Isaidelgoley. eth shared: A post-mortem of the gut-wrenching loss of my NFT portfolio, lessons learned, and a thank you to the incredible community that got me through this.

Constant vigilance. In the world of crypto and NFTs, constant vigilance is essential to keep your digital assets secure. A momentarily lapse in judgment, however infrequent or brief, can lead to the permanent loss of your assets.

I faced this stark reality a few days ago. I let my guard down for just one moment, and an elaborate spoof site emptied the majority of my NFT portfolio — a portfolio worth well over 50 ETH that I have lovingly cultivated over the last six months.

It’s Wednesday evening, and I decide to visit the website LooksRare — a novel alternative to OpenSea.  I’ve been staking a token called $LOOKS and am excited to see the APR in action.  I’m on my iPad.  I don’t use my IPad often so my websites aren’t bookmarked.

I can’t remember the URL for LooksRare: .org, .com, No problem, that’s what Google’s for, right?  I click on the LooksRare link at the top of the Google results.  The website looks exactly like it always does.  I connect my MetaMask wallet.  My LOOKS are doing great.

After a few seconds, my MetaMask wallet logs me out. Weird, but MetaMask is always glitchy. I log back in. It logs me out again. Annoying. I log back in. My password doesn’t work. Oh god.

I quickly open my Rainbow app on my phone (which is connected to my MetaMask) and everything looks okay. Relief. I refresh once, twice. Everything’s okay. One more refresh. 2 ETH and 100 ENS gone. I feel sick.

I refresh again. Several NFTs are gone. By the time I overcome the shock and lock my OpenSea account — seconds that felt like years — almost everything is gone. Game over, I lose.

In hindsight, I made a few key mistakes that left my portfolio vulnerable to this terrible loss. First, I kept my assets in a “hot wallet” (MetaMask) — which is far more vulnerable to attack than “cold storage” (e.g., Ledger, Trezor).

That is a mistake most people still make. Even the legendary collector Cozomo de Medici acknowledged routinely making this mistake just last week. Second, instead of using a bookmarked website that I have verified, I Googled the website and clicked the top Google result.

(Usually, you can count on the top Google result, right? Not so much.). Third, I saw that the website looked exactly as usual, but I didn’t verify the URL. If I had, I would have noticed a small typo in the URL.

I hope that this heartbreaking experience can provide some lessons for the community. Invest in a cold wallet. Use bookmarked websites. Check the URL. These simple precautions would have saved me, and I hope they might save you.

But that’s not the end of my story. There are bad actors in the metaverse, just like everywhere else. What makes this community unique is not the bitter scammers who stole my collection — it’s the overwhelming kindness and generosity that lifted me back onto my feet.

Within literal seconds of tweeting my perilous situation, I was flooded with messages of love and support.  My nounpunks family swiftly tracked the sales of my collection on the blockchain and contacted the buyers.  They saved my grail cryptoadz for me.

They gifted me some of their own beautiful NFTs. They sent eth to my new wallet so that I could rescue some more of my collection.

Meanwhile, my incredibly generous friend wattsyart reached a deal with the buyer of my OG crypto_chicks and safely returned that to me, in addition to sending me one of their beautiful cryptoadznft.

The generosity and support continued throughout the next 24 hours. motivateme bought several of my other toadz and is holding them for me.  theboneys auctioned off a boney to my friend toady_hawk and sent me the proceeds to build back my collection.

END My story is bittersweet. A bitter person scammed me out of a collection that I had so lovingly cultivated over the past six months. But hundreds of sweet, wonderful people came to my rescue and helped me start over. I love you all, and I vow to pay it forward when I can.