Not your keys, not your crypto

Everywhere money is concerned, there’s bound to be people who want to exploit others to get a hold of their money, and hence issues of security arises.

Crypto being the new money and the future of money, we’re seeing a shift in traditional methods of defrauding people of their physical paper money, to trying to get a hold of their crypto or digital assets. Because of this, it’s important we learn what the current tactics of these fraudsters are in order to be prepared in the case that we notice anything fishy that threatens the security of our assets.

Exchange or Wallet

This is very common knowledge, I believe. Majority if not everyone involved with crypto knows the safer place to keep your crypto between an exchange and a crypto wallet is the crypto wallet. If you didn’t know, guess who knows now?

As I said, this is common knowledge. But is that the common practice?

Most crypto handlers I’ve come across (including myself) for whatever reason, keep our crypto on exchanges because it’s convenient to transact with them over there. This would totally make sense for short-term keeping. But even people who have no plans of selling short term just leave their assets to sit on exchanges believing the illusion that they’re small holders, and so no one will target their small money to hack. Whiles this may be true, a fraudster does not need to target your own wallet specifically to get your assets. Hacking the exchange itself will give them access to wayyy beyond just your small wallet, and this is what most of them are aiming for anyways.

Not your keys, not your crypto

Again, another popular saying in the cryptoverse we’re all familiar with. It appears we tend to forget this often though because if we did, we wouldn’t be reckless enough to keep our crypto on exchanges. Or maybe we just don’t understand what keeping our crypto on those exchanges mean.

Let’s take a case study of the popular Binance exchange a lot of us use (RIP to Nigerians, lol).

If you keep your crypto on Binance, you don’t really own your crypto. Binance owns it, but they just give you access to it when you log in with your password. It could be likened to keeping your money with a bank. It’s your money okay, but the bank has to give you access to it for you to be able to spend it. If the bank disappeared on day, so does your money. The same happens for Binance. It is a centralized exchange.

On the contrary, keeping your crypto on crypto wallets like Trust Wallets gives you absolute control over your assets. YOU have the keys to your account. Well to be fair, it’s called a seed phrase in this case, but you get the idea.

Then there’s the issue of P2P fraud

This post would be incomplete if I didn’t talk about this. Fraudsters who are not techy enough to hack result to this easier way of stealing. I’ve had several encounters where in the process of doing P2P on Binance, merchants mark orders as paid knowing well enough they didn’t pay. Their hopes are that once you see the order marked as paid, you’ll go ahead and release the crypto without checking your wallet.

Some people fall prey to this. I fortunately haven’t, and I hope I never do.

This is just to create awareness of that situation. ALWAYS check your fiat wallet to be sure that payment has been received BEFORE you release your crypto.

When I was a rookie in crypto just starting out, I was so skeptical that even when I received payment, I wouldn’t release crypto yet until I move the money out of my wallet, just to be sure it’s safe. My fear was that even after releasing, they could easily call the network service providers, tell them they made a wrong transfer, and have them reverse the transaction. But as time went on, I’ve learnt that the network service providers don’t just reverse transferred money like that, so I’ve gained a sense of clarity and calm regarding the matter.

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Cover image was designed by me in Canva
All other images were taken by me

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