time (about 4k). I set a personal goal of 60k – enough to pay a mortgage down payment and pay off my loans. I take a little but of time off from work to trade more. After many many sleepless nights of trading, arbing, ICOs, I am nearly at the cashout goal that I initially set. I wake up one morning, I am literally on doing my business checking my phone for the latest prices – to my surprise Ethereum spiked during the night, I quickly go to check my address on Etherscan(just a thing I liked to do), to my absolute shock I see a transaction go through at 4am, I've never ran to the computer faster in my life. I checked over my address, checked token transactions, everything gone(about 50 Eth with tokens). My address was wiped clean – apart from one token(which was thankfully locked due to an ICO(REQ)), and a little bit of dust in alts. So, I try transferring in some eth to get the alt tokens out, the eth is immediately transfered out of my account(whoever compromised my address put a sweeper bot on it, making it nearly impossible to beat). – I never did find out exactly how I got hacked at the time. Obviously (And stupidly) not having a HW wallet was the main part of it( I got a one immediately after, obviously too late). I had received some calls from a Google Voice number a couple of days prior, didn't think much of it at the time. I also stupidly had remote desktop enabled on my computer for accessing the miners I had running in my house.

This loss was a big hit to my mental health. I struggled for a good while after that.

I was desperate to recover the losses (I put back in the last 2k of my savings). Trading as much as I could, arbing whatever/wherever I could. I was happy, I was gaining back and confident I could recoup the loses from the hack – then WEX.nz happened. This one but hard, as the previous hack was still an open wound. Wex.nz(formerly BTCe) had some nice arbitrage opportunities that I wanted( naively) to take advantage of. Suddenly withdrawals were disabled. The exchange still functioned for some time, allowing me to trade within that, I continued to trade, hoping that if crypto rises the exchange may enable withdrawals. Some months passed, the admins go quiet. There's chatter on Telegram channels that the exchange was sold to Dmitry Havchenko, a former Ukrainian entrepreneur turned separatist fighter.. ok, doesn't sound that bad… Fast forward another couple of months, WEX goes offline(domain shutdown because of the scan complaints). Now I realize there's no hope.. I go back to my career as a Software Developer for a short time. Fast forward to early 2019. I invest small bit of money that I saved up while working. I start reading on the side. Checking arbitrage opportunities here and there. Getting caught back into crypto, feeling sorry for myself again and trying to recoup past losses(fool me once right…), I see an arbitrage opportunity on BiteBTC (the name rang a bell, I remembered trading on it a small bit prior and not having any issues.). I try to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity and deposit whatever I had(5 Eth). Sure enough, withdrawals aren't processing – withdrawal gets cancelled. I wait for support… Fast forward a month or two, BiteBTC goes offline. I've lost hope for that one now. There's chatter on Telegram that BiteBTC is coming back as Fedlio.com(who claimed to be owned by Seychelles Commercial Bank – of course this turned out to be false claim). Fedlio comes online(and still is to this day- stay away!!!) and I am able to login with my old account. My account is "pending verification" – the only way to verify is to fill out the physical form with a copy of my ID and post to them in the Seychelles (not happening…). So I give up on that one.

I've been scammed more times than I would like to admit at this stage.

Here I am now watching Bitcoin breaking new highs, Ethereum thriving and very close to it's ATH and really itching to get back into cryptocurrency and still have 10k in debt.

Thanks if you've gotten this far. I've held off posting this for quite some time.

J

Submitted January 10, 2021 at 07:02AM }
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