Everyone hears about scammers looking to steal cryptocurrency all the time. Phishing scams, impersonation and giveaway scams, social engineering, fake exchanges. Whatever the method, it’s a popular warning in the news. After getting involved in the cryptocurrency space for 2 years, it finally happened to me.
The scammer sent me a direct message through Twitter (or now X) expressing interest in one of my NFTs, Otherdeed for Otherside #89268. Looking at his profile, he had a good number of followers (> 1,000) and was very active so I didn’t think he was suspicious. We agreed to a trade where I would give him my NFT for 1 ETH. Looking back, this should’ve raised an eyebrow, because the floor price for these on Opensea was about half that price, around 0.5 ETH.
He proceeded to add me on Discord, where we attempted to make the trade on sudoswap — https://otc.sudoswap.xyz/#/. The transaction did not work, and he redirected us to using Cosmos. Now since I never heard of this name before, I was very suspicious. I asked to make the trade on Opensea, but the scammer did not want to. After a few minutes of resistance, I ended up agreeing to trade over Cosmos. However, the website he sent only appeared to look like the real Cosmos website but wasn’t — https://cosmos-trade.io/. Here is the real one — https://cosmos.network/.