Degen

Reflections 48 hours after getting phished and drained of 1 mil DEGEN. Sharing my cringey self own with the hope that this doesn’t happen to you. 

A thread 🧵

my projects are usually interactive. co-directed portugal the man's "feel it still"


Some context - I’ve been in crypto since 2017.  I have read countless stories of scams and posts about good wallet management. I typically have my important assets on a ledger, but lately I played it too loose and got burned.  

Here’s what happened…

Saturday night I put my two year old daughter to bed.  She fell asleep cuddling with me, and I fell asleep for a few minutes as well. When I woke up I checked my phone. I saw this email from Milk Road, a crypto newsletter, announcing an airdrop.

I clicked the link and went to this website.  Still half asleep, I connected my wallet to base using Metamask and signed a txn.

Moments later I saw two notifications from Zerion that made my heart sink.  “You sent 1m DEGEN to 0x…” “You sent 1.1 ETH to 0x…”

I rushed downstairs, logged on my computer, opened Rabby wallet which immediately notified me of a suspicious contract that should be revoked.  I revoked it and began to transfer my other coins on the hot wallet to my ledger.

I fell for a phishing scam. They took a million degen. I feel sick.

Later that night I posted this to Warpcast.  The response from the community was incredible and helped me feel less bad about my mistakes. So what were those mistakes exactly?

#1 - Leaving large assets on my hot wallet.  I know better.  I recently bridged the degen back from L3 to Base and just hadn’t gotten around to sending it to my ledger.  If you’re reading this, I recommend sending anything you don’t want to lose to a hardware wallet. Right now.

#2 - Doing crypto related activities while half asleep on my phone.  Don’t do this folks!  It can wait.

#3 - Clicking on an email about crypto.  There’s almost never a good reason to do this.

#4 - Signing a txn for an airdrop.  You typically don’t need to connect a wallet to check a wallet for an airdrop. I had a lapse in judgement and it cost me.

#5 - Using metamask.  I have several other wallet apps on my phone and they likely would’ve warned me about the suspicious txn.

Ultimately, it sucks but I’ll be ok.  It wasn’t the majority of my overall stack, I learned alot, and I still have some DEGEN in the vault.  

Thx to @0xen, @jacek, @downshift.ethft.eth, @kenny, @tombornal and the rest of you DEGENS. Hopefully you can learn from my errors. 

The hat stays on. 🎩

Later that night I posted this to Warpcast.  The response from the community was incredible and helped me feel less bad about my mistakes. So what were those mistakes exactly?

https://warpcast.com/elistonberg/0x1c1a8a70