Ok, this post has nothing to do with my usual topics, but this is an important advice I feel I should give to the community.

If you know Coinpot.co, you probably know how it works: you claim different cryptocurrencies from its faucets, and for each claim you got 3 CoinPot Tokens, their proprietary... well, token.

Now you know you can do different things with these tokens, like converting them in cryptocurrency, playing a lottery game or the well known multiplier game. This game used to be a reliable source of semi-passive income, since once you reached a certain amount of daily/monthly multiplier roll, you win tokens, allowing you to invest for example 300 tokens and, at the end of the day, managing to gather around 2500 of them.

With this method, you used to be able to make something around $0.50 PER DAY. Which is not bad, if you wanted to dip your toes in the world of cryptocurrencies.

Now this is where it gets complicated.

3 weeks ago the site was targeted by a ransomware attack. The site went down for a while, then came back after some time with this statement:

What happened to Moon Bitcoin/Dogecoin/Litecoin faucets?

On Monday 1st June 2020 we sustained a targetted and comprehensive attack on our servers that are used to host CoinPot and our faucets.

This attack was in two parts...

1. Most of our servers became infected with the Makop ransomware.

2. At the same time there was a low level DDOS attack preventing us from accessing the servers.

These attacks meant that CoinPot and the faucets went offline immediately and stayed that way until we started to find ways to fix the problems. Predictably the ransomware attack was accompanied by demands for an amount totalling over $200k USD to decrypt and release the infected files.

This amount is far beyond anything we can afford to pay. Even if we were able to pay, there is no 100% guarantee that we will get the files decrypted and it would most likely encourage future attempted attacks. Therefore we decided not to go down that road and refused to engage with the attackers.

We have a strong (or so we thought) backup process. So we now took the steps to start restoring the sites on new clean servers. 24 hours of hard work later...CoinPot and most of our faucets were back on line exactly as before.

However our 3 oldest faucets were running on legacy software/hardware that hadn't been updated for too long a time. Unfortunately we now discovered that some of the backups for these sites also contained data corrupted by the Makop ransomware.

Since then we have been trying to fix this and recover this corrupted data - but now we must accept that we have hit a brick wall. The data is lost.

What does this mean for my CoinPot/Faucet account?

Well first the good news...

All funds/balances are 100% safe and secure in CoinPot - nobody will have lost even a single satoshi due to this attack. As mentioned above, CoinPot and most of the faucets were back online quickly and are running fine.

And the bad news...

The lost data for Moon Bitcoin/Dogecoin/Litecoin contains account referral information. That means that we no longer have records of how many referrals you may have had. Sadly we are now sure that there is absolutely no way to recover or reconstruct this data. We understand that this will be a great dissapointment to some of our fantastic referrers.

So we have had to make a hard decision about how to proceed...

What happens next for Moon Bitcoin/Dogecoin/Litecoin?

One option that we discussed was to abandon these faucets completely - sadly this happens all too regularly in the faucet world and leaves users frustrated and disillusioned. We are extremely proud of what these sites have achieved over the last 5 years, introducing many thousands of people to their first cryptocurrency for free.

Therefore we have decided to rebuild these 3 faucets in the same style of our other more modern faucets (Moon Dash and Moon Cash) and all 3 will be relaunched within the next 48 hours. This should make them more secure and reliable in the future.

When you next visit each faucet you will be able to sign in as usual with your CoinPot-registered email and use the faucet as before. The one thing missing will be any old referrals that you had before.

However for this relaunch we will make the following initial benefits available to ALL users (new or old)...

1) All Loyalty Bonuses will be initially set to 100%, no matter what you may have had before. Of course you will need to use the faucets each day to retain this bonus as per the previous rules.

2) The Mystery Bonus will be fixed at 100% for the first 7 days before returning to being a mystery % again!

We thank you for reading this and for all your support in the past and future!

The CoinPot team

You'll say "All good, they fixed the issue".

I'll say "Yes, but actually no".

Believe it or not, since they came back online, playing their "provably fair" multiplier game always results in the fast and total loss of all your Tokens.

Until the attack, I used to gather 300 tokens, start a 100k rolls game and leave it for around ten hours, only to come back to collect my 2500(ish) tokens, and eventually convert them in LTC.

Now, in the post-attack era, even if you put 1500 tokens, you'll lose them in a matter of a couple of hours.

Something changed, there's no doubt about it.

And this is scammy as hell.

Are they recovering for the money loss on the backs of their users?

Did they pay the ransom and now they're trying to get the money back?

Whatever you think, here's my advice:

STOP PLAYING THE MULTIPLIER GAME ON COINPOT.CO RIGHT NOW!

Call me an idiot, a paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, but let me know in the comments if you feel the same about the current state of Coinpot.co.

I'm not leaving referral links on purpose, I don't want other people get scammed because of me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this rant, I'm going back to my usual topics.