Crypto Rangers on the way!

One morning in 2017 I stared at the screen in disbelief. I rubbed my eyes, quickly glanced at the clock ticking on the wall. It was eight minutes past eight in the morning. I rubbed my eyes again and looked back at the computer screen. My wallet balance was zero!

I quickly clicked on the etherscan bookmark and stared in disbelief as my ether and ERC20 tokens were being transferred. Like a robbery in slow motion. I instinctively reached for my phone, but stopped in my tracks. Who was I planning to call anyway? A quick glance at my screen informed me that the transaction was initiated 55 minutes ago! It was still in the process of being confirmed! I was witnessing the movement of my tokens to an aptly named account: Fake_phishing and I could not do a thing about it! A crypto robbery in progress!

Yes! I can! I quickly swung into action. My D*N was still intact. I moved to transfer that to my Exodus wallet, but my ether was all gone! I had no gas to perform the transaction! Think!

My T*L was all gone too. I had patiently bid on it until the order was filled in the night before on Etherdelta…

Then I remembered the suspicious looking app on my android phone that I had installed a week earlier. I was in my car and installed an etherdelta app on my phone. It prompted me for my ethereum address and private key. I hesitated, but eventually gave in. I remembered the message displayed “comming soon” – Spelt with a double ‘m’. Ominous. I felt foolish for falling for the phishing trick and made a mental note to rectify my mistake and move all my tokens to another wallet. I never got around to doing it in time.

The scenario described above is familiar to thousands, or millions of early crypto-adopters and enthusiasts around the world. With recent events involving FTX, after a dramatic series of events in the first week of November, what’s next for the cryptocurrency industry?

If the industry doesn’t police itself, regulators are sure to come knocking with their own rules and methods on how the cryptos-space should be regulated. The big players in the crypto space should come up with some kind of Rapid Response Unit – Crypto Rangers – that we can call on when faced with such a situation.