HOW I GOT SCAMMED – A $3,000 ICO LESSON

LITTLE INTRO

I consider myself quite tech savvy and relatively smart when it comes to all sort of Internet scams. I worked in the most spammy online industries ever – I’ve seen it all.
Honestly, I have been fiddling with all sort of online stuff for over 20 years, and I never got scammed before. It feels shit! It’s not just the money I lost, but this annoying feeling of being an idiot who falls for one of the oldest tricks in the book… but let me start from the beginning.

The Story

I was looking for and ICO to jump on. Something with a massive potential, with backing from trusted institutions, existing product, etc. I wanted to be one of the first and get presale bonus – not like always, learn about something after it already sold out.
After digging through thousands of pages (by thousands I mean just a couple that lists all upcoming ICOs) I decided to go after Hero Token.

The project is backed by Alibaba (!!!), SoftBank and a couple of others big players.
Initial coin offering is capped at 50,000,000 Hero Tokens (250,000 ETH) => 1 Hero Token = 0.005ETH.
I won’t go into details on what this project is about, if you want to know more go to their website (https://herotoken.io) and read the whitepaper.

It was scheduled first to start on 1st of September 2017, but the date got cancelled. I followed the instructions and signed up to their Slack channel, asked to be whitelisted and have 10ETH worth of Hero Token reserved.The support informed me they don’t know new date yet and will announce on Slack when it starts – all good so far;)
I was eager to buy it and to buy it quickly as there is a 30% bonus for first 3hours of the pre-sale. On top of everything, I’m flying to Munich in next couple of days to attend SEOktoberfest (I will share more about this event in a separate post), and I know I won’t have time to pay attention to Slack messages.
You may understand how excited I got when I got an email notification about Slack message announcing that pre-sale just started.

YES, I’M AN IDIOT!

As you can probably guess – I clicked the link, filled the form and sent my 10ETH to a given address. I was happy to get my Hero Token on time and went to Slack channel to check when tokens are going to be released. The second support got back to me with copy/paste “We will announce the date…” I knew what happened – I got scammed like a baby.
Usually, I always check things, I don’t click on email links but go directly to the website, verify online accounts are from people they claim they are. Even their Slack bot sends a warning about this type of scams every couple of minutes. I let FOMO get to me and dropped my guard.
In the crypto world falling for something like this is equal to sending your banking details to a Nigerian prince who happens to have a hard time carrying his fortune out of the country 😉

After I cooled down, I could almost appreciate how well timed and executed this was. It sucks, and it’s embarrassing, but it’s a lesson I’m not going to forget.

Remember boys and girls: never sacrifice your security habits for a quick win!