Monty Munford, a BBC tech journalist, told his story of how he lost his hard-earned $30,000 cryptocurrencies. One simple mistake cost him his all crypto investment in one go. Monty wrote that in 2017 after much consideration and consultant from his crypto friends he invested in Ethereum in hope for making some savings for retirement.
After buying Ethereum Monty decided to not to keep funds in the exchange but in the MyEtherwallet. Like every crypto user, Monty was provided with two Keys, one Public and one Private. It is instructed to keep the private key in a very secure place if that is lost, it is impossible to recover your investments.
Monty knew all about the security and crypto scams, but he decided to put his private key with other documents in Gmail drafts for convenience reason. According to the tech journalist, that was the big one mistake that he made and cost him all his investments.
When Monty saw that Ethereum’s price was starting to fall, he decided to exchange and withdraw some of his coins. But it was too late for him to do that, all his money was gone. Someone had transferred it to another account.
After talking to some friends from the crypto community, he found out that his funds were moved to Binance exchange and then again moved to another account in the next 60 minutes. Monty when contacted Binance he got an automated message saying his request would be initiated in 72 hours.
After six months, Monty approached Action Fraud Website and then to the CipherBlade who work for FBI to catch crypto thieves in exchange for a percentage of bounty. He got the first clue from them where his Ehter money disappeared, they told him that his funds were transferred into a consolidate wallet by the thieves. Later he successfully managed to get the IP address of the systems through which his money was transferred, but there was no personal identification to go by.
The investigation is still going on, but there’s very little hope that he would get his money back. According to Monty, the worse thing than his money being stolen was that he could not do anything to get them back. He described his trading experience in the crypto world as wondering in a savage bazaar.
