An investor known as “NFT God” made a fortune in NFTs and other digital currencies. But due to a mistake everything is gone now. The loss of his fortune seems to be the least of his worries.
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A well-known investor by the name of “NFT God” is known to have made fortunes in NFTs and other digital currencies. He became famous for a strange NFT monkey that everyone just calls “Henry”.
The investor now explained on Twitter that he had lost his “entire digital livelihood”. And that by a small, stupid error:
Last night my entire digital livelihood was destroyed.
Every account associated with me personally and professionally has been hacked and used to harm others.
Less important, I lost a significant portion of my wealth
(via twitter.com) A “sponsored link” destroys an existence in a few moments
What exactly happened? The well-known investor “NFT God” wanted to install streaming software on his computer. But instead of downloading the official software, he got hold of a malicious link. As he himself explains on Twitter:
Yesterday afternoon I downloaded OBS to my personal desktop computer.
OBS is an industry standard video streaming software. I was looking forward to live streaming some video games for the first time in my life.
What I didn’t know was that I had clicked on the sponsored link on Google.
And this is where the disaster took its course. Suddenly his Twitter account was hacked and access to his digital possessions was gone. His hacked accounts also sent fake and malicious messages to friends and acquaintances.
A user can only play with a new gaming PC after finding nasty, hidden errors
What are these “sponsored links”? If you are looking for a specific piece of software or a website, what are known as “Sponsored Ads” or “Advertisements” will appear in the first few results in Google search results.
The problem is: in some cases, these ads look very similar to the real webpages. And exactly the mistake of confusing an ad with the official website happened to the investor.
Instead of downloading OBS from the official website, it ended up on a fake website and installed malware from there.
Beware of fake websites and “free” offers
Can you protect yourself against this? It is best to check three times before downloading a file from the Internet. If you are not sure, then check the URL again and whether it is really the manufacturer’s website. Such links are clearly marked on Google.
However, some fraudsters also take the opportunity and switch to websites that look very similar to the original. The website looks similar and the URL often differs only slightly from the original.
Take a look at our example image: If you are looking for the VLC media player, you will also find a website that we have marked for you. This is a fake site that has nothing to do with the official provider. In some tests, the wrong page was our first search result.
Such fake pages are endless for popular software like VLC media player, Discord, Steam or graphics card software. Often these sites are fully translated into German and seem real, but don’t let that fool you.
You should also refrain from websites that offer you paid tools and software for free. In many cases you download malware here that has nothing to do with the official tool.
So take a close look here or use well-known German websites such as Heise and Co, which in some cases also host the software.
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