First of all. Cry.
LOL
I'm so not kidding. Just - cry.
It's ok. I will cry with you.
You will absolutely go through the 5 stages of grief in this process. Accept it, and find someone to go through it with you. Want a friend? Come find me. lol
Now - after you finally get to the point where you want to do something about it - I can tell you what I did. I'm not sure at all if it will help you recover your money back, but it may help YOU recover. And after all - THAT is what is most important, friend. That you find the way back to feeling like YOU again, a little wiser, a little safer, but YOU.
(note: its been 3 weeks now, and I really do not quite feel like me yet. Which is odd. Because everyone that knows me knows what I am like, and this... just ain't really it. But, day by day, getting there. It takes time, but I hope this post helps you!)
What I did first.
Well, for me, I was leading a community. And that community had a lot of controversy around it RIGHT at the time of my hack. (this will come up in another post, I'm sure, as it was very very suspicious timing) But for me - it was important that I share what happened WITH the community.
So, I immediately made a video, and shared THAT night. I was bawling my eyes out (and I'm not talking that pretty cry where Demi Moore has the beautiful single tear roll down her gorgeous cheek in Ghost. I'm talking snots flying, no makeup, UGLY CRY. lol) Do you need to put out a video of your blubbering self? Nope. But maybe document it somehow. For others, for you, for healing. Write it out. You're a blogger, right? Write it out. And you never know, you might see some things you didn't see before that help you later.
Next thing I did with a help of a friend?
Got turned onto bitquery - a really interesting site! Let me show you.
When I first looked at my wallet on etherscan, I saw the hacker's wallet that had stolen from me. I clicked onto HIS(or her!) wallet and this is what I saw.
See my 6 sweet little ETH there? sending you love my darling ETH, come home to me please!
Now you can see there, it seems that 6 other tragic souls were hacked at the same exact time as me. Then if you continue to follow, you can see that our ETH is combined and then sent back out in different amounts to different wallets.
If you click on EACH of those wallets - it opens to a NEW etherscan, and then... it only takes about 39 seconds and 17 open tabs for you to forget which trail you were following, whose wallet belongs to whom, and which direction you're supposed to be moving in.
Which is why I introduced you to your new best friend:
bitquery.
Take a look at how much nicer this looks when you see a visual representation of what happened in that same time frame.
Yep - there I am - the orange arrow! Me and my 6.18 ETH, as the hacker slipped into my wallet, and transferred to him(her)self. When you first load the transaction into bitquery, it doesn't know how you'd like each wallet to appear, so it just has them floating in a blob. You click on each wallet, and drag them to where you'd like. I have all of the victims on the left side, and all of the wallets where the stole crypto - is going to on the right.
I have RECENTLY (like 3 days ago??) FINALLY been approved for a binance.us account. See how the hacker took 13.0960 ETH from a Binance account? Now that I have my Binance account, I'll be able to contact them (I couldn't before) and ask them if its JUST that simple as saying ummmm.... the hacker who stole from me, ALSO transferred money FROM a Binance account TO the original wallet that stole.
Could it really be that simple? Are thieves really that stupid? Sometimes... they are. I will let you know if anything comes of THAT in follow up posts - but let's continue with this demo of bitquery!
As you can see from the pic above - I have it set to 1 outbound transaction. Let's set it to 2 outbound transactions and see what happens!
Interesting, no? You can see in the following pics, I'm not going to keep separating the wallets on the "inbound" side vs "outbound" side. Just take a look at the arrows and you'll see what the hacker was doing. He/she is circled in the center. Of the two wallets he (not gonna keep saying he/she - let's just assume he for now) sent out to two wallets that ended up converging back to one. It seems HIGHLY likely that he sent that back to himself and just make it look more confusing.
Let's go to 3 outbounds now.
Even more interesting right? He ended up coming BACK to the original HACKER wallet, and then look at the left there. He sent to another "hub" that transferred out to more wallets.
Will they eventually come back to him again? Let's take it out to 4 outbounds.
It's getting more complex, more intricate, we're seeing some more "hubs" and points where things are circling back. Can you see why this visual network is SO much easier than trying to do this with tabs and trying to keep random wallet addresses in your head? That would be near impossible. But this? A really nice little tool for trying to keep it all connected, and UNTANGLE what hackers intentionally TRY to tangle in order to confuse!
Wanna see 5 outbounds?
Ok - look at that.
Remember the Binance wallet that FIRST went into the original hacker wallet?
He sends back out, through multiple wallets - and then ends up BACK to that same Binance account.
It's a complete circle, and it's evidence. (evidence for what? That will be for the next post!)
One of the worst feelings that you experience from being hacked -is feeling completely powerless and having NO control over what just happened. THIS lets you be on the offensive and regain power and control and hopefully, if the exchanges will use KYC. Binance.us DOES (as it took me almost 5 weeks to become verified. And let me tell you, I practically had to send blood samples to get verified. It was ridiculous.) But Binance (as far as I know) does not. Does that mean that nothing can be done? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps, they can freeze that account and not allow money to be transferred? I don't know, but - I'll be trying!
Last outbound. Take a look at what the max 18 outbounds looks like.
Here is the saddest part of this image.
It all converges. This guy/gal is stealing from so many people, and then sending the money through various wallets to end up in an account holding massive amounts of crypto that belonged to other people. One wallet that I saw had over 600k USD. Another had over 1 million USD. Then I got sick and just stopped looking.
Think about that?
After the hack, some very kind person was trying to console me and said, "I know it's hard, but maybe the person who hacked you needed the money?" (I am not angry that they said this - I know that people try to find meaning in the meaningless and try to open up perspective. I do try also... but)
- Even if that is so, there is no justification for theft.
- No one needs to steal my 6 ETH to add to their millions because they are in need. That is greed, and evil.
The next steps that I took will be coming up in a post soon. If you're reading this because you got hacked... ask for my ugly cry video LOL I'll drop it in the comment section! I guarantee you - we will be crying together, and I'm so sorry that you were victimized. You can chalk it up to "lesson learned" if you want, and just let it go. But if you're feeling like you want to get a bit more pro-active, I'm happy to help you in any way that I can!
This is the end of this post, but if you want to dig deeper into the "coincidences" with me? Feel free to continue further below.
NOTE: All of this was originally documented real-time on the Uptrennd platform. Part of the suspicious activity that surrounded my hack was:
- Everyone knew I was an Uptrennd whale
- Everyone knew that I held, helllld, hellllllllld!
- It was rumored that a "deal" was coming where Uptrennd was about to be sold (very much like the Steemit/ Ned/ Justin Sun saga)
- 18 hours before the announcement came that we WERE sold to Trodl.com, my wallet was hacked. Had it been hacked the next day - the 1up would have been almost worthless. So... interesting, no?
Most of the community mourned with me, because they knew how loyal I was, how generous I was with my 1up, and how strongly I believed in Uptrennd (even when things looked grim) but a few people accused me of staging my own hack. Can't lie - that really pissed me off, and I responded. (can see it below)
If you'd like to see any of the real-time blogs from when it happened, here they are. (My name is/was Tiger Lily on Uptrennd) These post links had to be archived, since Uptrennd will go offline on May 31 - and we will lose all our blog posts.