It's a big moment in any trader/collectors life, the first time you realise you've been scammed.
I've been scammed maybe 3 times in the years i've been in crypto, it's still a new industry and although scams are still evolving the foundations remain the same, take advantage of people's greed.
I consider myself pretty good at recognising a scam or someone with dishonest intentions but eventually everyone falls victim. My first experience of online scams were with Neopets and Runescape, fortunately I was never scammed on these platforms but instead I was the scammer, I'll quickly explain what I used to do.
Neopets was simple, I used to play this back when AOL was king, I was at school and realised before most of the other kids that shared computers had real issues. The scam really was as simple as selecting a couple of computers I knew would be used and activating the remember password feature and autofill, kids would come in, log in and play for a bit then log out. I would have to hang around til they left and before anyone else could get on, the rest was easy, log in, take their valuable items, then put the settings back to normal so no one became suspicious. I pulled this off a lot, surprising considering how simple it was.
Runescape was classic, whether it was trimmed armour, swapping things at the last minute before accepting a trade so the other person didn't have time to realise or selling normal bones as big bones in note form, the possibilities were endless, until a few years later when they changed the whole trading set up and made it nearly impossible to do these scams.
Karma was always going to get me and it caught up with me in the summer of 2021, a friend of mine kept talking about high yield farms that he's making loads on, I told him to let me know the next time he gets a new one. The stage was set, he text me and said KENNY token, South Park finance. As a fan of South Park I thought I would invest, forget DD and DYOR I was ready to go.
I looked at the website and ignored the first warning sign, an APR of about 400,000%. I invested about $300 and watched for the next couple of days as it grew, this is actually when I first became suspicious, NOTHING is this easy. Pretty quickly the whole thing started slipping, the KENNY token lost about 30% over the first 4 days, by the first week I was down 90%, the telegram group was blowing up with people complaining, the Devs were doing the usual "Trust us", "Big announcement incoming" and other empty words.
By now I had accepted I had lost my money so I thought I would try and get some value out of the project by enjoying the telegram group, I don't think I got $300 worth of entertainment but there were some funny moments with the Devs and a highlight was when the website disappeared, people were going crazy! Some people were claiming to have lost thousands, I don't know if that was true but I couldn't believe people were so stupid as to go all in on something like this, the phrase "Only invest what you can afford to lose" is true, I was annoyed but people were claiming they lost rent/mortgage money!
I ended up trading in my $300 worth of KENNY in the end for about $1 worth of MATIC so it wasn't a complete loss but the experience and knowledge was worth the money I guess, I've avoided plenty of similar scams thanks to that. I'll write about the other 2 times i've been scammed in another post but there are 2 phrases which must be considered in the crypto/NFT space:
"If it looks too good to be true, it probably is"
and
"Never risk more than you can afford to lose"
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