As bitcoin becomes more valuable, the more scammers become involved to try and steal your hard earned bitcoins.

Some scams are high tech and sophisticated while others are very simple. In any case, the scammer got paid and the scammed lost out badly.

This was especially the case with the current SONM ICO going on right now, and occurred during the first few hours of the ICO start on Thursday.

The scammer scammed his way to scamming over 1000+ ETH from investors

• Some people are calling this a 'HACK'...
  (Lol, I laughed real hard on this one)

• Some people are calling it a 'SCAM'...
  (I also Lol'd at this one)

(You) "So, there wasn't a scam??"

Oh, there definitely was something that happened and you could consider it a scam..

So what happened?

Here is the bloody and gory details brought to you from the frontlines.

---

2 days ago. Just this Thursday, the SONM team launched there ICO, and just as everyone in crypto world is aware, ICO's are super hot right now, and they sell out fast!
At the same time, the hacking community has found this to be a great time to harass these ICOs through spam attacks; causing website and server overload called DDOS.

Which is exactly what happened. People were unable to access the SONM website to invest and at the same time were experiencing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)

So, these FOMO investors decided to hit the Forum message boards on Slack and BitcoinTalk looking for answers.

Here is where things get scammy....

There were many users who knew of the website issue, and so, they created postings or quoted and modified an existing posting to scam people. They would indicate on the posting what the SONM Ethereum ICO address would be, but instead of providing the real one, they would put there own address.

Here is some examples of what I saw on BitcoinTalk:

Official anouncement

Attempted scam

As you can see, he added to the quote, in which the real posting was a few pages back. I'm not an active user on slack so i don't have any screen shots, but the same had happened there, except a user signed up with a new account indicating he was part of the development team and posted the "Official ICO Address"

That guy got really lucky...

https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0x120fC09f6AA2470c7EcEf3C103A227e09C96F5cd

Over 1k ETH, deposited and transfered away...

From apparently this guy

And that was pretty much how the scam worked.

• Nothing sophisticated
• Nothing high tech
• probably done by a 10 year old

In my eyes, it really wasn't a scam. People post there addresses all the time trying to get free coins, and for most of us, we see through the scheme. This was simply FOMO investors being fools and not doing research. If you are so willing to carelessly throw your Ether at an address without actually checking to see if that address is the right one...

It's not a scam

It is Stupidity!

.

Just as this BitcoinTalk user stated

I couldn't agree more

---

So... Steemit
What did we take away from this experience?

DYDD

DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE

aka... Research before investing!

---

---

Thank you for reading my posting on Steemit

Feel free to comment, resteem, or follow me

@generation.easy

A bitcoin fanatic and alt-coin enthusiasts