This isn't one of my usual posts. It's a public service announcement about a DeFi scam. A friend of mine was taken for nearly $10K. He filed a report with the FBI. Here's an excerpt from his complaint:
On October 8th, 2021, I received a message from a woman identifying herself as ‘Colleen’ (phone number +1-516-386-0069, @colleen6986 on Twitter) whose contact details I’ve provided in this complaint, and with whom I began corresponding about decentralized finance.
At 11:43am on November 1st, 2021, Colleen provided me with what she called her personal link (“https://go.cb-w.com/8uDquZOoJkb”) to supposed ETH-USDT liquidity mining pool now located at the URL “https://ethusdt.buzz” with a smart contract ID of “0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c13d831ec7” and which described itself as ‘pledge-free.’
Colleen then transferred ~$20 of ETH at the prevailing exchange rate for that day to my wallet (“0xf551b0A616bC4956E02e52Ac704Cd268ECd4aCEc”) from a wallet with an address of “0xeb2629a2734e272bcc07bda959863f316f4bd4cf” in a transaction identified with the hash “0x4b399d30bd4c9ddfe3bf0590c5768c2ce6dadaf93ab5b50bf469f652f7f29264” so that I could pay what the website describes as a ‘miner’s fee’ to ‘receive the voucher’ allowing me to include the USDT balance of my own wallet in the liquidity pool and thereby earn rewards.
On November 25th, I discovered that my Tether balance of $3103.82 had been pledged to the liquidity mining pool and transferred to a wallet with an address of “0x6302b04e7ff2463491efe44faa7cec6fc6969742” (in a transaction identified with the hash “0x1cd750b869f0d8ce9f825d66939294a1db3744aea07eb560473037964623b8f7”) via a smart contract with the ID given above. Therefore I contacted customer service at the URL provided above. The mining pool’s customer service agent informed me that I would receive a reward of 0.3 ETH, later increasing to 0.5 ETH, for increasing my pledges in the mining pool to $8000 Tether by December 3rd, 2021, on a smart contract with a duration of seven days, and assured me that I would receive my funds returned upon the completion of the contract.
Accordingly, I deposited and the saw the removal of $918.42 (removed in a transaction with the hash “0x5a288ed4bd0cd4911cf015bc25338de985c628bdcdd07df3f39fcafb11604f16”), $3185.63 (“0xee955b4f9b3a95717284bdd1c92a45f9a7dafc1e0f9a4c57b9803c06fe09c842”), and $857.88 (“0xd108e30db0321d87a166d22b49688f9a932e5647fb1c1479d3a96995b308ed11”) in Tether as pledges from my Coinbase Wallet on November 26th, 28th, and 30th, respectively. Each of these removals were transferred to the wallet address provided above.
On December 4th, 2021, I had not yet received my returned funds or promised rewards. That day I inquired again with the customer service agent, who informed me that in order to receive a return of my pledged funds and contract rewards I would need to deposit $4000 more Tether into my wallet, though no such requirement had been conveyed to me in our earlier conversation. This agent also led me to believe that further deposits of Tether into my wallet would not be pledged in a smart contract.
I then deposited $1615.84 in Tether, which was removed from my wallet (transaction hash: “0x565be980b78e4c98a218a586e334d859c2da48d5c6906370c5e7e44154519a7d”) on December 6th and transferred to a wallet with the same address as the transactions above. I contacted the customer service agent once more for an explanation, and they answered that I must deposit $4000 in Tether into my wallet as a single deposit before the funds previously removed from my account would be returned to me.
This was a relatively sophisticated con job wherein the contact person provided my friend with enough information about her to make him believe that the scam was a legit venture. Hopefully, word about this will get out fast enough to keep too many others from being robbed.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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