How they tried to steal my bitcoins

source: https://dcxlearn.com/blockchain/what-is-lightning-network/A few weeks ago I was a victim of a scam. Everything started after I upgrade my Android to the last OS version.

I’m a bitcoin fan and, despite that I don’t know many things, I try to learn everyday more and more. I’ve always been a curious person so more that a year ago I heard about the lightning network. By that time it looked pretty cool to me so I deposit 100,000 satoshis or sat, which by that time it was around 50 EURs.

I installed a Lightning wallet in my cellphone and then I realize, there was no way for me to buy anywhere near a coffee with this crypto currency. I spent 10 EUR in a amazon gift voucher with Bitrefill, but apart from that, I left the satoshis there.

Last week, I upgrade my Android and the camera of the Lightning Wallet stoped working. So I contact support by the Telegram channel. There was one admin really nice that tried to help me, but after several messages, he told me it was not a problem of the app, but the libraries of the camera. He recommended me to close my channels and try it with another wallet.

For those of you that don’t know what is a channel, you have come to the wrong place, because I still don’t know exactly how it works. What I think, and I’d recommend comments on the post to correct me, is that, when you open a channel, is like opening a pipe with water inside. So now, imagine that your currency ( satoshis, dollars, euros or whatever) is water. So I instead of having 100,000 sats, so I’d have 100,000 liters of water.

The problem with this, is that the pipes have a size. In this case, this pipe is 100,000 leters, so I can’t receive more liters. If I want to receive more satoshis/liters, I need to open a new pipe/channel. Or, another posibility, is to empty my channel, or in other words, spending it with something.

This channels are not meant to be open for years like I did. Is a way of not doing transactions in the Bictoin network because the bitcoin transaction fee is expensive, so instead of that you open like an open bill in a bar, the waiter write down all the beers you drink, and when you leave the bar, you pay all the beers at once, instead of doing an invoice for each beer that you drank.

Open and close a channel comes with a price, but they say is worthy to open a channel, pay micropayments with lightning, and close the channel, rather than do all these micropayments directly in the bitcoin (on-chain) network.

As I told you, I’m not good with this, and I left my channel open for more than a year, so now that the camera wasn’t working, I want to move my satoshis to another wallet were the camera would work.

A “suppose” member of the Lightning Wallet support contacted me and told me that he was going to try to help me, by merging my open channel into another wallet that I have. But obviously I have to tell him my other wallet address.

He started to ask questions, and …. let’s stop here and let me give you one huge advice here, maybe, the holy grail of all the advices in the crypto world:

NEVER SHARE YOUR SEED PHRASE WITH ANYONE So let’s recap, the guy was asking me for my wallets’ addresses. For those of you that don’t know, the address of your wallet is like your bank account number. Is not that by knowing this information, a hacker can steal your money, but is an extra information that you should only provide in certain situations like when you direct debit your electricity of phone.

However, in this case, I have no idea about this merging process, and I don’t know, how trustful was to share my wallet address to person in telegram that I’ve never chat with him before.

My though was: If this guy can release my satoshis, I’ll be 100,000 richer.

However, the tricky part came, when the guy asked me for the other address, the one that he was suppose to transfer me the money (money, cryptocurrency, ….)

I though wisely and I give him, only, a wallet address that was empty.

Another lesson that I learnt from Darthcoin in this guide is:

Separate your BTC into three levels of stashing

So you must have 3 levels:

1- A level where you have big amount of money

2- Another level where you have certain amount of money.

3- Another level to spend.

In other words. Level № 1 is like this movies, where there’s a box in a Swiss Bank that you have to go in person and scan your eye and insert a key, in order to withdraw anything.

Level № 2 is where you deposit your payslip or some earns.

Level № 3 is the money you are going to spend of the month.

Let me put you an example:

Imagine that I get my 1500 EUR payslip. My monthly expenses are 500. And I an average of 800 EUR per month.

• So I deposit my 1500 in my Level 2- I transfer 400 to Level 3 for expenses.- I transfer 800 to Level 1 for saving.- And keep 200 in level 2 to have cashflow.So now let’s come back to the scam, where that guy in Telegram, was telling me to give him my wallet address. What I gave him was one of my wallet addresses of Level 3.

Until here, everything would be ok: You give a guy, from where, and to where, you want to move your money.

The scam came, when the guy told me that for transfering the money, “merge” in his words ( fukck1ng scam in mines ), I need to go to a website and do some operations. These operations, consists on putting my seed phrase of the 2 wallets.

By that moment I knew something was really fishy, but I said to myself: “What do you have to loose, if you have already blocked 100,000 satoshis and you have nothing in the other wallet?”

So yes…. I put my seed phrase in a website that I had no idea about, only because that guy, that claim to me he was from support, told me. (this is the time where you can call me stupid).

I’m not going to get into the details of the operations that I was into neither the conversation that I had with the guy. But this is what I call hacking reverse engineering. The guy immerse you in a context, surround you in an atmosphere, that don’t let you think clear, so he can get the information he wants.

Lucky me, I’m stupid, but not as much. So they guy replied me that the other wallet address that I gave him, had no funds (ups… hahaha).

So the they guy disappeared and now Telegram chat showed me a Deleted Account. Next step after I saw that the guy was a fraud, was to pay the fee for closing the channel, and transfer my funds to another wallet where I only know the seed phrase.

When the satoshis were on my new wallet, I deleted the old Lightning wallet that was not working, and the other one with no funds that the hacker was trying to steal.

Bottom line, I’m stupid because I gave my seed phrase of my wallet where I have some satoshis. I clever because I was always playing on the level 3.