Have you been scammed?
It was one of my biggest regrets in life but I already moved on and took it as the most expensive lesson that I had to learn on the internet. I know that it is hard to trust anyone online, but I was young before when I learned this lesson.
I already published a blog about my scam experience last December 2021 and if you want a detailed story of how I lost my Axie Team, you can read it here .
I am always curious about things and trying to earn money from the internet during my younger years until I was introduced to cryptocurrency. I had a long journey on crypto and earned some decent amount of money from my hard work — until NFT and Axie Infinity exploded in the world of crypto.
And yep, I jumped into the bandwagon, bought my own Axies to play without evaluating things. I am sure that I was in FOMO at that time because people were getting rich, buying what they wanted, and endorsing Axie Infinity as a form of job that is highly profitable.
The time came, I bought my Axie Team for about $900. It was expensive, yet, I invested all my money into that game. Little-by-little, I realized that this game was not for me and I don't see it profitable anymore just after 1 week of buying it.
You will notice how impulsive I was during that time when it comes to making decisions and I am now annoyed at myself while writing this due to thinking how dumb I was.
After realizing that it was not profitable, I decided to sell it to a Facebook group. Posted about it, thinking that I might get a profit. There were a lot of scammers back then (and I think until now), but I was tricked by them.
Someone contacted me saying that he will buy my Axie team. He offered a quick call for the transaction and I think I was hooked by him because of it. I thought I could trust him because he called me during the transaction. Some part of me was telling myself that it was a scam so I recorded our conversation.
How dumb am I to think of it as a scam but did not stop?
I sent my team and then by that, he blocked me.
One thing that I learned from this is that the internet is full of scammers that will trick you and so, you should not trust anyone with your money (or anything) if you barely know them.
As an old phrase says, “don't talk to strangers”. We need to be sure that who we are talking online is trustworthy. It is sad that there are still people who are getting scammed due to aggressive behavior, greediness, and some are just because of being unaware when it comes to these scams.
I don't know how scammers can live daily having this job. I know that karma will hunt them and time will come to them.
Just for now, be aware of potential scams as they are improving together with the emerging technology. Some people are getting smarter and thinking of more creative ways to scam people.
Lead image was made and designed by the author using Canva. GIFs are from the built-in feature of PeakD and InLeo.