Sometimes it’s difficult to admit you’ve made a mistake. It’s even more embarrassing to make a mistake and then tell the whole world about it. Mistakes, while at the moment seem painful and frustrating, they can also be a great learning opportunity as well. Well, in today’s article, I want to tell the whole world the mistake I made back in 2017. It happened right after I began investing in cryptocurrency. My hope is that you learn from my costly mistake and don’t duplicate my mistake. 

My first and worst cryptocurrency mistake cost me not only a lot of money but heartache as well.  My blunder happened with MyEtherWallet (MEW). For those who might not be familiar with this type of wallet, let me briefly explain. Simply stated, MyEtherWallet is a free, open source tool for creating wallets that work with the Ethereum platform. Since its initial release in July 2015, the Ethereum platform has grown rapidly. When it comes to storing ether (ETH) tokens and other digital assets issued on the Ethereum platform, MyEtherWallet is a solution that is easy to use and offers a lot of flexibility.

I forget the exact number of different tokens I had in MyEtherWallet but it was in the range of 6 to 8. These tokens represented cryptocurrency projects that I had invested in was storing the tokens in this wallet. The value of these tokens, in total, was approximately $3,500 US. Remember, this was back in 2017!

Here’s when and how my mistake happened. Please don’t let this happen to you.

One day I received an e-mail from MyEtherWallet. Or so I thought. The e-mail informed me that I needed to click on a link in their e-mail and sign on to my account. So I clicked on the link, entered my “private key.” Big mistake! I looked over my account and everything seemed fine, so I logged out. Several months later, I logged back in to my account and all my token balances were “zero.” I was confused and had no idea what went wrong. Was I hacked? How was I hacked? Who hacked me? Could I ever get these tokens back? 

I was a victim of a “Phishing” scam. If you don’t know what this is, please familiarize yourself. Do a Google search and learn about it. Do it today!

According to Wikipedia phishing is: the fraudulent attempt to obtainsensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit cards details by disguising as a trustworthy entity. Typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging it often directs users to enter personal information at a fake website, the look and feel of which are identical to the legitimate site.

There are two lessons to be learned here. The first is to NEVER give your private keys to anyone! The second lesson is to never click on any links sent to you in an e-mail or instant message. I’m sharing my mistake with you in the hopes of you learning from what I did wrong. Hopefully, I’ll save you from making a costly mistake. 

Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. 

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