Thank you for the replies.

Ethereum seems to be plagued by ponzi schemes, ripoffs, hacks, phishing, etc. Anything I do with ETH will be very low-cost, no more than small fractions of 1 ETH.

I really, truly do not think I clicked a phishing URL. I have been in the practice of typing in URL's directly, and more recently, doing cut and paste. I do the right-click for cut and paste, and make sure that the URL is correct when the site it joined. I am going through my links and making

Yes, Slack is a joke, in my opinion. Absolutely riddled with scams. Plus, the fact that they openly display their scam URL's, in bold type, no less, is quite interesting. If I had clicked on one of those, my sanity needs to be checked.

The positives to take away are that: 1.) I will avoid ETH as much as possible. And, 2.) I will do a hardware wallet for cold storage of any crypto.

And, I still think that using a Private Key for log in is strange, at the very least. I would still say it is dangerous.