Saw my friend got drained 29.69k today from her Ledger right in front of my eyes 😢
As she was new to web3, she was always cautious about clicking links, wallet connection & downloading PDFs.
Yet, when she googled for Ledger Live to link up her cold wallet to her new computer, the first search result was a phishing link that was boosted through Google Ads.
And that was how they got ahold of her seed phrase.
Before we found out the cause, I saw in person how off-putting this sort of experience can be to people who wants to get onboarded. She started to doubt if Ledger was even trustable and questioned how else were people able to participate in crypto without any sense of security.
So yes, security is absolutely paramount. But we can never avoid these bad players, especially when technology is advancing everyday.
If we want to onboard the next millions of users, EDUCATION about security is equally, if not even more important.
It’s through education that people know what exactly they’re getting into, and for big players such as Google and X to understand and acknowledge how large the extent of harm is for such links to be promoted.
A proper vetting system from such big search engine is necessary as Web3 starts taking front centre again.
As for my friend, it’s an expensive but valuable lesson. Thankfully, this happened before she got to invest more capital into crypto. To my delight, once we found out the root cause, she was no longer repulsed by crypto as a whole and even said that she’s gonna go personally educate her board of directors that she had onboarded too ✌🏻