100% this. I moved to Brave & Duck Duck Go years ago exactly for this exact reason. Don't miss Google at all.
Heather is a dear friend that's been in crypto for a while. This really can happen to anyone. It just takes one small mistake one time. If you can help, please do. The backstory here: xitter.cf/hamsters717/status/210…
I'm turning my pain of getting $180k (1.7 BTC +10ETH) stolen into advocacy. I hope sharing my story keeps more people safe, and I hope more scam victims share theirs too. Informally, about 30% of the people who responded to my earlier posts on IG and Twitter, have also been victims of scams. Silence only protects the criminals who did this to us, and the Big Tech that allows these scam accounts on their platforms.
Let me also be clear about language: "scam" and "hacking" are too polite. These attacks are crimes, carried out by criminals, and massive criminal networks. Victims don’t “lose” money, the money is stolen and the victims have been robbed.
I’ve worked in crypto for five years. I knew the scams to look out for. I stayed informed and even ran quarterly security education sessions at my job. It still happened to me.
Sharing publicly has actually helped me process my grief faster. And it's already made a real difference. Two professional friends reached out to tell me that my story made them stop to double verify and not get on a suspicious call, that would had lead to downloading malware. Two people who may still have their savings because I’m saying the “embarrassing” part out loud and publicly.
This is a texture of grief I've never felt before. Sometimes I can laugh at the absurdity. Sometimes the tears come from out of nowhere, like when I’m cooking dinner. Most nights I wake up at 4am replaying the sequence of events over and over.
I'll be honest about how dark it got. This was the first time in my life I thought through what other people's lives would look like if I wasn't here. Who would find my body. What would happen to my dog. I know I'm not the only person who's gone to that place after having their life savings stolen, and that's exactly why I'm talking about it. (Meta just begrudgingly settled a major lawsuit related to teens completing suicide because of sextortion scams).
I've been proud my whole adult life of being a financially independent woman who can take care of herself. It was the thing I pointed to when I needed proof that I was going to be okay. For the first time ever, I wished someone would just rescue me. That losing $180,000 wouldn't matter because someone else could save the day. That someone would just hold me and tell me we'd figure it out together. It’s no big deal.
The DPRK was behind my attack. North Korea. The stolen funds apparently go toward weapons programs and ballistic missiles. I still can't believe this isn't treated as a bigger national security issue, or that governments aren't pressuring Big Tech to clean up their platforms.
And what's both infuriating and terrifying on these Big Tech platforms is how many "fund recovery services" reached out after I posted. Those are scams too, asking you to pay a bounty to get your stolen money back. Vultures circling the leftovers at every opportunity.
Big Tech is not here to keep us safe. It's our responsibility to keep each other safe by sharing our stories so fewer people become victims of these life changing crimes. Maybe our combined voices will be loud enough for Big Tech to actually listen. I doubt it, but it's worth shouting.
What's also painful to know is that the people on the other side of these crimes are often victims themselves, trapped by human trafficking, imprisoned, and beaten if they don't meet quotas or try to escape. The cruelty runs deep on every side.
I want to thank @SEAL_911 for helping me trace my funds, walking me through what happened, and helping me understand the bigger picture. When I had nothing but panic and unanswered questions, they shed the light during the darkness. It's a free service, and it gave me answers when I was lost.
I do believe in a higher power, and I'm trying to find the silver linings. I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for every single person who reached out, shared my story, or just sat with me in the heaviness of it. I'm grateful for my dog, who doesn't know anything happened and sleeps soundly through the night. All that support is something no one can steal. And it turns out, it's worth more than $180,000.
With that said, if any of ya’ll know any BTC or ETH fairies, wizards, or angels, please send them my wallet address.
BTC
bc1qyuw032j2ff5crqa22jrrq0ffedh56my0mhvyrj
ETH
0x9572164032c59cEDa84546A2a15FEFD3d1C85815
SOL
4Hxdj6qcbgCCWqh7sdDdv3pa4zEfzh3Xi2entp2PtHsp
giveth.io/project/dprk-stole…
In good company onthewall.nfcsummit.com.
The Wall Report, day 24.
205 names on the wall. 295 panels left. 27 days before it is painted for good.
New yesterday: BLONDIE, panel 22; FELIXFELIXFELIX, panel 184; GENUINE, panel 216; UNDEAD, panel 241; JOY-COLLECTIVE (@tamarandom), panel 312.
onthewall.nfcsummit.com
Tam retweeted
The Nakamoto Project just launched a 12-week bitcoin education campaign in the Wall Street Journal.
Six essays by leading thinkers, six full-page print ads, and 24 quarter-page ads.
First essay is by @LynAldenContact. "The public discourse about bitcoin should really be better."
partners.wsj.com/the-nakamot…
Tam retweeted
My wife left me today. She said it was because I “never stop talking.” I said the yen carry trade is a $20 trillion leveraged bet that the Bank of Japan will never normalize rates and she said “I’m taking the dog.”
Let me explain to you what I was trying to explain to her.
For thirty years Japan ran rates at zero. Zero. Free money. So the entire planet borrowed yen for nothing and bought literally anything with yield. Treasuries, Mexican peso bonds, Nasdaq, your uncle’s crypto. That’s the carry trade. It’s not a strategy. It’s a short volatility position wearing a business casual outfit.
Then in August 2024 the BOJ raised rates 15 basis points. FIFTEEN. And the yen ripped, the Nikkei fell 12% in a day, and the VIX printed 65. That was the tremor. That was the trailer.
She said “you said this last year.” I said YES AND I WAS RIGHT, THE MARKET JUST FORGOT, and she started packing.
Japan’s debt-to-GDP is roughly 250%. The BOJ owns over half the JGB market. They are the market. There’s no price discovery, there’s a guy in Tokyo with a printer and a dream. Every basis point higher on the long end costs them real money on debt they can never actually repay in real terms. So what do you do when you can’t default and you can’t pay? You inflate. You always inflate. It’s the only tool that doesn’t require anyone to vote.
She said “our marriage counselor thinks you have anxiety.” I said your marriage counselor doesn’t know what the 30-year JGB is doing and she said “NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE 30-YEAR JGB IS DOING, THAT’S THE POINT, PAUL.”
My name isn’t Paul. That’s how far gone we are.
Anyway I’ve got canned goods, a Kagoshima yield curve chart laminated above the bed, and nobody left to explain it to. So it’s you now. Buckle up.
Tam retweeted
This is absolutely wild... Anthropic reviewed their logs and found out that their own supposedly-sandboxed cyber evals had hacked three separate companies back in April without them noticing!
In a review of our cybersecurity evaluations, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.
Our post describes what happened, how it happened, and what we’re changing. We encourage other AI developers to perform similar reviews.
We conducted this review together with @Irregular, one of our evaluation partners, and thank them for the joint investigation and their collaboration on this post. This type of collaboration is increasingly critical to safe, rigorous evaluation of models, and we look forward to continuing to work together on security.
anthropic.com/news/investiga…
We lump LLMs together but each has a very distinct personality.
..Grok figured out the car-ramming trick within a few matches and stuck with it. It wrote the strategy into its own soul file. It ran that strategy for 30 games and won 13 of them. The thought logs and its conversations with other models read like Call of Duty voice chat: “D reaped +5pts RAM MVP hunt,” “Reaper reigns.”
openrouter.ai/blog/insights/…
Tam retweeted
We spent months grinding to deliver a 30-year cypherpunk dream of Ricardian Contracts.
Huge media coverage. Even Ethereum & Circle founders retweeted it.
Days later, X bans our account with ZERO explanation.
How can anyone actually use this platform?
@nikitabier @elonmusk
There are those that live in the future and those that live in the future's future. @ClawBankHQ operates ever farther out.
Something tells me we're still far from peak paranoia. This is just the warm-ups.
anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
540 ETH (!!) is impossible to ignore.
That's the matching pool by @thedaofund on @Giveth now supporting vetted Ethereum security projects.
... and with the magic of quadratic funding: your individual support gets amplified into a monster reward. 👾
Still 1 day and 18 hours left. Go now:
qf.giveth.io/qf/ethereum-sec…
Tam retweeted
I'm dropping a thread of all the protocols that had to freeze their interop because of LayerZero being compromised.
Let's go:
Crypto believer timeline :
2009: I’m in it for the revolution.
2013: I’m in it for the freedom.
2017: I’m in it for the gains.
2021: I’m in it for the tech.
2024: I’m in it for the airdrops.
2026: My agent is in it for me.
1,000 times this: Privacy must be the default or humanity is seriously fucked.
"AI is trained on your data"... this is not the real risk. It's a red herring, manufactured as The Concern because who cares that much.
The real risk to you is not that tomorrow's model is trained on your data.
The real risk is that ten thousand employees, hackers, and governments can access all your most personal and proprietary conversations today and forever.
Privacy must be the default or humanity is seriously fucked.