How I got my Moonbirds #6544 scammed, which spiraled the best weekend of my life into the worst weekend of my life.

As I am writing this post, I am still devastated. This all just happened a few days ago, and I haven’t been able to sleep, eat or socialize properly since. I hope that in writing this post and sharing my lessons learned, I can learn to forgive myself for one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I have been in the NFT space for around 8 months now. Throughout this time, I have not been able to accumulate a blue chip NFT yet. On Thursday April 21, when I found out I won the Moonbirds allow list, I was ecstatic! I even shouted to the top of my lungs when I was driving my rental car while visiting Los Angeles.

I just barely scrapped up 2.5E, which at the time was all my liquid Eth, to mint my Moonbirds #6544 on Friday April 22. After I minted my Moonbirds, I watched hours of YouTube videos on the Moonbirds project to wrap my head around the project, and to realize that I had finally owned my first blue chip project. I even talked to some friends about getting a hardware ledger wallet to store my Moonbirds right after the weekend.

I spent the weekend at a 3 day music festival — Coachella weekend 1, and during this time I saw the Moonbirds floor price continue to rise. I was super happy of course but I didn’t really acknowledge how big of an asset I owned and that I should really start to be very careful with my asset.

After spending 3 days at Coachella, I was very hungover. And after driving 5 hours alone from Coachella to LAX, I was mentally exhausted. This was when I made a final gas station pit stop before returning my rental car to AVIS LAX and I only had 10 mins to return my car and check in my bag, or I’d miss my flight.

This was when I got a twitter tag from a Moonbirds twitter account.

I think this part of the scam was what threw me off the most.

• How did they connect my Moonbirds NFT to my twitter account? I’ve never posted this anywhere.
• The only possible connection I can think of is when I signed up for the allowlist raffle on premint.xyz.
• I suspect the hacker must have gotten a hold of the premint allow-list winners — twitter to wallet address table.

At my low mental state, I also did 1 more due diligence, and saw that the account had 55K followers so it’s possible that it’s the real Moonbirds twitter account. It had all the right website info and everything also.

• Lessons Learned #1 — Do not check NFTs or click any links when you are super tired or even under the influence.
• Lessons Learned #2 — When performing due diligence on Twitter accounts — look at everything. I only checked handle, profile pic, and followers.
• What I should have checked were:

1. Whether it was really the real Moonbirds twitter account
2. Who the account is following or followed by
3. Go on discord to double verify the links or ask folks about these suspicious activities

This fake Moonbirds twitter account posted a tweet saying that owners can now go to their website to claim a 3D version of the Moonbirds avatar.

This is where I made another mistake because the link was to a website called (Moonbirds. Events) — I deliberately put a space there so people don’t accidently click the spam link — when the official Moonbirds website is moonbirds.xyz.

This took me to a website that looked exactly the same as the official Moonbirds website, except for a link at the top to claim your 3D Moonbirds avatar. It also showed that 980 were already minted.

At this moment, I was mentally exhausted and I only had like 5 minutes left before I’d miss my flight, so I decided to quickly take out my laptop to connect to my phone’s hotspot and mint this 3D avatar.

After I clicked the mint button, a transaction of 0E popped up on my metamask and I approved it.

Clicking the approve button is the biggest gut-wrenching worst mistake of my life.

Afterwards, a failed transaction popped up on metamask and it asked me to approve again. Stupid me clicked approve thinking something went wrong with my first approve. Then another failed transaction popped up and this is when I realized something was wrong. So I quickly rejected the next transactions and disconnected my metamask wallet.

This is the big horrific pivotal moment that I realized I had made a huge mistake.

I then went over to my opensea account and saw that my moonbirds #6544 was gone.

At this point, I felt like my stomach dropped to the floor and to the point that I couldn’t breathe.

I went over to find the email from someone who made an offer for my Moonbirds #6544 to find the link to the NFT. This is when I saw this:

The scammer transferred my Moonbirds #6544 to his/her account and immediately sold it for 18E (0.5E below 18.5E floor at the moment).

The scammer also stole another NFT of mine that was worth 1.7E and sold it immediately for 1.4E. The 2 most valuable NFTs that I owned.

Not going to lie, I cried on the whole flight home. I don’t think I have ever cried like that in my life.

The scamming doesn’t end here.

Once I landed, and I had internet again, I was sad and desperate. So I replied on the real Moonbirds twitter account’s pinned tweet about not clicking scam accounts with:

This is when another twitter account (Jason_Anderson — I think the account is blocked now) replied to my tweet saying he got scammed too and to reach to dssy_tech on Instagram to help me recover my losses, as dssy_tech helped him.

Desperate and devastated me reached out to dssy_tech on Instagram and I asked if he can help me. He said he was a hacker and he is willing to help me because he hated scammers and he’ll do it for free. He told me to send him the transaction address of the scam. Then he said he can retrieve my losses, but he needed $200 usd to be sent to his wallet to access the servers. After some back and forth, and checking the wallet address on etherscan, I determined that it was a scam and blocked him. Luckily, I didn’t get scammed again but this could happen to anyone.

• After a few days, even reporting this incident to opensea, I have come to terms that I would never be able to retrieve my Moonbirds #6544 back again.
• I also later found out that the hacker actually hacked another twitter account with a lot of followers and changed all the info to show Moonbirds, and that’s how he/she got so many followers.

Below are my consolidated lesson learned from my experience:

1. The NFT/Crypto space is very cruel, and scammers will try to get you whenever they can.
2. Many NFT investor’s goal is to acquire a blue chip NFT. Once you reach this status, you are now a big target for scammers. You now need to be especially careful and come up with a good hot vs. cold wallet strategy for your NFTs.
3. Do not check NFTs or click any links when you are super tired or even under the influence. The chances of you making a mistake is much much higher.
4. When there is a promotion that is out of the ordinary, check all your sources before committing.
5. Double check twitter, discord and even ask around your friends/alpha groups to double check everything.
6. When dealing with twitter, double check all the information to make sure its not a fake account.

I hope by sharing my experiences, I can help others not make the same mistake as me. And also allow myself to forgive myself for making the biggest mistake of my life.