The world of Crypto is plagued by scammers, and recently I was targeted. I think it's everyone's nightmare to one day login to your crypto account and discover with horror that all your crypto has been stolen. So anyway, here's what happened to me.

I was relaxing at home enjoying my time off after finishing work that day, I received a text message and looked at it. My heart jumped after I had read the short text, it was a text from Coinbase stating that a withdrawal for $5000 of Bitcoin had been started from my Coinbase account. Here is a screenshot of the text I received.

Naturally the next thing I did was to check my email and to my great dismay I had received an email from Coinbase stating that I was on the phone with a Coinbase representative. Here is a screenshot of the email I received.

My heartrate had definitely accelerated, and I quickly tried to login to my Coinbase account, I felt relieved to see that my funds were still there, to be sure I quickly changed my password. No sooner had I began the password change when my phone started ringing with a local number. I quickly answered the phone and was greeted by a man who spoke perfect American English. He assured me he was from Coinbase support and was aware of the situation and was there to help me. He asked me for the email address for the Coinbase account associated with the number he was calling me on.

I have always been very careful with my Crypto security, I have 2FA, allowable addresses and I regularly change my passwords which are all unique to every account. I knew that Coinbase support doesn't ever call you, I never had $5000 in Bitcoin in my account, and I've never had a text like that when doing a transfer. I was now fully aware that this was a professional phishing attempt. I promptly told the guy on the phone to go pleasure himself in a harsh tone and hung up. I finished changing my password and contacted the real Coinbase support to fill them in on what had happened, they assured me my account was fine and that it was indeed a phishing attempt. 

I've been involved with crypto for a long time and I can easily see how a less experienced person could easily fall for this as the guy on the phone was so convincing. Please be vigilant people and don't let these scammers get anything from you.