This is episode #2 of stories involving crypto owners who were hacked and/or lost a lot of money to various online scams. Last month, I wrote BTC Investor Losses 7,4 BTC with Fake Sparrow Wallet Mobile App.
This is a more complex story and a more advanced scam that resulted in Alexander Choi losing $996,000 in various coins and tokens.

Here is what happened...

The story begins with Alexander being approached over X by some token community profile regarding a partnership opportunity. They were interested in working with him and asked him to schedule a call to talk more. They had two meetings over Microsoft Teams, and everything seemed legitimate and done professionally. The first person Alexander spoke to introduced himself as Dan. He had an American accent and was well-spoken. They discussed the future and how they could cooperate because Alex is also a crypto founder. They spoke again two days later. This time, another cofounder joined the meeting to discuss their plans.

Two days go by, and Alexander gets a notification on his phone that some crypto got transferred out of one of his wallets. He checked several wallets on his PC and noticed that each one had been emptied. In total, he claims that almost 150 different wallets and addresses got drained of all their coins.

Alexander then did some more research on the SPARK token community he was talking to. Turns out, they had fake followers and were involved with another rug pull in the past under a different name.

The money is gone now, and he will probably never get it back.

But there are several things you can do differently from Alexander to not get yourself in a similar situation:
- Don't hold your crypto in hot wallets. Especially not on devices you use for everyday activities. If Alexander's crypto had been in a hardware wallet, an airgapped computer, or a second computer he only uses for crypto, this could have been avoided. There is no reason to hold $1 million worth of crypto on an internet-connected device when there are safer options around.
- Take your time to investigate and research people and projects. Alexander found out these people were scammers, but only after they scammed him. Why didn't he do his due diligence before?
- Always be careful and suspicious. It's still unclear what kind of Microsoft Teams meeting Alex attended. He claims it was an official link, but who knows. Fake links with extensions and scripts are shared this way. One wrong click and you invite malware and drainers into your system.


If you want to read the full story, you can do so here:
https://x.com/notalexchoi/status/1964464236710461885