So I got crypto-scammed today…

… and feel like a complete idiot, it’s easy to see after the fact how they got me.

Figured I should post here as a PSA, maybe there’s a chance to out the scammer to the public a bit, but also give you folks a chance to chuckle at my expense.

I don’t use twitter much, never was a fan of it, but recently RoaringKitty aka DeepFuckingValue of GameStop 2021 fame made some meme posts and the GME shares I was keeping as a souvenir from that event pumped in a big way. So I get on twitter to see what’s up, and did not realise this comment, underneath a real post on the same page, was an impersonator. The fine print account name being TheRoafingKitty rather than TheRoaringKitty:

https://twitter.com/TheRoafingKitty/status/1790150385979789373

So I joined the discord, where it said new users must be verified to access the main channels, and gave several methods to verify by connecting a crypto wallet, OK, that’s immediately a bit sus but not completely out of the ordinary for some financial channels, but hey I trust DFV, so it’s all good. Was given a QR code to attach a crypto wallet, scanning that QR code from within the wallet put my wallet software into a loop where it requested signature access with a warning, I say no, it request again, over and over, making the wallet software unusable, but at the same time I DO trust Roaring Kitty, and haven’t yet realised it was a fake post, so after clicking no about 20 times I finally click OK, and within a minute, the 0.99 ETH I had in that wallet was gone.

This is the first time I’ve ever fallen for any kind of scam, I’m usually extremely skeptical, but I guess I really just wanted it to be true, it wasn’t as though it were offering free coins or whatever, just access to a discord channel where fake DFV would be doing an AMA later.

I don’t hold any hope of getting the ETH back, and I’m assuming that I should make a new wallet and transfer everything out of the compromised one, even if they cant access the other coins, that ETH address is cooked, but I guess the real reason for posting this is that in all of this the thing I find most surprising is the absolute lack of support on either Twitter or Discord for dealing with this sort of thing.

Something like this should happen to one person, once, before the channel and twitter account is promptly shut down. Maybe I was that one person, but now after doing everything I could to contact and report the scammer on both platforms, the accounts are still active and I have got only automated responses, so I am not holding my breath. The Twitter account has been active since 2009, and the discord since Jan 2023.