Episode 2 – $70,000 Worth of Crypto, Vanished
Watch and learn from our Chief Tech Officer, Charles Guillemet. Matthew Piliaci is our guest today for episode 2 of “How I Got Hacked.
Script: – I had Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then a couple of altcoins. And whoever got into my account, took it and put it in their cold wallet, somewhere in Russia, and see you later. – [Man #1] My account was hacked. – [Man #2] Somebody stole 21 Bitcoin out of it. – [Reporter #1] Two million dollars in cryptocurrency stolen. – [Reporter #2] Forty-seven million dollars– – [Reporter #3] Million dollars worth of cryptocurrency… – [Woman] My heart sank, like, completely sank. – [Man #3] Everything we had was gone. – When I first invested in crypto, I knew it was the Wild Wild West. No rules. I looked at it as… the same way I look at sports gambling, which is, don’t bet more than you want to lose. And if you lose it, it’s going to suck. When I made the original investment, I put in $12, 000, maybe, somewhere in there. The 12, 000 at the beginning became just under $70, 000. I had no clue what I was doing. I’ll be straight up with you, I had no clue. So, the day someone hacked my account, it was March of last year. My good friend was in town from New York. I had just moved down here. We went to dinner, and I got a weird text. Random number, said they were Coinbase, “Your account is in jeopardy”, you know… Blah, blah, blah, link here. Came home, I got another text, and I ignored them, I erased them. I logged in to my account, and I saw that everything was gone. And I was like, zero balance, no… no. And my heart just… Help? Here I lost just under $70, 000. Zero coins, zero doll– everything was zeroed out. And I saw the transaction, that somebody had switched everything over to Bitcoin, and then pulled it. I reached out to Coinbase a bunch, of course they don’t have a live human to talk to. So, you have to email them a case, what happened? I knew I was not going to get it back. I just wanted to hear that, you know? So I could come to terms with it. But then they’re like, “Yeah, here’s what happened”. They got my… what is it, the two-pin verification, three-pin verif– or whatever the f*** they call it. And they got into my account. – In this case, it’s likely that Matthew has been the victim of a sim swapping. Sim swapping is a common technique consisting in the takeover of your phone number. The attackers will call a carrier and do a request for porting your phone number, pretending to be you. It will port your phone number to the attacker’s sim card, and that means that the attacker will be able to receive your SMS. The attacker only had to connect to Coinbase, click on “I forgot my password”, please send me an SMS, and that’s it. – I still think about it now. I wake up some days, and I’m like, motherf*****! I’m going to f****** throw something through his c********** window! You know, I swear, it’s just moments, it’ll pop up, and yeah, it sucks.
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