This is my friend's story from a few months back.
2 months ago my neighbour told me about mining and helped me get my first mining rig up and running. I went on https://www.myetherwallet.com, created a wallet, typed in my miner parameters, started the rig and just left it. Today I decided to see how it is doing and how much I've made. So I go to Yahoo, seach for "MyEtherWallet" and click the first link I see (yes, yes, I'm stupid), load my wallet up, type in my password and see that I have almost 2 Ether!
I exited the site and went on it again later (this time on the right one) only to see that I have 0 Ether in my wallet. I went searching and found this transaction. Almost $600 stolen!! Wtf? When? Who? No one knows the passwords. How did this happen? That friend who helped me at the start went through my browser history and found this:
Turns out, the first time I went to the wrong (scammy) website. Look carefully at the addresses.
So guys, be careful! I don't consider myself to be a noob in computers, but I did fall
hard for this. This makes me wonder what an average user has to go through? There is still so much to be done before we can use crypto like we use banks now. And now I'm off to drink...
This sucks bad, but it's a good lesson. Before concluding this post, I actually wanted to go see which search engines promote scammy websites. I did the test from Chrome because it is the most popular browser out there.
Bing
Bing promotes scam.
Yahoo
Same as Yahoo.
Out of these 3, Google is the only one which filters the ads properly. But Bing and Yahoo are completely out of touch with it.
My friend fell for a completely different site - http://mythervvallet.com (look at how funny they write that "w"). Because of this, it is safe to conclude that Yahoo is showing more than 1 scammy website for the same search term!
Always check the certificates of the website you are visiting! They are shown at the very top of the address bar. Yahoo should be ashamed of themselves! Same as Bing, but I highly doubt anyone uses it.
My takeaways from all of this:
- Ethereum has a crap official wallet -> people are forced to use mew.
- Yahoo: "Nothing personal, just business"
- Once something like this happens there is nothing you can do. No one is going to help you. There will be no courts or judges for the people who stole your money. Think twice before buying crypto. Maybe you don't need all this pain after all?