I got hacked today

16 days ago

_{.... By this wallet}

Today I went to get a haircut and then to my aunt's house, and while I was there, I received a tag from one of the Discord channels to which I belong. Now the tag was that I had been granted access to this project's private testnet.

Now, I had been working hard to get a link to this Private testnet for a long time, so I was overjoyed when I finally got it. I checked the sender of the link, and it turned out to be an official bot from the Discord channel.

Now that I was seriously engaged in a conversation with my aunt, I simply connected my Metamask wallet with my raby wallet extension.

Then, after a while, I realized that this was a trading platform rather than a testnet. This is a hack! I hated my gut at the time because I knew I had already made a mistake.

So I asked the moderators if they were the ones sending private testnet access, and one of them said they weren't. Then I asked why a scammer had access to the official channel bot, and they did not respond.

Now, I believe some clicked because they were excited to be invited to the testnet. Funny enough, the admins didn't reply again, and went ahead with their normal chat and discussion.

I was upset because when most projects are hit by a smart hacker, they quickly address the issue and shut it down. These guys were simply relaxed, never responded, and continued to act as if it were another Tuesday.

So this made me feel like perhaps it's one of these inner circle guys that created the link and encoded the scam contract into it.

Because some scammers are not as intelligent as this. How does the scammer know that everyone is rushing to get the link to the project's official test net? The scam did not take the form of "claim airdop or claim money".

I already knew that interacting on testnet makes it nearly impossible to be scammed, so I assumed I was entering testnet. It gave me the impression that the scammer had insider information and had created a scam contract based on a testnet narrative.

Now, a testnet narrative is not compelling enough to entice people to click a link, but this person knew we all wanted to get into the testnet, so they hacked the bot command and used it to create a code that leads to a scam.

I have been interacting with a lot of testnet projects for a long time, and I generally know which links to avoid. However I attributed this scam to the closeness of the scammer with the admins and that's if it wasn't even these guys that created the scam.

So, basically, the Arb Ethereum in my wallet is for mainnet transactions, and I only used one project for mainnet interactions. Most of the remaining 20 to 30 projects are essentially testnet.

So the scammer decided to transfer the arb because the gas fee on native Ethereum is always high. So I was drained of my arb eth. So, basically, I can no longer do my mainnet interactions because I need to fund the wallet in order to interact with the mentioned mainnet project.

So I decided to track this wallet on etherscan, and I discovered the address they had hacked. The problem is that I hope this hack is a one-time thing and whether the scammer has not installed a sweeper bot on that contract.

This means that any funds I send to that address will be automatically transferred out. However, I hope the scammer is not as cunning as this.

However, they managed to create a website that was very smooth and appeared authentic when I clicked the testnet link and this makes me think they might be pro and it scares me.

So this wallet is anticipating a large number of potential airdrops, some of which I intend to use to purchase Hive if they prove to be significant airdrops. If this is a one-time occurrence, it is time to blacklist the project.

Not because they have scammers, but because the scammers are accessing users' wallets via the official channel bot, which leads me to believe it is an insider's job.

This is probably one of those sad days for me, but we will move on.