It seems a week doesn't go by that we don't hear about someone in the crypto space losing their crypto or nfts to scammers, hackers and other ne'er do wells. Back in 2017 we talked about how Travis got hacked and almost lost his cryptos. Kevin Rose lost $1,000,000 in Nfts in a wallet draining attack just last month. And now it's finally happened. I got phished. It was an incredibly stupid mistake that could have and should have been avoided.
But it's what happened subsequently that I find the most disturbing. Most of all. It's proof that it can happen to absolutely anyone. Today we talk about how you can protect yourself through technology and hyper awareness. On our Joel doesn't meet Trey Anastasio but still gets phished. Episode number 670. Of the Bad Crypto podcast. Five for.
Three.
How are there all of the other food banks?
And yes, it is finally happened here at the Republic of Bad Cryptopia a thief has taken my NFT is like to say I gave them to him. Joel, Come here, sir. Lord Travis right there. How are you doing? Good, sir.
Well, welcome to the club.
Yeah, I got to say, man, there's. There's a lot of things to be learned from this. And I want to talk about what happened. They were NFT was and you and I briefly said, well, shouldn't this be a nifty show? But honestly, it's the same type of thing that can happen to any of your cryptos. Nfts are just cryptos. They're just nonfungible instead of fungible tokens.
This podcast, sponsored by Leger, makes sure to get you to put all your cryptos on there and they're finished or bits slapped.
And Pfizer, don't forget to get your 18th boost.
This show not actually sponsored by anyone. But you know what it is? It's so interesting when, you know, Joel mentioned at the top there, you know, Kevin Rose is one of the most probably proficient interwebs out there. Right. He's built some of the most amazing properties. He's still got hacked, Mr. Beast. He got his stuff stole. We'll talk about that a little bit. He could have got hacked and had all of his crypto. So he did it because he he was able to circumvent that. I mean,
my phone number got switched, right? So what number was that episode number 41.
Yeah, it was number 41. We got a link to it in the show notes and we'll have several links that you're going to want in this episode. So go to bad code dot iron. Forward slash 670 for those links you know and we called that episode Travis gets hacked but honestly you didn't get hacked you got jacked right? SIM swapped, you got SIM jacked is what happened. Yeah. So, you know, most of what we call hacking isn't actually hacking. People can't hack into your wallet unless they actually have
your keys. What we talk about when we say people get hacked is usually a result of social engineering, clicking on fake links, that type of thing. That's what Kevin Rose did, right? He got caught with a phishing link.
Yeah, and I assume that's what happened with you. I don't even really know the story. So this will be probably mostly a Joel centric episode where he's talking because he knows most of the details of what occurred. So I'm not even sure exactly how it happened. So where did it all begin?
Joel Yeah, so that's what's really interesting about that is I don't know exactly how it begun as some point a conversation initiated with somebody on Discord. And here's the thing. I've been on discord for years now, and one of the morals, you know, one of the things that, you know, not to do on Discord is accept DMS from strangers, especially those acting with authority over another collection. Those are most of the time phishing links.
Right? So it's a little bit different probably for us because people are like, Hey, we want to come on the nifty show, hey, how is this work, etc., etc.. So I think in some ways that could get set up. Now, I personally don't respond. I'll tell people to hit me, hit me on Twitter or something, or hit me on email because you know, the DMS on Discord, they seem really spammy and there's not really any way to verify those DMS a lot of times. And so that could
be this vulnerable vulnerability. Number one right there is, is pay attention to the DMS you get.
Yep, pay attention to the DMS. And I honestly do not recall how the conversation with this person started, but I got booted from a an NFT group that I was in and I don't know how that happened. I have a feeling that this person is the one that did it. So now as I'm thinking this through, I was in the The Sewer Rats Social Club. It's something I've been in since 2021. They were one of the OGs of, of of PSP Nfts They happened before the board a yacht club and I've got a bunch of
these in my wallet. Oh, you know what? I'm wrong. It's not the sewer apes, it's the goats Maison de Goat. So that's another collection. Right around the same time it was the goats. And and I was I got a message from somebody that I had spammed that group and was booted from it. Well, I went and looked for that group, and sure enough, I was banned from that group. So it gave legitimacy to it. It appeared to be
a mod telling me I got banned. Now he's probably the one that reported me as having spammed and got me booted from the group. Now this is beginning to make sense. So he messaged me and told me and he sent me a screenshot and in the screenshot of this alleged spam that I posted, which I did not, was my profile picture and name. But of course I didn't do that. And I told him I didn't do that and he won. Nope, my wallet was and I told him my wallet, blah blah blah. And he said
he was reinstating me because he was really sorry. And I went to click into the Discord. I still couldn't join the Discord. He said, Oh, that's our Dao Discord. Here's the one direct to the collection. And like an idiot, I clicked on it. I went to that discord and I went to the collab Land Verify, and that's now when you do a collab land verify, you're going to often, if it's the first time with that wallet, get a transaction saying. You know that. Okay. Does this You and
I did it in the moment. I did it. My Syrian app on my phone lit up and four of my apes from the Bulls and Apes collection. I'll actually show them to you right here from one of my other wallets. I actually owned 32 of these that we're getting ready to reveal. And they've just revealed today. You can see my apes right here. Bulls and Apes is a really cool collection. And I had moved these divided them between eight wallets. And so only four of them
remained in that primary wallet. Now I'm thinking about that and realizing if I had not divided up those 32 apes, they'd all be different wallets. I would have lost all 32 of them. I lost four of them. And then I looked at my men. And these are.
The four that were stolen.
No, these are these are a different wallet. These are mine. So one of the other wallets. And I'm really grateful that I divided them up.
Now, let me ask you that. Let me ask you that, because that's maybe abnormal behavior, whereas most people probably have one wallet or maybe two. Why was that? What spurred your intuition to say, let me divide these amongst eight? Was there a benefit for. Yes, there was.
There was actually a benefit. What we were told by the team is that for every wallet that had four in them, you were going to get a bonus loot box that you're going to be able to open here to customize your apes. And so it had that not been offered, I would have lost all 32 of those and.
Maybe some of the bulls as well. But well.
Here's so I have a lot of different wallets. I have multiple hard wallets. I have keys stored elsewhere. Like I'm just I'm super protective. And that's why this in these were even on a ledger. I just moved everything from from from hot storage to cold storage so that stupid stuff wouldn't happen. And I still clicked to verify that transaction. And then I looked at my metamask and I saw there were 37 transactions waiting to be approved. And so I clicked reject all because basically he would
have wiped my wallet of so many of these. And here's the other ironic part about this and where you guys really need to pay attention and make sure you're equipped. I installed a Chrome extension on my computer that goes with Metamask called Stylo. stel0s Tello Stylo Labs dot com is where this is. And this is really cool because you probably can't see this on my screen share because it's a pop up. But what it does, every time there's a transaction, you get a pop up first that
tells you exactly what's happening. And as you could see here, it tells you if it looks risky, it tells you exactly how much money you're sending. It tells you where you're sending NF TS. And so this is like like a condom over your metamask that.
They don't steal all your stuff.
Correct. And so I had it installed. I didn't have it turned on.
Oh, no.
It's like having a condom by the side of the bed.
Yeah. Joel went roadhog all up in that fish.
Yeah. So I got, I got fish. But here's, that's not the most amazing part. And by the way, this is this is very common. This is what we call social engineering. It's a very constructed and thought through process by these scammers to, to take your crypto or your NFT is this is what happened to Kevin Rose and there's a link to the story where he got he lost like $1,000,000 in Nfts from a from a phishing thing that happened to him. He followed a bad link and, and those entities are gone.
Scammers crazy is you know, Joe is not a newbie in this space at all. He's probably one of the more advanced people when you think about do you divided 32 and empties in eight different wallets divided that all up have multiple ledgers and keys are who who has that probably point zero something percent of the people actually have that and he still got hacked.
And I let my guard down. First of all, it was late at night. I was tired and.
He just smoked a huge fat marijuana cigarette.
That is not true, but it could have been true in some alternate life. And I. I just it was dumb. You know, you get so accustomed to this stuff that it's easy to let your guard down. And I remember when Kevin Rose did it and I thought, idiot, like, why would you fall for something so obvious? Is that you know not to do well. I did it.
What an elaborate plan, Joel. I mean, seriously. So somehow this guy was able to engineer his way into a community, get a member who's been in there a long time out, and this is presumably before they even knew what your your address was. Right. Because. Okay, send me your address. Let me see so I can let you back on. Then once he then presumably he goes and looks at that wallet, sees what's in that wallet and says, hey,
we can get you back in. Here's the link. It looks like a discord link, but and it takes you to some discord that may or may not be the right one, which then pops up the collab Land Verify, which is not a collab land verify woods. So that's a very highly intricate sort of scam system that was set up by these guys.
Yeah. And so I'm actually going to share my Discord screen with you and I wish I had captured the full conversation before I went to bed that night because I had already been talking with the scammer. This is But he's deleted all of his text so you can't see, you know, what he said back to me. But this is, you know, when he was a social engineering me and then he apologized to me and that's when it went sideways. And I, I was I reacted emotionally. And it was. It was.
15. Did you. 15.
Well, he said he was 15 then he was said he is 19 now. You can see here from all of my texts that there was a lot of back and forth, like we talked for at least 2 hours that night and he's deleted all of his stuff. But this is what.
How come what is it? Why does it Dischord actually take these things into account and that that person's IP address, that person's she should be completely banned in Sean from being able to even use it because yeah, look what happened. But this court and a lot of these big tech customer service companies are just nonexistent.
Yeah, it's pretty sad. But what's really sad is the conversation that I had with this guy. He's he says and I don't know if he did or not. He said he made $1,000,000 taking money and lost all but 200,000 on leverage trading. I'm like, You're going to lose the rest of it, too, because you're a criminal. Here's what really struck me. That makes me really sad. And I feel bad for the guy. For me, it's $1,000 an NFT. Oh, well, you know, Nfts have been good.
To me, that's life lesson learned. But for him, his moral compass is so broken that he truly believes that stealing my nfts is a game that he won and I lost. He sees it the same as Wall Street, that, hey, the financial institutions play this game, they play it legally. But he sees it as, Hey, if I'm not hurting
my family or my friends, it doesn't matter. And I was when I realized that, wow, this person truly has no grasp on morality and was telling me, you know, your morality is not my morality, that we are in big trouble if there is a generation that has no moral foundation.
Well, that's exactly where we are. There's that quote. I don't know exactly who said it, but it said tough, tough people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create tough times. Right. And this this whole sort of thing, it's like here we are in tough times, create strong people and strong people create good times. Good times create is basically we we're in this line here
where we have weak people, are creating tough times. And that whole quote comes into play right now where look at what's happened. There is no moral compass. Religion is pretty much gone for a lot of people, right. So they don't have the moralities of that. Marriage is marriage is gone. Everyone is now, you know, saying which gender they want to be and everything else. And there's a lot of there's a lot of and you can say who you feel you are and be that that's great.
But this is this is a whole lot of wildness. I saw just the other day this lady who was a she was a she her they them something I'm not exactly sure, but she was offended. And then she got up and started screaming and just disrupted this whole meeting. And I say, wow, there's nothing more disruptive than an angry, offended, extroverted. He she they them whatever. Right. So it's like if they when they get upset, like they just don't they're just going to sit and scream screech in the sky.
It's because I think maybe time out didn't really work when I was a kid. Grandma was like, you know what, Travis? Go out there and pick out a switch off that tree. I'm a beat your ass and you got your ass beat. And guess what? You behaved a little better. We're in a generation where nobody got their ass beat, and so they all just like a bunch of petulant little kids because they are. And they're going to be grow up to be petulant little bitch ass adults, right?
Karens a whole a whole bunch of Karens. And the next generation is going to look at them and go, Yeah, we're not going to play that anymore. The pendulum's going to swing back.
It's going to squeeze that.
Hard and there's going to be a generation of children that are going to rebel against this alleged insanity, this alleged rebellion. And I even I told this kid, I said, you know, what would your what would your dad think of this? Oh, I you know, I would never tell him. I'm like, well, why if it's not wrong, you know, because dad would see it was wrong. Let me have a conversation with your father and see what? What?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, thank you. Goodbye.
I ended up like, you know, he. He said he couldn't get me the Nft's back because his developer had him. Like, for a moment there I thought he was that he might actually send them back because I ended up being nice to him and I ended up, you know, talking because he was like, I can bench to 20 and I'm well-liked in school. I get great grades, I got a 1500 on my A.C.T.. I'm like, That's great, but you're an idiot, you're a fool. And this is why.
And you might end up going to prison over this stuff. All only 1% of people get caught. I'm like, you know, sooner or later it's going to catch up with you. It will, you know, whether you call it karma or, you know, you, you reap what you sow or what goes around comes around. I believe that. That that is a law of the universe and the universe is going to spank the crap out of you at some point. And I told him, you're going to remember this conversation.
I'm sure this 17 year old with an undeveloped brain who thinks he's so smart and thinks he's being ethical and thinks, Oh, yeah, I know what you know, my my psychological development is at the age of 17 is going to get spanked hard and and he's going to remember our conversation. I'm sure of it.
Hmm. I remember what was funny was I have a friend of mine who knew some people on the dark Web site. All right. What's his Twitter handle? Because the dude was tweeting me and then figured out his Twitter handle, figured out his Instagram, his girlfriend's Instagram. And then I started tweeting him pictures of him and his girlfriends kissing
on Instagram and he freaked out. It was hilarious because this dude literally went into because when he got my phone, then I gave him access to my Gmail because you could do the reset through the SMS. And then it was trying to get into my Coinbase. But Coinbase, I used a different email specifically for that, so they couldn't get into my Coinbase, which what they were trying to do.
Then they got into my apple, I got into my Twitter and then once you're in my Google, once they're in my Google, they can get in my Google drive, which I had some photos that some some hot nudes that some chicken sent me back in the day and then was posting those on my Twitter and then as do was just being an overall hassle. And then I
figured out who he was. And then what was funny was he access my phone, logged in to his iPhone, and then through my find my iPhone app on mine, I was able to identify where he was and then locked his phone so he could not use that phone anymore. And so then he was back in the me, you know, like politics and call me King Daddy. And I was not so friendly. I was I was in no joke with the guy because he ended up getting nothing from me except being a pain in the ass. So it's
just these guys, what are you going to do? We got a whole generation full of idiots who don't know what the hell are they going to do with their life? And then we got A.I. taking everything over. So you got these humans with too much time on their hands, and not enough money is in their pockets most generally, and most likely nefarious activities follow suit.
For them in their friends. And he told me this is a game they compete to see who can steal the most. Look, I was not, you know, the ideal child. I remember taking money out of the cash register drawer. You know, when I was working at the pizza place, I remember I was I was a doorman at a club in in Dallas back in 1986. And people would pay, you know, $5, you know, cover fee to come in and cash and every other cash entry I shoved in my pocket. I remember walking out with $300 one night
and thought I was, you know, hero. I didn't have a moral compass. I mean, I knew it was wrong, but I didn't care because I needed money. And I was 19 or 21 years old. I was just a stupid kid. And that's what happens. Stupid kids do stupid things. And and I was a stupid adult who let this stupid kid trick me. And it happens and it can happen to you. You sent me a video earlier of Mr. Beast talking about how somebody broke into his place. Tell the story.
Yes, I just saw on this YouTube short, but apparently somebody robbed Mr. Beast before he got really huge. Right. And so he had taken a hundred grand invested in Bitcoin and then Bitcoin blew up. So this would have been like probably 2016, 2017 when he bought the Bitcoin. Then the Bitcoin was worth about $2 million. He was about to take some of that money, cash out and make some videos. This is before he really hit it big and somebody came in, stole his TV, stole his computer,
stole his clothes, all kinds of stuff. And on his laptop there was a little Post-it note that said Bitcoin private key, like, oh, worst place to hide, like right there on the thing. And then he realizes like, Oh, shit, where's my lab? Where's my. Oh, God, I'm getting stolen. Oh, shit. So he went down to his other computer. They didn't steal his other computer and he had another note there. Bitcoin private key he had in a few places, went in, was able to move all of his bitcoin over before,
so the dude didn't steal it. He was too busy about stealing another one of his TVs or whatever. Didn't go and getting his $2 million worth of bitcoin at that time.
So that's a victory story right there. And the guy was, you know, not only a thief, but a truly stupid thief because he had.
To watch a 2017 TV now and you could have had $2 million worth of Bitcoin in 2017, which is right now probably $5 million. But you think about that what Mr. Beast did with that turned all that money. And so basically he made his YouTube money by crypto, turn it into $2 million and then use that to fund more videos. So the moral.
The moral of the story is, first of all, get cold storage, use a ledger or a trezor or something for your your cryptos, because at least then it's it's more challenging with with hot storage. It's a lot easier to get to your stuff and be socially engineered that way, at least with a ledger there is that, oh, transactions coming in, I need to approve it or you know,
or disapprove it. Use the web extension. Still go on your metamask and and be careful about messages that you get from anybody on Discord, on Telegram, on tic TAC, on Instagram, on on signal, on anywhere. Be cautious and don't accept DMS from people. Always verify before you trust. Don't even trust. Verify what's going on first.
So would you say that the fact that zero on the app on your mobile device messaged you, is that the first thing that alerted you that you were getting yanked?
It is and so this is a free app and we can put a link to this into the shownotes z vr i0n is the app you can download. Not sure if they have it for android. I have it on my iOS and I don't connect my wallet to Siri and I just track my wallets on zero. And so you could just put an address in and tell it to send you notifications. So I tracked Travis's wallets. Every time Travis does a transaction, I want to know what he's up to. I track several friends and I get them very.
I want my privacy. Joel, your violate my privacy.
What blockchain? It's public ledger. And so I can see when you're transacting in nfts or in cryptos, Kazarian tells me in zero and lit up right away. And it said for bulls and apes, you know, NFT is sent to. And I'm like, Oh, crap. So thank you. ZIRIN That's another really great point. Travis. Go download the Syrian app. I'm going to find a link to that right now to put in.
Yeah, that's good. The Syrian in the style of the kind of help you modify and monitor what it is you're trying to do to save your ass. I like that.
App .01. com.
I vr i o in.
Syrian app is the one that you want to get. Yeah. I'll put a link to that into the shownotes at Syrian dot i o smart social web three wallet. Again, you don't need to use it for the wallet aspect. You can just track it. You can track any wallet you want without it making it a hot wallet. And so I recommend that. So you go Lessons learned. Here's another lesson Learn Trav. You can go and write a review and it'll get read on this podcast, especially if
it's five stars. We got a review from Mike MOH 1271 fun and entertaining crypto podcast, five stars. He says It's a great show. Look forward to Joel and Travis podcast every week, including the nifty show. Listen to it. So often my fiancee is saying the stay bad in the intro every time. Ha ha ha. While she isn't really into crypto, she enjoys listening to Stay Bad five Stars. All these other reviewers giving less than five are little whiners.
Little whiners. What? Little whiners?
That's right.
If you if you leave us, I got a three star or two or one. I assume you have a minuscule manhood. So, Mike, go ahead. Just self-identify your microbial.
Mike, Thanks for listening and hope you guys learn something today. I know I have this week and this is not, you know, fool me once, shame on.
You. You won't get fooled again.
Fool me twice, shame on me. So this I you know what? I'm just going to jump right ahead to the fool me twice. Shame on me. I should have known better.
Yeah, well, you know what? At least that guy's self identified as having a micro penis.
He did? Yeah. Yeah. Like in micro morality, too. When we say stay bad, we don't mean be an asshole. We mean just stay there.
A group Whose band?
The Bad Crypto podcast is a production of Bad Crypto LLC. The content of the show, the videos and the website is provided for educational, informational and entertainment purposes only. It's not intended to be and does not constitute financial investment or trading advice of any kind. You shouldn't make any decisions as to finances, investing, trading or anything else based on this information without undertaking independent due diligence in consultation
with a professional financial advisor. Please understand that the trading of Bitcoins and alternative cryptocurrencies have potential risks involved. Anyone wishing to invest in any of the currencies or tokens mentioned on this podcast should first seek their own independent professional financial advisor. Trev, I don't know if you're aware, but the feedback from the show that we did recently
about I was fantastic. And I think we should like do a spinoff show because, you know, I does overlap some into blockchain, but mostly not.
Hmm. And mostly what we've been is sort of the Sherpa to new technologies, right? This whole world of crypto and an NFT is an metaverse and play to earn. And I just fits right in with what it is that we do.
The Sherpa DARPA's I believe.
It was a show or the Serpent Sherpas. Yeah, sure. Be very sensitive to crypto.
Well, let's let's talk about that a little bit more. And you guys who get to the privilege of listening to these Easter eggs because, you know, sometimes we go on after the show is actually over. Stay tuned.
This isn't an Easter egg. This is more like a Halloween treat, like a cherry tree.
Are we going to trick or treat them?
I don't know. To be determined.
Well, we'll let air decide.
Oh, and that's how we can in the show as stay I bad?
Yeah.
That's good.