I read a post yesterday about how a guy was drained $700 two years ago.
Recently he discovered it was his close friend behind it, thanks to on-chain identity.
I had a similar experience in Nov 2023, and I caught the person that same week.
Pay attention to this. You’ll need it, especially if you were drained manually and not via smart contracts.
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𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗗𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿
Late November 2023 I received numerous micro debits from my MetaMask wallet across multiple chains.
Especially on Polygon, Arbitrum and BSC.
All my gas fees of $15 I kept were moved out to different wallets.
I didn’t know how or what to do because this was manual, and I had no idea who could be behind it.
This was the Tipcoin and Ratio era for those who remember.
A friend then told me to calm down and study the transaction hashes slowly.
➢ Step 1
I checked the 4 different wallets that received the funds.
I noticed they were 6 months old, and their last transactions before receiving my funds were about 4 months prior.
➢ Step 2
Each wallet had less than 10 transactions.
So I copied every wallet address they sent coins to and kept them aside.
➢ Step 3
I pasted those wallet addresses one by one into the X search bar.
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Why?
Because people often use alt wallets to farm giveaways, comment for meme airdrops, or participate in campaigns.
So I searched the wallets that received funds from the ones that debited mine months back.
Guess what?
One of the wallets that received funds from mine and another that interacted with it had been posted in the comments under giveaway and airdrop tweets.
And I saw the three accounts that posted them.
It was my own close friend’s main & alt accounts.
Someone who literally started this journey in Web3 with me.
This happened in 2023, but do you know when I shared my seed phrase with this friend?
In 2021.
I had a faulty phone then and was also in lectures, and there was an NFT mint that afternoon.
So I told him to help me mint, which he did and we all enjoyed our profits that day.
Two years later I got a job that paid $120–$150 weekly.
This project had earning opportunities within it, so I brought it to my close circle group of about 7 people.
I even funded everyone $5 each to start interacting with the project.
We were getting about $3 daily from it.
Four days later I started receiving these debits.
I even shared it with them in the group and they all told me to leave the wallet immediately.
Little did I realize that the mind of a man is truly wicked.
When I confronted this boy in the group, I was really weak. I couldn’t even do anything because he’s in Lagos and I’m in Port Harcourt.
Thankfully it was less than $45, so I started thanking God I wasn’t sending my salaries and profits to that wallet.
Bro would have emptied me and I would’ve done absolutely nothing other than crash out, make empty threats and start over.
After I caught this boy, that day I learned two things:
1. On-chain never forgets.
2. Not everyone moving with you is rooting for you.
So if you were ever drained manually, don’t just move on immediately.
➢ Trace the wallets
➢ Check the interactions
➢ Search the addresses on X
Sometimes the answer is closer than you think.
And sometimes… it’s sitting inside your own circle.