#CRYPTO #CRYPTOCURRENCY #SCAM #STELLAR #XLM #STAKING #MONEY #LIFE
They tell you it happens to everyone.
Sure, I've made some bonehead investments... Steem, Reddcoin & Smart Coin come to mind. I've even made some dumb crypto purchases like my 0.25BTC bedsheets I bought back in 2014 on Overstock. I was cash poor, so it made sense at the time. All those stung pretty bad... but I've moved on. And I never got scammed like so many of my friends, until now. It really can happen to anyone.
Staking my crypto has been a great passive income since I've put most of my coins on ice since the 2017 bear market. I've kept buying, kept holding and staked where possible. It's a solid strategy I highly recommend. Just make sure you know which coins you can stake and which coins you can't. That would have made a huge difference when I received an email from "Stellar" promoting their NEW staking. I could earn 25% and they were only accepting 5000 accounts. Anyone who's been involved with the Stellar Lumens project knows they don't stake, but that logic was overridden by greed and the sheer elegance (and brilliance) of the scam.
It all started with an email.
I should have checked the "from" address, but everything seemed so legit.
It brought you to a Blog post on an exact replica of the Stellar website except for the slightest domain change at the end... you see the "lc"? I didn't.
All the links worked and brought you to the different pages of the site. Within the body copy, there was a link to the 'Account Viewer' and again, was an exact replica.
Here, you connected to your Ledger Wallet. This put my guard down and this is where the psychological aspects of the scam was so thought-out. They were only offering 5000 accounts the opportunity to stake their coins and used a counter to reduce the available slots by the second. Before you knew it, the counter had reduced to under 4000 available slots. I knew if I wanted in, I had to act fast.
I transfered almost all of my XLM from my Coinbase account to my Ledger and then gave the “Account Viewer” access to view my public address. I tried staking at 3000 - nope. 4000 - nope. Finally, I ponied up over 5500+ coins and met the minimum staking amount of 5000 XLM. I could now earn close to 600 XLM for staking my position. I was thrilled.
It instructed me to transfer the amount to a certain address and confirm through my Ledger. Before I knew it, there were less than 600 staking positions left and I started to panic. I didn’t even read the warning signs, the Ledger certification steps or allow the voice in my head any volume or influence. All I knew was I had to beat that counter.
