Fools will never run out: How (not) to spend your money on fake “gas fees”

Wisdom often comes solely from personal experience. Fortunately for the guy on Reddit, his knowledge of the world’s meanness only cost him $20 (that’s how much Ether the scammer swindled him out of).

It all started when a user with the nickname Cheese4life__ found a comment on CoinMarketCap saying that someone made a huge amount of money on a coin and decided to give out his account on MetaMask with $590 on it. That someone even posted the seed phrase (and as we know, you absolutely must not do such a thing).

Our genius protagonist decided that he was the only one so lucky and went to collect his half a thousand bucks. He entered the seed phrase and found an account with $130 in Tether and $118 in USDC. But the catch was that you had to pay a withdrawal fee (gas) in Ethereum (ETH). The dude, of course, didn’t have it.

“So I look at my KuCoin account and send over $20 in ETH to pay the gas fees for Tether. The ETH shows up, I quickly go to withdraw the Tether, but as soon as I get to the confirm page, it says I don’t have enough ETH to pay for gas fees. And to my semi surprise, the balance of ETH went from my sent $20 back to zero. Though it might be a bug, no way someone at that exact moment did withdraw. But a quick peek at etherscan.io shows that as soon as my funds arrived, they were immediately taken out, likely by a bot. In fact, I’m far from the first one. This account alone was used to scam $200 worth of ETH from 6 different people,” he said.

Let’s face it, commentators didn’t appreciate Cheese4life__’s complaint and noted that this is the most common way to cheat. And not only in the crypto world.

“The other ‘most sophisticated way’ would be the double your crypto scam. Send me 1 ETH, get 2 ETH back,” they joked.

Others have praised the guy for checking the crypto flows. Usually, this scam works so that people try to pay for gas over and over again. And they waste a lot of money.

The idea of the whole scam is quite simple. It’s as if a letter came in the mail saying that your distant relative, whom you didn’t know, had died. A story about a multimillion-dollar inheritance follows. But you can only get it by paying a few hundred (thousands) dollars in taxes upfront. We wonder how many people believe this and transfer their money to the villain’s account? It turns out that such fantasists still exist today. And in the crypto world, too.