Instead of fooling you with an Instagram influencer style blog showcasing the perfect life in NFTs I also like to share the bad times, not only because I find it funny but also it helps other people learn from my mistakes.
With that in mind I will tell you about ANOTHER time I got scammed.
I had been tracking a project called NiftyRiots for a while, I found them while scrolling through Rarity.Tools, I liked the style and the launch was weeks away. I joined their Discord, secured a whitelist position then sat back and waited for minting day.
Now I'm not going to pretend I was in love with the community or anything like that, I was there solely for the visuals and the profit, of course I checked the server frequently for updates but I wasn't heavily involved. By this time I was already in about 20 projects so it becomes hard work keeping up with all the latest developments.
This is where the fun started.
I received a direct message from a user called something like "NiftyRiots Official", we shared the NiftyRiots server so my first safety check had been ticked. On reflection this is an absolutely crap safety check to the point where it might as well not exist, it's like meeting someone that claims to be Cristiano Ronaldo and saying "Well it has to be him, he inhabits planet Earth just like me". Also, there is a reason why mods in servers will usually keep saying "WE WILL NOT DM YOU", I was just too stupid to listen.
Even writing about this now, how it all played out, I am sitting here shaking my head thinking how could I have possibly fallen for something so stupid. It's an entry level scam, probably the first scam they had set up and here I was falling for it.
As it was minting day I thought they were just trying to drum up some hype so I clicked on the link, checked the amount that had been minted then went back to Discord. Whenever I take part in a launch I never mint immediately, I like to see how the numbers move, I've been in drops before where I jumped in expecting a surge which never came. I usually enter when minting numbers hit 7000 or 8000.
I first became suspicious when I noticed a difference in the minting numbers being talked about on Discord and what the site was showing, I can't remember exact numbers but it was around 1000 out or something around that, I thought this was odd, I then went to OpenSea to check the numbers there. This is probably the point where I actually fell for the scam, the numbers on OpenSea were out by about 200, so I had 3 sets of numbers and didn't know who to believe, I decided that the "Official" site couldn't be wrong and it was the only one I could trust.
I went back to the "Official" site and credit where credit is due, it was a very good copy of the genuine site although I didn't check it over properly. Imagine my mindset, a project has just launched, the minting numbers are going up, I've got 3 different sets of numbers and don't know what to believe, I was thinking if I didn't mint now then I'll likely lose out so I did just that, I minted 1.
I went back to OpenSea to check my wallet....Nothing. I spent a couple of minutes refreshing waiting to see my new purchase, to my surprise a random NFT showed up called "Savan", some of you may have seen these already, i think they may have been removed from the platform now but last time I checked I think around 2.5k had been minted, around 200 ETH worth of scams based on the 0.08 I paid.
An Original Savan
As soon as I saw Savan sitting there I had that horrible feeling of knowing what had happened but I needed to confirm it. I went back to the link, checked it then did something I should have done in the first place, I went to the server and checked their official links, this was where I confirmed myself as a fool.
The official link was .com, my DM link was .io
Again, I had that feeling of knowing I had been scammed, what made it worse was now I couldn't actually buy one as I only had enough to take part in NiftyRiots and one more drop which was later in the day. So I missed out but the floor price is currently 0.01 so it would be easy to get one on secondary.
Thankfully my cautious approach to minting NFTs saved me bigger losses, I can imagine some people minted multiple and lost big money.
It's not all bad news though, a couple of weeks ago I received a DM from another "official" account claiming that whitelist was open now and to head to OpenSea as my piece had been reserved, my first thought was to check the URL and what did I find.... it was opensea.deals! Another scam website! Out of curiosity I opened up an old laptop and clicked the link, it was a near identical copy of the OpenSea layout, it wasn't quite identical, anyone that uses OpenSea frequently will have noticed something wasn't right but the scary thing was a MetaMask "pop-up" appeared in the corner prompting me to log in to my account, again it was worryingly accurate even the fox's head moved!
I've spoke about scams before but it is always worth mentioning that with better technology comes better scams. The fundamentals will always remain, prey on greed and inexperience, so as long as you don't get ahead of yourself and you ALWAYS check the URL you should prevent falling for some common scams.
Good luck ✌️
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