Lost 220 thousand ADA because of a YouTube video

I live in Canada, chose Crypto Legal based on a recommendation from a friend, their legal fees were a bit costly, but I’m quite happy with the results, if it wasn’t from them I’d probably still. be having nightmares as of today…

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Possibly you just need to reach out to one of them and they might put you in contact with someone to help you.

60% of 220k are an awsome 132k; just saying.

Even if you ended up with a solid 10%, with fees and so on, marvelous.

Get it back and throw a party.

cheers

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Yes sir that would be great. A miracle actually - I will invite everybody to the party except for the guy who made the G Wagon comment on a previous post

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Forget that; he didn’t even notice that it wasn’t you who made the post in that thing.

Dummies, can’t live with them, surely can live without them.

cheers

P.S. Meat Wagon is the only one I know anyway. And you don’t need that much gold/wood/food cap. to buy it, although you’ll have to w8 36 secs to be built. Ces’t la vie!

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Agree 100 with you. That’s why I’m into crypto. I mean we need regulations but not control or trade off freedom. And codes are freedom of speech.

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Thanks for the recommendation @Navyseal33

In the grand scale of things I lost 15,000 ADA in comparison to @fernand69584745 which seems like nothing compared to him.

But you now what I read this article about a large crypto seizure (By Greater Manchester Police in the UK) awaiting to be rightfully claimed by their owners. Now, That may or may not be connected to any of us but it ultimately led me to this forum which I have only joined a few days ago and I feel between us we may even spot similar articles or news like that which again may or may not be connected to us but still the fact that more and more of us are talking about it.
You guys based in America and Canada and myself from the UK but based in Australia I think gives for some hope.

In all honesty I am not certain I will ever see mine again but the fact that there’s a few of us discussing this I would be thankful if it helps raise at least a little awareness for naive people like myself in ending up in similar situations or maybe even leading them to getting theirs back I am all for it :slight_smile:

Anyways I would like to express some gratitude to you guys who are leaving comments being friendly and trying to be polite and assist people rather than just take an attack at our stupidity as we are very aware of what we did and there’s no real requirement for unhelpful inappropriate comments.

Thanks

AR261

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Hello AR,

No worries, my pleasure to be of any assistance, I´ve been exactly in the same position and I know how it actually feels… don´t give up on your assets, make a police report and seek legal assistance, nowadays it´s feasible to recover your funds.

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The root cause was your greed. Stupidity was only a catalyst. If you didn’t think that you could magically turn 220,000 ADA into 2x, 3x, etc without doing any real work, you wouldn’t have fallen for the scam.

You weren’t content with a valuation of well over $500,000 USD? If you were staking (5% return), the ADA bag was bringing in $25,000+ per year while you did nothing—this was the free money all along.

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human nature likes to participate in activities that get you a reward - i agree with you 100% - greed took over me for a moment to make one of the if not the most stupid decision i have made in my entire life - aside from the fact of being ignorant of not sending coins with out an address - right now is $700,000 dollars because it went up - it hurts my stomach

Thanks for coming to the forum to talk about your loss. Hopefully it helps more people find out about the scams and avoid them. I’ll put in another vote - get the Class Action going against YouTube. They have done nothing to protect people from these fraudsters and they know about it and have the ability to stop it!

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Hi fernand69584745,

Just like you I lost 10,000 Ada, its not much compared to you. But the Bleh moment ruined my day and week. I can only feel sorry for you, especially when everyone on here has something to say. I could only wish that cardano could have a way of tracing these con artists especially with their wallets being in the public domain. I know I won’t get my ADA back, I reported both the youtube Video and the Website, which both were taken down. I will just say I hope more people get aware of these scams and stay away from these fake videos and websites. Again sorry for the loss, just be positive for your family.

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I’m currently working with Professor Nick Nikifarakis who is applying his research and existing tools into online scams and cybersecurity into the Cardano ecosystem.

His current Twitter Cardano Phishing Bot provides the results of discovered scams and takedowns that have been initiated. As a result, the bot has taken down over 200 scams successfully creating disruption to these scammers and hopefully protecting more people from being scammed.

He’s has submitted his Catalyst proposal on IdeaScale and would love to get feedback for what we’re planning on unleashing on these scammers.

This is the plan thus far:

  • Expand sources of suspicious domain names, past zone files, including the use of Certificate Transparency Logs and YouTube. We’ll need to build continuous integration pipelines to fetch daily lists of domain names, build YouTube bots capable of screen scraping and OCR-ing videos (in search of domains embedded in scam videos), and then dispatching armies of crawlers towards the identified destinations.

  • Work on anti-evasion mechanisms before they become an issue. We anticipate that scammers operating these scams will have every reason to evade our proposed bots (detect that we are visiting them and show us benign content). Our anti-evasion mechanisms will revolve around geographical diversity (so that a single IP address cannot be blocked), diversity of crawling software, and other anti-fingerprinting techniques that we will incorporate into our tools. The PI (Nick Nikiforakis) is an academic with 15 years of cybersecurity experience and has built a large number of bots for discovering online malicious content ranging from phishing pages to technical support scams.

  • Isolate intelligence content. Other than just reporting the discovered malicious websites, we will work on isolating parts of them, such as the advertised wallet addresses. We will make lists of malicious wallet addresses available to wallet software and online exchanges so that new users can be warned when they are about to send money to them, and given a chance to read more about giveaway scams. Similarly, we will create lists of malicious IP addresses and domain names that will be available to hosting providers, ISPs, registrars, and operators of blocklists such as OpenPhish, Phishtank, and Google Safe Browsing.

  • New dedicated UI and APIs. Next to our Twitter account, we will develop a modern web application where users will be able to retrieve lists of malicious URLs, IP addresses, and wallets. The site will also be the API endpoint for all the aforementioned intelligence that will be provided to interested stake holders. Co-PI Peter Bui is an experienced web developer and has connections with multiple wallet providers that we will use to advertise these APIs.

  • Popularization of our tool. The Co-PI of this proposal (Peter Bui) is an operator of a popular Australian Cardano Stake pool and the podcaster behind the “Learn Cardano” Podcast (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj-_2e7L2UgHaJLrGEOJRzA). We will use this podcast to not only keep warning new Cardano users (the ones who are the most likely to be attracted to a podcast about learning Cardano) about these scams but also use the reach of this podcast to connect with stakeholders in ISPs, hosting companies, registries, and web-security companies, who can all integrate with our APIs and protect their users.

  • Manual analysis and ML. A stretch goal for this project is the use of supervised machine learning for the final labelling of suspicious web pages. Once our database of known scams sufficiently expands (past say a thousand positive, i.e., scam, samples), we will experiment with supervised machine-learning techniques (such as a Random Forest) to automatically flag the high-confidence scams so that manual analysts can focus their labelling efforts on only a number fraction of suspicious domain names for which the classifier cannot produce a high-confidence label. We have experience using supervised ML for the detection of phishing pages, malware sandboxes, and tech-support scams.

We want to create a safe and scam-free environment for anyone embarking on a journey into crypto and especially Cardano.

Leave a comment, provide some feedback.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Automated-Phishing-Scam-Detection/367075-48088

At the moment, my team is building out the API and endpoints to get flagged wallet/addresses that have been detected from websites. We’re looking at breadcrumb trails and following the transactions. It’s all on-chain. We’re just connecting the dots. We should be able to see where scammed money is going.

The second part of the API is the flagged websites and domains.

Third-party developers will be able to access the API and alert users in their interfaces when a user is submitting a transaction to a potentially flagged address. A user on Yoroi, when submitting a send transaction will get an alert message letting them know that the address could be a negative address that has been used or is related to a scam.

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Amazing.

Was about time someone with technical expertise arrived carrying the banner of “this is what needs to be done, and we’re doing it”!

Along with that massive way of prevention/detection, do you already have in mind what to do with the info about the scammers that get away?

cheers

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Yes please shed some light - maybe there is hope for us who got scammed and hopefully this events are gone once in for all and if not at least people could recover their funds back if stolen

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Link seems to be down

I feel terrible for your losses. If you don’t mind sharing with us the name of the scammer that way we can banned him! Thanks

Hi all I too am in the same position from the same scam, I have only lost 2750 ADA but am still gutted and so pissed at myself and the people, if there is anything we can do as a team please let me know and I will get involved…

What we can do is address chasing and following the money. We should be able to work with various exchanges to stop the money from being converted on exchanges and even decentralised exchanges.

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There may be nothing we can do for scams that have already been and gone but we can help protect users from future scams.

Sorry. I must have copied the link incorrectly.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Automated-Phishing-Scam-Detection/367075-48088