In a taxi from Johannesburg to Midrand where I lived, excited about my friend showing up to visit me from Nigeria because I knew he would bring a lot of Nigerian food stuffs that we weren’t privy to in South Africa and I also missed seeing a close pal.
Approaching my bus top, I signalled my driver and shouted short left ( which was a way to signal that u wanted to drop off at the next stop). Got off and made a quick stop at the tarvan close to my apartment complex to get some liquor, after all the weekend had started.
Got home and within the hour my pal was already here, we exchanged pleasantries and discussed everything we could talk talk about in a bid to catch up on gist.
My first Cryto kiss
We were in the summer of 2012 when my pal visited, and while we were having drinks he made mention of a new avenue to make money and he called it “Crytocurrency” in particular “Bitcoin”. I said tell me more and he opened his account at the time and all I saw was about $1500. He said he had opened one for me as well with $350 in it and he gave me the access to it. I was so ignorant at the time and I asked him why didn’t u just give me the damn money, instead of converting to some coin I had no use for, and he smiled.
I would login every other day and look at the money I had no idea how to use or what to do with,and I would log out until I eventually abandoned it and forgot about the account.
My Ignorance pays off
Late winter of 2015, I remember my Cryto account and decided to login and boom to my amazement, the money had grown.( Don’t ask me how much I made but I became a baller going into springs).😁😁
Cryto suddenly made sense to me and I began to research and learn more while enjoying the benefits of my profits.
Let’s go phishing
Fast forward to 2017 , I fell victim of what is called a phishing scam, which lead me to doing my research on phishing scams and how to protect yourself from them. Let’s talk about the phishing scam a bit.
There are about 6 common phishing attacks but I will talk about the deceptive phishing which was what I experienced.
Deceptive phishing is the most common type of phishing scam. Scammers impersonate a legitimate company to steal personal data or login credentials.
Redirect and shortened links was used in deceiving me to losing my login information to the phishing scammers. They shortened the URL and used what is called “time bombing” to fool me to a phishing landing page, after my credentials have been stolen the same page now redirects u to the legitimate web page. Well guess what? My Cryto was gone before I could say “Jack Robinson”..
How do you protect yourself? Always inspect the URL’s and make sure it doesn’t redirect you to an unknown/suspicious website, also look out for generic salutations, grammar mistakes, and spelling errors.
Everyone falls but the great ones rise back up.
I didn’t lose a lot after the phishing scam but I lost something and I rose up and went back in the Cryto world and ever since I have been thriving and learning new stuffs.
I benefited in the raise and currently and during the pandemic period and what more can I say? Short-left...😁😁😁