ripped off

this is not about steemit but the warning is clear whatever the coin. i put this on a couple sites.

i was recently relieved of 9000 lumens after signing up to a fake stellar wallet at stellar-address.org. this is a complete sham site set up to emulate a valid site. everything is seemingly above board... initially. after sign up you get an email to click and activate your account. when you go to the site you can certainly sign in but that’s where it goes bad. every single user who is caught in this scam is given this address upon first sign in GDZCEWJ5TVXUTFH6V5CVDQDE43KRXYUFRHKI7X64EWMVOVYYZJFWIFQ2 as their public key to deposit to their wallet. of course i soon realised something was amiss. there were no lumens showing after several days.

i started to investigate. eventually i asked jed mcaleb to look into it and it of course ended up be “sorry, but there’s nothing we can do” i certainly wasn’t going to accept the loss of my lumens so easily. as in my profile i am a farmer and money is earned hard. i started tracking the crooks and found many instances of people under many nicks, getting lumens sent to GDZCEWJ5TVXUTFH6V5CVDQDE43KRXYUFRHKI7X64EWMVOVYYZJFWIFQ2 this is a big operation!

do a search of the deposit key and you’ll see what i mean. lots of identities at mystellar.org and stellarcommunity.org using that as their deposit key. i have exposed a dozen or so in the last couple of days. after such a poor and unsupportive laisser-faire response from stellar.org i kept looking, looking, looking. picking up clues here and there until i found something. it was just four little letters that i didn’t even notice at first and then it hit me. i’d seen it so often it stuck. JSON
on a hunch i put JSON and GDZCEWJ5TVXUTFH6V5CVDQDE43KRXYUFRHKI7X64EWMVOVYYZJFWIFQ2 in a search together and bingo! a git hub address. have a look here first to get an idea https://steexp.com/account/GDZCEWJ5TVXUTFH6V5CVDQDE43KRXYUFRHKI7X64EWMVOVYYZJFWIFQ2 of the wide net this gang throws.

this is the jaw dropper. the google search led me to this file at git hub. https://github.com/irisli/stellarterm/blob/master/directory/directory.json it is the script for stellarterm in a directory of a stellar developer. have a look at line #307 WHAT! it is the same deposit address of the scam gentoo-address.org deposit in the script.

i am disappointed that i had to discover this with no help from stellar.org piss poor support who preach acceptance of your loss instead of justice! there are a lot of people who are gunna be angry to learn that this scam was inadvertently facilitated by stellars very own files. this file leads unsuspecting rubes (like me) to sham stellar-address.org. what a breach! i think i have every right to expect my lumens back. the breach was theirs not mine but i lost. if you’ve been ripped off by this mob this will give you some leverage. finally you’ll know what happened! i have a copy of the file should anybody want it. bb