My Wallet Got Hacked Through A Mine Pool
This is a story about a time I tried to create a passive income and It didn't end so well.
It was around October 2021, right before the huge Crypto bullrun we had, I was swing trading shit-coins and making good bucks from them every 3-4 days. Once I finally had a good $15,000USD in $ETH on the side I decided to do some research on how to earn passive income in $ETH.
I started swing trading in around mid September, threw in a few hundred bucks and flipped good profits at the time, most of my profits would go into SaitamaInu (Saitama) and I would keep a few hundred for new tokens that would come up on the blockchain, Within 4-5 years I had over $15,000 in tokens, mind you one of the tokens I was swing trading hit around $8000usd alone in a matter of 4 days, this is when I had the bright idea to go on auto-pilot.
I was working night-shifts part-time at Australia Post, so I was ecstatic about the profits I was generating on the side while I was working for $3.2kaud a month, so one morning when I went back home, instead of pulling out some of the $15,000usd into my bank to have extra cash on the side to help me with food or bills or even a little comfy, I went all in.
I found a Stake Pool website for $ETH, I checked every page on the website, googled it, checked to see how many people are in the mine-pools and what the ROI is, I connected my wallet to the website and sent $200 in $ETH.
Now I only sent $200 ETH out of the $15,000 and this was for a test-run. The mistake I did was not sending $200 Eth to another wallet.
I remember that day clearly, I went to bed right after I set everything up, before doing so, I disconnected and cleared my history and all that other good stuff, in 4 hours when I woke up around 11am-12pm to do some more twittering and networking with the community before I got ready for work I decided to check my passive income in "Eth" before anything else. I couldn't believe my eye's, I refreshed the screen about 15 times, reconnected the WIFI, restarted my laptop - HAHA!
I checked Etherscan and kept refreshing, whilst doing all of this I was laughing to myself saying "This is a glitch" Etherscan made me believe it wasn't a glitch and not only was my $200 gone... the hackers sold all the tokens in my wallet that had value, the token being at $8000, a few others that were 1-3k each. I couldn't believe what I did.
That's when I got into a routine or habit of creating separate wallets for different things on the blockchain, NFTs, Different Tokens, Connecting to certain sites (OpenSea, Projects website etc.) it was a hard lesson and it costed me 2 months of my time growing my $50-$250 bag to $15,000.
If I did do anything smart at the time, my main bag which was "Saitama" at the time was in a separate wallet, the wallet that had $15,000 was my "Trade Wallet" or a wallet I used for trading, I was too lazy to create a 3rd wallet to send profits to and as we all know, lazy pays a price too.
This was the first time I got scammed in crypto and I have never thought about joining a mine-pool ever since.
I still can't believe what I fell for back then, I mean, even though I was willing to throw $200 out the window I don't know why I didn't think of creating a 3rd wallet to send to the mine pool, at least I would've still had my other tokens that I was planning to take profits from whether this worked or not.
We all learn through experiences and I'm glad that incident didn't push me away from web3.
