75,751 iEthereum Stolen

I am disheartened this morning.

Moments like these make us stronger in the end. A wiser man with more gray hair.

I had personal coffers that were allocating iEthereum I had been purchasing that contained the “Free iEthereum” for new paid members of the iEthereum Advocacy Trust stolen. We will again make good on our promise to you.

This has nothing to do with the iEthereum technology in and of itself.

Think of it this way. If I hand my wallet to a stranger on the street and $100 was taken. Does this make the $100 less valuable?

The answer is no. In fact, that $100 all of a sudden becomes more valuable to me and just as valuable to the store in which it is spent.

This lesson is valuable to many in the crypto space. In this article, I will discuss what happened to provide valuable insight to help prevent this from happening to others. Additionally, I will discuss how we move forward from here.

Deep diving into the distributed ledger to track the iEthereum and the wallets that were involved will be a separate article. The investigation has begun.

Where do I start?

I was scammed. I was hacked.

By definition, “hacking is the act of identifying and then exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network, usually to gain unauthorized access to personal or organizational data.” According to Kaspersky, “hackers use a variety of techniques to achieve their aims.”

I lost over 78,751 iEthereum on the streets of the wild west of crypto this past week.

I don’t consider myself a newbie in the crypto verse, but it has been awhile since I have had to pay for a costly lesson. This particular bastard stole $6,458 worth of iEthereum because of a lack of my deep crypto technical understandings and how the network and smart contracts work at a deep fundamental level.

In these streets I think it is wise to not get to comfortable. You gotta keep your guard up, defenses ready. It saddens me to say you cannot trust anybody in this sphere. In other words be street smart.

I did not give up my private keys or my seed phrase. Therefore, I believe this is a lesson all of us can learn from. Including those at the upper institutional echelon that are pushing for mass adoption.

Mass adoption of cryptos will not come to pass anytime soon. There needs to be faith and trust in a system for mass adoption to take place.

In my opinion, a reason crypto is not ready for mass adoption is extracted from the lesson I learned with getting this iEthereum stolen on December 19, 2023.

This was a customer service related issue that lead to being scammed. Kaspersky would say that this was a socially engineered hack as a means of this particular scam.

The benefits of operating in a decentralized fashion is that a project does not carry the cost of having an office, staffed with employees that require salaries, pricey electricity and heat between the 9-5 hours of the day. And from a user sense, there are no intermediaries taking fees. The downside to this scenario, is the customer has nobody to get questions or concerns answered. There is no personal technical support.

No matter if your new or experienced in navigating the crypto sphere, there will be times in which customer service is needed, wanted or desired by the public users. And customer service will be essential for adoption to propagate. I will be highlighting my need for customer service below which led to being scammed.

In this particular case, I attempted to create a liquidity pool for iEthereum on the Pulsechain network in the beginning of November 2023, 50 days prior to this situation. Just as with any new experimental DeFi activity, I created a new wallet to isolate funds. I did a test deposit in the amount of 500,000 PLS into the iEth/PLS LP. The funds left my wallet, went to the LP address but did not reflect in the pool itself. I understand that sometimes blocks take time to confirm or be mined and I left the issue unresolved for 50 days. Not a big deal, I thought it would automatically post or rectify. Got busy and forgot about it.

This is where the need for support came into play. I have a Pulsechain iEthereum article scheduled and I wanted to have some new information regarding the LP to report. I sat down with some time to log into the wallet and see if the problem was solved. It was not.

Who do I contact? Is the problem even worth solving?

After all it was a test. Do I proceed forward or do I give up?

I am an advocate for Pulsechain, Pulsex and the Richard Heart ecosystem. I still am. I did not want to walk away. I wanted to finish the job and to contribute. I especially wanted to contribute PiEth (Pulsechain iEthereum) to the Pulsechain ecosystem.

If you like Ethereum, there is no reason to not like Pulsechain. Its an Ethereum code fork that is cheaper and faster than Ethereum. I enjoy the greater community, minus the “Pulschain Scam Bastard” that floats the Pulsechain telegram group. Be wary. I do not hold the Pulsechain project responsible for my stupidity in getting the iEthereum stolen.

I wanted to solve the unresolved iEthereum LP issue and so I sought help in the Pulsechain and Pulsex telegram groups. I know I know. Trust me I know. lol

Where else do you go for customer support in a DeFi world? I had my guard up. I didn’t trust anybody. And I definitely wasn’t going to give up my private keys to anybody or any unknown site. Ask questions in telegram and you receive lots of “helpful” people. At some point, to resolve any issue, you are going to have to trust somebody.

The first guy seemed very helpful, gave me an answer that seemed to make sense. There were pending transactions ahead of my LP deposit that needed to be cancelled in order for the LP deposit to finalize the transactions. The day I was attempting this deposit, I did have a couple failed transactions. This answer resonated. Unfortunately, his solution led me to a site that I had never heard of. This site would not allow me to connect and prompted me to enter my seed phrase manually. I declined. No problem.

Wallet safe. But problem not solved.

I still needed help and was confident that I could get the expertise needed without giving up my keys. I sought help through another referral.

The Scam Itself

I was instructed to not provide private keys. Follow these directions and you can reverse any pending transactions associated with the LP wallet address.

1. Open Metamask

2. Go to Settings, Click on Advanced tab

3. Make sure the “Show hex data” toggle switch is on

The scammer stated, “Your LP wallet address and its iEthereum pending transactions is associated with the Pulsechain iEthereum you sent from 3 wallets to the LP wallet and must have something to do with the Ethereum/Pulsechain fork that took place.”

The scammer was such a nice person. They offered to pay for my Ethereum gas associated with the upcoming transactions that were going to occur. Lol. This is where I should have really questioned at a deeper level. I did have Google on standby waiting for when the remaining instructions came through. Google did not pull up any reference to any scam for the following stated instructions. I proceeded.

To reverse and cancel any pending transactions associated with the hold up delay of the posted LP Pulsechain iEthereum; I was instructed the following directions.

1. Go to this "0x” account in Metamask that sent iEthereum to LP wallet

2. Insert the iEthereum contract address into the “Send To” field

3. Insert 0 into the amount of Eth to send

4. Insert this “0x095…3cbfa…998aa…125df…” data string into the hex data option box

5. Send and confirm the transaction

6. Repeat directions for the other 2 wallets containing iEthereum that sent Pulsechain iEthereum to the LP wallet address

That is it. That did it. There seemed to be a delay as I didn’t observe any malicious activity after following directions for the first wallet, before proceeding to the second and third wallet. The scammer was kind enough to offer his evening of time to walk me through additional iEthereum wallets. Lol

A complete breakdown with technical TX’s, wallets, ledger monitoring analysis, police reports, the resulting exchange dialogue and full investigative report will also be published to www.iEthereum.org when the investigation is completed to the best of my ability.

Although we expect to learn who committed this crime in due course. I do not expect any return of iEthereum funds or any follow through from authorities. I do hope to have provided valuable insight and a lesson to the dark side of crypto that might save somebody else from losing funds in the future. Perhaps this article will make it to the top pages of Google for when somebody else looks there as the above directions are being supplied to them as a form of customer service.

Now several weeks later, It makes me laugh that this guy/girl/scumbag will look back in history and will not even fathom how much value they sold for pennies on the dollar to redeem just 0.91 Ethereum at wholesale liquidation rates on Uniswap. Moron. I, We, iEthereans, at least, just paid for schooling that will benefit us.

And you, who took my kindness for weakness, I forgive you. However, you can forever look over your shoulder. You interfered with something much larger than any one person. A higher power is at play. Don’t think the universe won’t find you. Karma is a bitch.

iEther way, We see value.