First and foremost I'm going to list the 3 major points to minimize being scammed.
I don't mind if people don't read this entire article, I just don't want scammers to win.

For anyone who doesn't want to be scammed please take this advice. 

1. No matter how 'urgent' someone says it is to give your personal information out, take the extra 30mins/1hour to thoroughly check if you should. Ask people on Twitter, Telegram, Facebook and any other any social media that developers of the token in question have, and thoroughly go through the information. It is ALWAYS worth taking as much time as you need to figure it out. One hour of research is worth the possible thousands you stand to lose. In most cases people in the space will be able to provide good information to help you, I've found the official Telegram groups have lot's of users who are quite helpful and generally there will be an announcement channel for the crypto in question.

2. Never...NEVER, give out your seed phrase (explained in the story below) for any wallet. This compromises your account completely and with an algorithmic password hacker program, people will be able to access your account, such as they did with mine even without a password. I suspect that all they needed was my name and email along with the seed phrase to do this. So never give this detail out.

3. If someone is claiming to be a helpdesk or support for a company, ask them for an official statement or link that can confirm the details you are supposed to give. In my case, as soon as I asked them to supply me a page where it states I needed to give out the information they were asking for, they immediately asked me another question to try to steer me away from what I asked. Although at this stage it was already too late, I knew it was a fake when they did this. Even when I asked the second time and they supplied a link for me, it looked like a beginner's page, had no references to developers or people who were involved with the helpline and had no other credible links to the main website. Double check that they will or will not contact you directly via email or Twitter or Telegram. This seems like something you would do anyway but always double check if you are not sure.

These are the 3 big points. Don't take them with a grain of salt because as you'll read, I thought I was scam proof being that I have been in this space for a while and am very careful with contacting certain groups. 

For those who want to read how I lost half my Metamask balance, over $4000, read on...if you don't, no probs! Just take those 3 points seriously if you trade Crypto. 

My first scam:

Today I was scammed for almost $4500. It was actually a pretty dumb move on my behalf, however, I am far from one of the few that have been scammed now and they are getting quite elaborate with how they go about these hacks.

I am a very skeptical person, inside and outside of investments. I am a pretty keen conspiracy theorist though and although some people might
say 'If you're so skeptical then why are you a believer of conspiracy theories??' Well my friends, it is exactly because I am skeptical that I believe that certain things the world forces upon us, such as the current ridiculous pandemic, just don't add up. But that is another story for another time...so watch out for that one.

Anyway, a few months ago I invested into a company called Bidao, a legit blockchain company who are making waves in the economy scoring massive partnerships with the likes of HP, Travala, Oppo and Chainlink - the same Chainlink that had one of the most parabolic ascensions in price this year so far - among many other blockchain and tech companies.
I was an early investor with Bidao and being so gave me 30% apr of interest with staking my pre release tokens. I think that because Bidao is actually becoming such a strong force within the Crypto community, youtubers such as DIY Investing and Chico Crypto repping them on more than one occasion, there were bound to be imitators and scammers to try to steal people's gains. Even knowing this and having never been scammed before and also being as skeptical as I am, I assumed that I was doing everything fine.

It's been a pretty damn good 3 months in the crypto space for me and maybe I was getting a little bit head-strung...but that all changed today.

I was contacted by a telegram group claiming to be the Bidao Helpdesk channel and as they were calling me I thought it must be about the transfer which I was looking to have sorted out.To remove the tokens I had bought from the platform and send them to my wallet, I needed to supply my ETH address for them. Nothing out of the normal there as I was expecting that to happen one of these weeks, but little did I know that in the real telegram group which I hadn't checked in on in a while, they had pinned a message stating that they would never directly contact or PM anyone via Telegram....this I found out right in the heat of the moment. But I digress...

So here I am having a Telegram phone call, the first one ever, and an 'associate' advising me that I needed to check the private chats for a link to connect to admin chat channel to provide the details and begin the transfer. Again, nothing really out of the ordinary or suspicious.

As I was talking and chatting to this 'admin' he linked me to a form to enter my name and phone number and confirm my wallet address. The only
strange thing about this process was that even before I had gone through the form, the operator asked if I was still there and if I had filled it out yet, giving me a sense of urgency. Being that these tokens had already gone out to some people I knew, I felt like I was late in attaining them, so I figured that him rushing me a little was just because this may have been something I was unaware of and that actually needed somewhat urgent attention.

After this confirmation that I had indeed supplied the info and clicked submit, he said I needed to fill out the second piece of the form to clarify the account was mine and not someone else's. He noted that I needed to confirm my Seed Phrase - a seed phrase is something you acquire when you make an account in Metamask or Brave Wallet which you need to log back in, say if you were to format your computer.

You should never....NEVER, never give out your seed phrase. Did I stress never enough?
NEVER GIVE OUT YOUR SEED PHRASE...just if I wasn't making myself clear enough.

When he said this to me, my brain immediately kicked in to skeptical mode. I even told him...

'Why would I need to supply you that information? If you have my seedphrase and email you're only one step away from accessing my Metamask account'.

He assured me that the form was 100% anonymous and no one can actually read it being that it was an automated support form. My skeptical brain was firing hard at this point but the sense of urgency was also high and I was scared into thinking that I may lose out on my $750 worth of BID tokens.
After some more back and forth about the level of anonymity and against all the force in my body telling me DO NOT COPY AND PASTE YOUR SEED PHRASE.....I did exactly that. I supplied him with my Metamask seed phrase. I told him I had finished the form and that I would wait patiently while the BID tokens were populated to my account. At the same time, I kept going back and forth to the wallet to see if the tokens had arrived. After about a minute without them appearing I told him that they weren't there yet to which he replied.

'In order to receive the tokens you must supply your wallet with 4 ETH as there network fee needed to come out to process the transaction'.

Now if you have used ETH and transacted with it on Uniswap lately you would know that the gas fees are substantially high, as high as $200 to do a full approval, swap and stake in some cases in September when we were going through a massive pump. So it wasn't out of the ordinary he was asking me to supply ETH to my wallet to process the fee...but 4 ETH was unheard of to process anything. This was the first time I really began to question if I had screwed up big time.

I was super defensive at this point.

'Why do I need to have 4 ETH in my wallet to process a transaction when it would only cost $15-20 max?'
'Oh it's just so we can make sure that, in case the gas fee's are higher then usual, the transfer will actually take place' (Because sometimes transactions actually fail with a smaller gas setting)
'Ok, but I don't even have 4 ETH to put in my wallet'
'Sorry sir but you need to have a minimum of 4 ETH in your wallet for the token transfer to take place' (Note they were saying sir at the end of every sentence, really giving me the feel that they were being professional)
'Excuse me but no where in Bidao announcement's, Telegram or Twitter page has anything mentioned about requiring 4 ETH to make this transfer'

This is where my alarm bells were really firing and I started to check my account. Something seemed a miss. Some tokens I had bought weren't showing up anymore. It's not that they were showing 0...they were just gone.
I entered full freak out mode when I noticed my USDT holdings of around $700 were gone and at that point I started moving all my remaining Crypto to my second Metamask account. I didn't even bother going back to the chat as I was trying to quickly get all my tokens moved to minimize the heist of my hard earned Crypto.

I alerted my Twitter and Telegram pages that there were Bidao impersonators and they were using really good tactics to steal your identification. As in the Crypto space, everyone is keen to help out for some amazing reason. In the real world I've found not many people like talking about their financial life but Crypto, everyone is keen to help each other get wealthy. 

In total I lost about $4500 worth of USDT, Falconswap, Trustswap, YFFS and UNI, before I had moved the remaining tokens over. In the heat of the moment I didn't even save any screenshots to be able to post to warn people, but, there are some very legitimate scammers coming out these days
who are quite professional and know how to get your money/Crypto by using tactics to make you question yourself and give you that sense of urgency.
So I emplore you, do not make the same drastic mistakes I did. Do not EVER give out your seed phrase, other details are minor but that is like your bank code for your credit card. 

I saw In the announcements page for Bidao on Telegram, they had a pinned messaged to inform everyone about the token swap event and that they would never directly message you on that platform. Twitter and email perhaps but never Telegram.  Shame I saw this too late. But anyway, lesson learned.

The value of the assets totalling $4.5k didn't annoy me, but the value of the Crypto I now do not have is excruciating. 
To gain back the value I just lost may take a lot longer than just buying say, $4500 worth of Crypto because everything is in appreciation mode now.
So that loss may equal greater than $4500 in the not so distant future.

Either way, hard lesson learned and I hope that you take some use from this article. I would love to help people not be scammed out of their hard earned Crypto gains.

Peace!