Personal story about a METAMASK SCAM going around! Please be Careful!

Good morning, everyone.

This is a personal story that really hurts, and hits home, hard.

I hope to bring awareness and attention to all the scams and scammers in the ecosystem. I am tired of people being conned and overall, just over all the bad actors/players in the space. Again, I hope my story helps people pay attention and just double check everything and anything, anytime you send a transaction or load up your wallet.

I was an early investor into the company called Telcoin. I had been one of the first people to really dig into what they were doing, and I started sharing all that information to everyone that was willing to listen. One of those people that decided to listen to me was my father. I would like to give a little back story about why this hurts me, so please bear with me.

I grew up in a broken family at a very young age and I would move back and forth between my parents. As I grew older, I decided to live with my mother because all of my family lived in the immediate area, (even my dad’s side). So, me and my father never really had that chance to bond, as a normal father and son would. It wasn’t until I left for the military and grew up a little bit, before my father and I started to really have a best friend bond.

Now that I have given a little back story, you can see why this is emotional and again, one of those people that believed in the research that I did, was my father. Back in October he finally took the plunge and invested $2,000 USD into Telcoin. He was able to amass about 5.5 Million Telcoin at that time. The price started to climb higher and with that, we would talk to each other every day. Whether it be about the price, news, speculation or even announcements from the team.

We started to bond more on something that I was truly passionate about and dedicated a good portion of my time to. We were sharing information back and forth and were trying to find ways to help the ecosystem grow.

The time finally came for me to make sure he was set up right and that he finally got access to his assets. So, I created a separate wallet and put the tokens in there for him. It wasn’t until his recent visit that I gave him the ownership to the wallet. I gave him his seed words and he was able to successfully load his wallet up on his mobile device. I had told him about Metamask and how it was a safe reputable wallet that offered many options to help hold or trade digital assets. However, you need to make sure to keep your seed words / private keys safe. Write them down and put them in a safe. He was very adamant about keeping them safe, so I had no worries. The very next day, my father ended up leaving and heading back up north.

A couple days had gone by and I get a message about his tokens not showing up in his wallet. Me being confused, I called him and asked what was going on. He said he had downloaded Metamask on a new computer he had bought from Best-buy the day prior. Long story short, it was a fake Metamask browser extension. Whenever he loaded it up, it functioned exactly like Metamask normally would. However, this one asked him for his seed words / private key, 2 times. Once he put those words in again, he received ETH directly to his wallet (Because he only held Telcoin in the wallet) and all of the 5.5 Million Telcoin was sent to another address and swapped on Uniswap.

Here is all the information I could come up with –

One that stole the Telcoin initially - 0x84e85bCf8abA8c6a1f59512F117DfAEfC0F4efBc

Then they swapped it on Uniswap 2 times.

https://etherscan.io/address/0x84e85bcf8aba8c6a1f59512f117dfaefc0f4efbc

One was for 1,000,000 TEL, valued at $26,631.65 USD

It was swapped for WETH (Wrapped Ethereum)

This is the transaction detail link -

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4f50d24ffbee6d8e06981ab1d5cf70ea9f4152d052ce67322df81e2f0986fad9

Second one was for 4,499,999.92 TEL, valued at $119,842.42 USD

It was swapped for WETH (Wrapped Ethereum)

This is the transaction detail link -

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x233e596d21da2c74d375a333cfe57f837147249cd7b27eec33be50931ed8145b

This is where a majority of the ETH is at, at the current moment (June 14,2021) -

https://etherscan.io/address/0xb5176e09bcad76eb75a894488310fb39789729a8

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I tell this story because the scammer didn’t just take $182,000.00~ USD away from my father, they took away that bond we were building through something I loved and enjoyed. That is what hurts the most.

I hope you all never have to go through something like this. Please be aware that we are very young in digital assets / cryptocurrency and many new ways will be conceived to try and scam you.

Lesson, always be on your toes, double check that send address and most importantly, NEVER GIVE UP YOUR PRIVATE KEYS!

Thank you for all that took the time to read this!

*TLDR: Dad downloaded a fake wallet browser extension and put his private seed in it.*