Crypto PSA: How To Not Get Scammed

What is going on? It's your boy Joe Fear here, and I'm doing a solo episode with y' all today. And today I'm going to be talking about the so fascinating, so interesting, so riveting topic of security in cryptocurrency. And, you know, before you pass along on this episode or if that doesn't sound interesting to you and all that stuff, just hang on for a second, because this is something where a lot of people haven't really. It doesn't seem like there's enough knowledge that can be had around security in cryptocurrencies these days. I mean, there's some news articles I'm about to show up and pull. There have been, I think it's close to $10 billion stolen this year alone just in crypto, and we don't want that to be you. I actually had some experience in this that I want to talk to you about. But the fact that we've been talking so much about crypto lately, and, you know, it's so easy to get in and get excited and start learning about all these projects and then just start diving into some of things without doing the research of the fundamentals of actually, hey, let's. Let's keep ourselves safe in all of this and remember that we're in the Wild west with this whole thing. And, you know, what happened in the Wild west, there's a lot of thieves out there in the Gold Rush days, back in the, you know, in the California Gold Rush. And, you know, it's just. There's a lot of thieves out there. There's a lot of unregulated things, projects popping up all the time. So in this episode, I'm going to dive through a personal experience of mine actually getting my stuff stolen twice. One of them recently, one of them a few years back. And then also, I want to show you some of the stuff that's happening out in the world right now. I pulled up some news articles just from this week and last week that you should be aware of, and also some very simple things and some, you know, some. Some moves that you gotta make and know of and some little devices here and there that you should be having in place before you go into crypto, at least in a big way. And we want to make sure you have all these boxes checked before you actually hop in. All that. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart.

Podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Wiki wiki Wiki Hey, I want to tell you about something.

What's that, dude?

Ahrefs. You know, the tool we've talked about forever because we use it a lot in our business. They have a free version now.

No. Wow.

They do?

No. Wow.

Yes. It's called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Wait, wait, wait. It's legit. Okay, hold on. Let me.

Nice fake typing.

Oh, I went to ahrefs.comawt that was. I went to ahrefs.com, and you should, too. Hrefs.comawt there's an a before all.

A H, r e f s.comAWT yeah.

So we said it about a hundred times. So now it's subconsciously in your brain. So I went there and this is blowing my mind, Matt. This is crazy. I'm looking at the page right now. It monitors the SEO health. I mean, tell me more. Matt. Why is this important? Why should I?

Well, it monitors the SEO health. It monitors all the backlinks and all the domain and page level SEO metrics and all of your search traffic and keywords and what keywords you're showing up for. And it does it for free. We use the paid Ahrefs.

But this is awesome. You know, I was just kidding over here. I was just having fun. No, I wasn't really real typing. Right? You don't. No, I don't really type.

Yeah, I can also see you.

Yeah. Dang it. Okay. In all reality, this is a freaking cool tool. We were nerding out about it when we heard that Ahrefs was coming back for a sponsorship because it's a free tool, no credit card required. And, yeah, you get a lot of key things that the bigger Ahrefs tool has in it, that this one basically has all the key things that every person with a website should have. This. So that is you listening?

That is you listening. So, yes, improve your website's SEO performance for free. Just go to ahrefs.com awt yeah, I'm back.

What up? All right, so what. What I have on screen, if you're not listening or if you're not watching on YouTube, you definitely should go check it out at hustle and flowchart.com tv. We're going to do a lot more of these videos that are highlighting some of the bigger things that you should be aware of in crypto web3, just in general, breaking down fundamentals. So, you know, sometimes you're going to get it from me sometimes, Matt, Sometimes with a guest with us. Breaking down fundamentals and. And things you got to know around this space as well, bringing the experts in. But in this episode, I want to talk to you about what we're seeing in terms of security, some of these hacks that are going on, phishing scams and you know, all this interesting stuff that sucks. But at the same time we got to talk about it, we got to know about it especially it's top of mind for me since this just happened a couple weeks back where I committed some of these, these problems or these, you know, just kind of wasn't paying attention, to be honest. But okay, so before that story, I want to show you a couple articles, just kind of like lay the ground of where we're at. And this is so important. This is an article from the 14th of December from CNBC. Basically says $10 million over 10 billion, sorry, 10 billion with a B was stolen in Defi related thefts. So defi, that stands for decentralized finance. And that's kind of, that's a, that's a big rage right now in the crypto space because there's some very interesting ways to have your money work for you in a bunch of interesting ways. We're not going to break down all that stuff here, but definitely it's something you should be aware of. And we, in the previous episode that we released, we talked a little bit about DeFi and how there's protocols like Anchor Protocol that are, that have been around that, that seem, you know, kind of conservative. Obviously not in financial advice. Here, do your research. But at the end of the day, Defi, you're going to start seeing that become more and more mainstream. It already is. It's making news on CNBC and NBC and, sorry, CNN and all these other things. But this is just one example. It just shows you the amount of money that's actually being ripped off from people right now. And it sucks. I mean, it's horrible and it's happening in all different ways. But we're gonna show you, I'm gonna show you a few different ways that you really should be paying attention and just to kind of safeguard yourself. So that's just to show you there's a lot of money just kind of getting ripped from a lot of people unknowingly. And a lot of folks unfortunately just don't know the basic security protocols. And you can't be perfect in this world anytime. But at least let's do the best can here. Here's another article from Vice News. And this was from the 13th of December. And this is where a Vulcan Forge So this is a gaming company. So inside of that game there's a, in game currency. Well, a bunch of stuff got stolen there. So more than $400 worth of their tokens, I believe it was, were stolen from them. And in this case and this, this is where there's a lot of details. I'm going to share these articles so you can actually look into it. I think in this case 135 million. Somehow the hackers actually, I think this one, they gave it back. Let me see. I'm kind of reading the articles, one of these where it was given back. But I'm not going to, I'm going to have these things posted in the links, in the, in the show notes and also on the YouTube. But just to show you just the kind of. It's everywhere. It's not just defi. This is now in gaming. So gaming is another thing in the crypto space that's going to pop in 2022 and you know, there's a lot of stuff coming out and you're going to start recognizing a lot of these names in our. Sorry, in gaming now, you know, bigger companies moving over here. But just, just remember that it's still not a perfect environment that there could be hackers, you know, going in all of this because this is an opportunity for a lot of folks. Got to remember there's people in all sorts of walks of life in different countries and different motivations to that want to be in the game. And unfortunately, you know, you see some, some, some bad, bad characters getting in the mix here. Here's another one from Coindesk and this is from 13th December also saying that hey, here's a crypto exchange. Now this is a centralized exchange, I believe so where you're actually exchanging coins and cryptocurrencies to trade or hold whatever it might be. This one was a loss of 77 million. And there's, there's all these details you can look at inside of here. And then lastly the last article I have, and mind you, this is just from the last handful. This is from the 12th of December, this is from CNN Business. It basically says, hey, crypto heists are getting only bigger and bigger. So here's what you got to know. And I highlighted this. It said basically an anonymous hacker stole over or $600 million in cryptocurrency from the poly network. That's another defi type of network there. And the hacker actually gave it back. So this is the one I'm like, whoa, I don't know what happened there. Maybe it's a ransomy type thing, but again, it's kind of crazy. So I wanted to not stifle all the excitement and all that in Crypto, but this is the reality that we're playing in is that it's the wild, wild west and there's a lot of folks and there's a lot of money getting played right now or getting passed around. And unfortunately, sometimes we just aren't keeping track of all this stuff because it's in these websites that we've never played with or they're in these wallets at these exchanges that we don't quite understand. So let's, let's actually talk about and let's break down what we can do to protect ourselves. So I guess, you know, what I'll do is I want to start with the three things that we find or at least that we've found. And by, by looking at the discords, you know, the different, the channels that, where you can be involved in projects and engage with communities, which shameless shout out, you got to be a part of our Discord channel. I promise there's no scams going on there. You know, these are the best of the best folks. And can't promise that, you know, Discord is going to be safe because I'm going to describe how there are scams in Discord as well. But that's not to deter you from go join our Discord. It's at hustle and flowchart.com discord and we're doing a lot of fun stuff there. We have a lot of fun things planned for our community. Got some tokens coming up in the future and some private channels for people who engage a lot in there where we're sharing some really insider kind of stuff that we're looking at. So go join us at hustleandflowchart.com Discord make sure that you're in the know there with us. So now let's get into like the three things. So the three ways that we're finding or we're seeing people get scammed the most often come in the form of three different ways. So phishing, rug pulls, and also inside of decentralized or more like centralized exchange hacks. So let's start with phishing. So phishing, basically that's, I mean, it's been around online for a long time. So it's like people looking for your passwords, looking for these secret phrases and things that you really shouldn't be giving out. But maybe the way that they, they shaped it and made it look, or the process made it look legit. Well, that's pretty dang common. So phishing is happening in Discord. That's how it got me. So I'll, I'll describe that in a second here. So when you're on these different channels like Discord, that's a place where a lot of people are hanging out at. It's kind of like, you know, it's another community around that, around a project that you can join very easily with the click of a button. So like when you go to hustleandfluidchart.com Discord, it's going to take you to a landing page, you're just going to click a button and then it's just going to bring up Discord if you haven't installed and you're going to be able to join that Discord. It's pretty dang simple to get into any kind of community around some kind of crypto project. It could be a new NFT project that launched. It could be a defi type project that you're interested in, could be anything else around, you know, a game maybe in crypto. A lot of gamers in general are using Discord, you know, from, you know, like Twitch streamers and all that stuff. So point being is there's a lot of people and a lot of attention, a lot of value in these Discord channels. So you got to keep in mind when you're joining these channels, if it's a really popular channel, which was the case with some of mine, you're going to get some random people reaching out. And Discord, sometimes it's, it's really helpful to actually hide yourself so you don't get a lot of these spam bots and people basically messaging you, trying to get you to join something else. Maybe it's a different Discord channel. That could also be a scam, potentially. It could be a bot or someone basically acting like a bot, which was the case with me, where they basically made themselves look like someone else. Collab Land, that's actually kind of like this bot that's like an integration bot that connects to your wallet, your Metamask wallet, which is like a, like a hot wallet online. So essentially that just means it's browser based or it's online. That's where you store your stuff, your currencies. Well, it's very simple to just kind of click, click, click, click, and they give access to everything to someone if you don't know what you're looking for. And that was the case with me. So I was actually, you know, basically in an NFT project, clicked something when I was very distracted. I think I had my toddler running around. I was in the kitchen, I was, I was on my phone. I wasn't totally paying attention. Which is rule number one is pay attention to anything you're clicking over. If you're ever transferring anything, signing anything, it's not even moving money. It could just be approving something to your account. Which was the case for me where it approved the secret seed. Basically the seed phrase of that MetaMask, that wallet that I had some stuff in, some NFTs and some currency. Well, the fact that I clicked that button in MetaMask, everything went away. This is the number one thing you should definitely remember when it comes to security is never give out your secret recovery phrase. Or it could be called your seed phrase. It's basically a string of words that are unique to your account. And if you lose those things or if you give them to anyone else, that opens you up for theft. You know, someone can now have access to your vault, depending on your, you know, your wallet, whatever you have set up. And you can set up a bunch of these things, which is definitely what I've now done, depending on what I'm doing with this thing. So, point being is here, when you set up one of these wallets, do not give away your seed phrase or your secret recovery phrase. Those are kind of like the two terms you see, once someone has that good luck, that's when, if you know that's compromised. Like was the case for me, even though basically everything got taken from that specific wallet, luckily it wasn't everything I had, but it took, you know, they took what was in that wallet. That's gone. Unfortunately, I can't get that back. And these people that we're seeing these news about, you know, with their funds getting stolen, they can't get it back, most likely, unless hacker somehow is going to give it back, which in, in the case of that one instance on, on the one exchange, I just showed it happened. I don't highly doubt that would ever really happen normally. So I wanted to point this up is when you're making your account on MetaMask, which is probably the most common way. I know Coinbase also has an option for this, but you see MetaMask used often, this is what you're going to see. So take the time to really understand how these things work. And the key thing is do not give away this phrase and just know that there are other ways that people can get this if you're not looking and reading what you're signing in the process of clicking and doing all that stuff. So when it comes to phishing and any kind of weird stuff, if there's someone with, like, that they're trying to basically make themselves look like someone else or like a legit project or person, just do your due diligence and don't rush through anything. Don't do stuff when you're tired. There's a lot of things that you can probably take for granted. Granted. But when you're in the middle of things, sometimes you're just like, oh, you're either fomoing, you're trying to get into something quick, or you're trying to keep up with all the news and you just can't. So you're just kind of clicking fast and getting to the next thing. Don't do that. Like, there's no rush here and there's opportunities coming all the time. But the thing is, just don't lose your stuff. So make sure that you have yourself protected and you really know what to look out for. So that's what I wanted to point out here. And there's a lot of smart people kind of getting. Getting taken by this stuff. I want to show you one Twitter thread that I saw. It's from. From this guy here. I don't know who he is, but. Or she. You know, because they're just an avatar. But you can see, you know, I'm legit freaking out right now. I'm, you know, I would consider myself a pretty savvy tech person, but I almost gave access to my wallet to a bot. And apparently there's a huge issue on Discord where bots basically have hooks and can respond to normal channels, yada, yada. Point being is, you know, it ain't just me. There's actually. I looked up on Twitter, there were people having all sorts of issues with this specific, specific thing where it's collab land, you know, basically a bunch of people making it look like they're legit. Collab land is legit. But the point is that a lot of people see that opportunity as a way to kind of dupe some folks that aren't paying attention. So don't be that person. It's not worth it. It's not cool. So a couple other places where you're gonna see some fishing happen is on Twitter. So if we go to. I mean, if we go back to Twitter really fast, actually. I mean, you just look up Anything on crypto NFTs if you look up hashtags, I mean, you're gonna find all sorts of just people talking about. There's just all sorts of things happening. I mean, look at this. NFTs over 6,500 tweets just in one hour. Not saying there's a bunch of spam and scams happening, but just know that because there's so much attention and momentum and velocity happening. These are the times where you want to kind of start looking at stuff and then maybe reading the comments and being aware of what scams look like. So when you go to. I don't know if some of these are going to show it, but there are people that will actually go on Twitter. Like I actually posted that I got hacked or phished on one of these threads where I was basically like, yep, me too. Literally minutes later I had 3 or 4 bots reply on my tweets, basically saying, hey, reach out to me. Metamask support. Fill out this form and put in your seed phrase in there. Or email us@gmail.com. you know, some email, like, obviously those are scams. Those are more people phishing again. It's crazy. So just be aware that there's phishing happening all over the place because you got to think there's people that see opportunity when there's a lot of money happening and flying around. So I don't want to make this. This isn't like the most fun episode that I wanted to put out there, but it's more of a PSA for you. Just like this person here is, look out for the fishy stuff and be aware of what's happening. And I think it's super smart for us to do if you're, if you're in Discord, like, make sure you're on top of the discord scams that are happening and knowing how Discord works. And then also MetaMask, of course, because you're going to use that to transact in a lot of places. And you know, Twitter's kind of a really hotbed for crypto talk in general. So you're likely going to see some kind of sketchy looking things. So it's going to pay dividends to you if you know what to look for prior to anything really going down for you. All right, so another, a couple other places is YouTube. Obviously YouTube, you got a lot of creators. There's a lot of crypto people on there talking about new projects, cool stuff to get in, just people you've never heard of. So there's not really not saying that, you know, all, like, even the most reputable creator has all the trust in the world because there's still people at the end of the day that we're lending our trust to, just like us, Matt and I. Creating content. You trust us to an ext with what we're giving you, and I thank you for that. That's. That's super cool. Point being is there's a lot of sketchy characters on YouTube as well that have just created an account, maybe a video, maybe duplicated a bunch of videos, and they're leading people down a path with false information, telling them to maybe run some contract, a smart contract, you know, giving you instructions to do, promising the world in terms of returns, and then in turn, basically, you're giving access to your seed phrase again. That was actually something that Matt was showing me the other day. I definitely don' to point you to those videos because we don't want to be sending you down a bad path. Point being, again, is, if you see something on YouTube and it sounds too good to be true, or even if it does sound kind of legit, do your research. Go deep and take some time. Don't rush into anything, don't ape in anything if it doesn't feel right. Aping mean basically not doing a research or like, you know, just kind of like, nah, I'll just go for it. What we love to do is, like, really nerd out and look at research from all angles. Twitter, ask friends, maybe some masterminds. Go to discord, check out if they're legit. Have they been. Are they real people behind it? Are they using their names? You know, are they. Are they creating content? All this stuff really kind of checks more boxes in the gut and makes it feel like, okay, this is legit. I can put some funds into this or some attention, whatever it is, you know, and you have a little bit of better sense of what things are doing. So rather than just clicking and following directions, you definitely don't want to do that. You know, look out for yourself there. Another thing, last thing on the phishing part of stuff. So this is again, like the top three things. So fishing, you know, we talked about Discord, Twitter, YouTube. Another thing is just going to websites in general. So I've seen some really crazy stuff, and Matt has as well, where, you know, there might be a popular project in, say, defi, you know, like where Matt and I are in some defi projects just to test, and we kind of experiment with little funds here and there, stuff that, like, if we lost Those funds, we're not going to, you know, things aren't going to melt down. We're not going to be able to pay our bills. All that stuff like, like, everything will be okay, but it'll suck, you know, if we lost it. But at the end of the day, some of these projects get popular enough where scammers and these people will make a duplicate looking page. You know, a landing page will look pretty much the same, but the URL will be misspelled just slightly. Like, let's just say it's a common misspelling when someone's typing in. That's why when you go to these projects, one of the most common things you see is like, hey, check the. Like, it'll have a bar on top of the landing page that says, look at the URL and make sure it matches this. And whatever that URL is, you always want to double check you're on the right website, because a little one keystroke could be all the difference. And it could take you to this scammer site that basically looks legit. But when you connect your MetaMask wallet or whatever wallet you're using and then sign something, you could literally be signing your seed phrase again to them. Or maybe you deposit some money into their protocol or their project and you never see your money again. That also is happening. I've seen that on Twitter a lot. Some people on YouTube report this stuff. So those are kind of the ones to watch out when it comes to phishing. And that's where people are really looking for your private key so they can have access to your wallet and all your funds and NFTs and all that stuff that you worked really hard for. So keep a lookout for phishing. And that just. It just sucks. So you don't want to do that now. Rug pulls. That's kind of. That's a term that is more used in crypto, I think, more than anything. But essentially that is when a project is launched and it looks great, or at least it kind of looks good enough, and people invest into it, but then sooner or later, the team just leaves after the launch, after they received a ton of money and. Or maybe they just haven't been motivated to, like, follow through with what they promised. This happens. Obviously, it can happen in Internet marketing. You know, someone sells you a crappy product online and they promise you a bunch of stuff, but they just fall out and they don't deliver. I mean, it can happen there as well. Obviously. That's why refund policies and stuff like that exist. Or going to, you know, third party affiliate things that kind of back you a little bit. Like clickbank for instance, there's certain protections in place, but when it comes to crypto, there's not really a lot of protections in place. So rug pulls are something you also want to be aware of. And that happens a lot, mainly in the NFT markets. You see that in Defi sometimes as well. I mean, probably a lot more so now because that's becoming more popular. But like some of the first projects that Matt and I ever were involved in were rug pulls, or at least they kind of ended up being rug pulls, it seemed like. So that means, you know, they launched, they had all this hype before the project, and then when it came to launch day or drop day, you know, it sells out, let's say it sells out 10,000 units of this NFT project, whatever that is. But now, you know, they're left and I'm talking about they being the owners of this project, the people that released it. It. There's a lot of work that still is to be done. But you got to remember they just received a ton of cash or Ethereum, let's say some kind of cryptocurrency. They're loaded now for the most part. You know, they probably made a lot of these people. There's, there's a lot of folks launching these NFT projects. There's a video that we just got passed to the other day and they seem they're super legit and there's nothing against this, but like there are people making millions and millions and millions of dollars like that, more than they've ever made. But the problem there is that a lot of these folks have made a ton of money because they made the front of the project look really good. They got a lot of people, the right people pumping it, maybe influencers also shouting it out. But then they're not there to deliver on what they promised to the community and behind that thing they just sold. So that's a rug pull. You don't want to be involved with those, those suck. But let's be honest, a lot of people unfortunately have been involved because it's tough to do the due diligence on those types of things. But that goes back again to he, hey, look into the team. Are they legit? Do they look legit? Do they have a history, track record? Are they sharing their names or are they anonymous? You know, so as much as there's a lot of anonymous folks, not saying all anonymous type projects or artists and people, developers behind it are not legit, but you want to make sure they have a track record and you know, just doing your research and on the defi side of stuff, same kind of thing. I mean, if you know the person behind it, if they're creating content, if they're doing AMAs and you know, question and answer type things on Reddit or Twitter spaces and stuff like that, you get a better sense that, okay, they're in it for more the long run, you know, and ideally even you can get into most of these projects after it's launched, maybe not before, because there's not a lot of track record there. Most of the case, unless you have some reason to get in beforehand. You know, this goes for like NFT mints. There's a lot of people that just go and load up on the mints. Well, Matt and I now doing this for, I don't know, 4ish months or so, we see a lot more luck happening, or not luck, but we have a lot better results when it comes to dealing with projects that have been launched and have some momentum and some track record to them already. So we can start kind of seeing the trends and you can see the charts. You could see if people are actually selling what the price kind of looks like. So these are all reasons why, or these are all things that we look for now to prevent being rug pulled on something and basically losing our money. Because when you get rug pulled, for instance, on an NFT project or probably defi project too, that has not happened to us, knock on wood yet. Or at all. The value of your NFT or whatever you're holding to basically goes to nothing. You know, as long as there's, if there's no demand for it, why would someone buy it? So that's a rug pull. So you have fishing rug pull. And the last one is decentralized or centralized exchange hacks. This is one of example Ascend Ex hacked. I mean there's, there's a whole bunch of them, but this is one right here, 77 million. You know, this is essentially meaning that someone got a hold of, found a loophole or some hole inside of this exchange, which is where you go to put your funds in. And then you can trade some coins. That's an exchange. And there's centralized exchanges like Coinbase and some of these other ones. Kucoin I think is another one. And all these other ones, there's a whole ton of them. But then there's decentralized exchanges. Those are a lot safer for the most part. But when it comes to exchanges in general. If there's a way that you can put your funds, not leave them inside the exchange, but rather put them on cold storage, which is something called a ledger is one example. That's what we use. Show you some of this in a minute here. I want to give you some tools on what you can do for your security. The point is, don't just let your money hang around in one of these online centralized exchanges for too long, like get your trades. And if you can get your money onto a cold storage, like a device that you can hold on to, basically that means you hold your keys. That means your money is not floating around on, you know, on MetaMask, it's not stored there. You don't have the potential to just, you know, quickly sign something and there goes your funds. Potentially the idea is if you can hold your keys and your money, essentially that money is yours. So always think about that. If you're using exchanges, figure out a way to not just leave your money in the exchange, but to do something more secure, like. Like cold storage, which we'll get into in a minute here. And going back to 2017, I swear, I hate being hacked and all that, but when I got hacked the very first time back in 2017, it was about. I think it was like $2,000 worth of stuff got stolen from me because it was hanging out in this online exchange because I was actually doing some trading back in there and I remember logging in one day and all the money was gone. I was like, what just happened? And there was a hack and there's all sorts of stuff that went down with that exchange that was back in the day. But point being is there's issues across the board with this stuff, so don't get too comfortable with your money. If you have the ability to put that on a cold storage, definitely do that ASAP. App goes with NFTs too. You can do the same thing. So exchanges, you know, back to phishing and rug pulls, those are like the three things that we find that are. At least we see the most hacks and scams going down, which. Which is totally sucks. So, point being, again, I want to. I just want to leave you with. Well, I won't leave you quite yet, but there's a few things I want to go through in terms of, like, here are some of the components and things that you can use to, to make sure that you're more secure than not. And I want to start over here with a pretty one, which is my computer's about to Go to sleep. No, don't do that yet. LastPass. So LastPass.com will get you there. I mean, this is something I've been using, Matt, and it's been using for a long time just in our browser for security. But LastPass is great. Make sure you got LastPass all set up and you have unique passwords, you change your master password often you do all that stuff, it gives you a bunch of rundowns. Point being is, don't take your passwords lightly these days. People are savvy. There's a bunch of bots out there doing crazy stuff. I feel like it's more like AI bot warfare now more than ever online. And I feel like that's only going to increase. So it's better now to, to really get your head around security and really take it seriously, even if you're not in crypto. This is smart. We had Chris Parker on, you know, months back from the Easy Prey podcast and he was talking about a lot of this stuff. So don't be Easy Prey. I might even link to his checklist because he had like a cool security checklist. So LastPass definitely got to get LastPass. Now another thing is get two factor authentication set up on everything. I mean, like now Matt and I are so damn paranoid. It's crazy where we even have like our Instagram 2 factored. At least I do because I just got someone fricking hack that even or, you know, basically acted like they were me. Weird. Why would they do that? So Authy A u t h y.com will get you to authy.com and so this is a cool app that you can get two factor installed on pretty. So this thing has an app for your phone, it has an app for your computer. And so that basically gives you redundancy. So if you, you know, if you ever lose your phone, for instance, that means you can still go to your computer or some other device and still get into your websites. And if you don't know about two Factor, definitely go read about it. Go check out Authy. We like it. It's made by Twilio. So they've been around the game for a while. There's some other options, but Authy is what we use now when it goes to cold storage. So this is what I was mentioning earlier. We use the Ledger Nano X. That's what it's a new. And there's some other ones that are out there. Do your research on it. But Ledger is one of those that are. They've been around for years and Years they're integrated with a lot of the. There's a lot of exchanges that'll integrate with. I think Coinbase integrates it with it. So point being is like you can go to Coinbase for instance, go buy some coins, don't sit on them in Coinbase. Meaning, like, don't just like go buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever and keep it in Bitcoin Coinbase, go put it on your Nano. Put it on something where you can actually hold onto it, put it in your safe at home, you can lock that sucker up and have peace of mind knowing that you actually are not going to get ripped off because they are in your hands. So Nano X will actually allow you to do that. Now another one is securing your email. You might not even think about this, but protonmail.com that's protonmail.com gets you an encrypted email. So this actually is. It says a secure email based in Switzerland. Always makes it sound cooler when it's in Switzerland. But basically this, what you could do is make an anonymized email. That's what we would suggest. That's what we've done. So not using your name@protonmail.com but actually like, you know, letters and numbers, something that you can record offline somewhere else@protonmail.com and then use that for signing up for all of your crypto activities. So at least that way you know your, your personal email, which has happened to me as well, yay is like that can go into forums and stuff where spammers and bots and people can pull from. And I mean once your email, I think there's a. I forget the email or the website out there, but there's websites out there actually like check and see if your email has been, you know, basically pwned. You know, it's like, essentially like it's in the hands of spammers and you're just going to have a bunch of bots hit you up and try to break into your accounts. That sucks. And that's where passwords really come into play and some really high security two factor and stuff like that. But if you use ProtonMail and anonymize your email and really think about being strategic about what you sign up in all these crypto accounts, use your ProtonMail because at least that way it's not connected to your personal emails, your business emails, you don't want to go down that route. So just playing this wild wild west game, just know that there's, it's a lot of the stuff that doesn't sound fun, but it's like once you understand how all this stuff works and why it's so important, and now you're seeing the stats of, you know, the crazy amount of money that's being freaking taken from so many people without them knowing and without them thinking about it, they're thinking they're probably good to go. That's why you want to really hone in on your security. So other than that, VPNs sometimes come into play nicely. You know, that can help kind of change your location. So however you see that benefiting yourself, sometimes there are certain things that you need to be in other locations to be involved, you know, to get you in some exchanges or some kind of projects let you kind of figure out that on your own. I use NordVPN. I mean, there's a lot of good ones out there. But the point being is make sure you're secure in your passwords. Get two off two factor authentication going on there. Hardware wallet, something like the Ledger X is awesome. Oh, the other one is get like a waterproof or fireproof safe or even these little bags, I think they sell them on Amazon. And you know, that's great to have your notebook in with your security, you know, your seed phrases, any kind of passwords, maybe some addresses that you want to put in there, anything that you just don't want lost. Make sure that's all in a secure safe or bag that's waterproof, fireproof. Talk to your spouse, you know, or your partner, someone that if you hopefully, you know, you don't go away without them knowing where your money is or, you know, your collective money or funds. So having backups for all this is really smart to think this through before really diving deep into crypto or even getting involved at all. It's better to have this stuff secure. Email and VPN VPNs also help as well. So what I want to do to wrap this so exciting and so fun episode up is to show you this fun screenshot again. And for you, for y' all listening. Basically what I'm showing is just again, the, the, the screen that MetaMask gives you when you're signing up for new wallets. And I definitely, I also recommend when you're signing up for MetaMask wallets, sign up for a variety of them for different uses. So like for this one, I have a defi wallet. You can have an NFT wallet, you can have coin wallets, you can have a, an airdrop wallet wallet. You know, there's a lot of this kind of stuff we'll talk about and that just helps organize your funds. It also separates your funds so you're a little safer. But the whole point, the thing I have on screen here is just to remind you one last time because this is the most important thing, which is something that it's so easy to slip up if you're not paying attention or understanding what it is. Do not give away your secret recovery phrase or AKA your seed phrase. S E E D phrase. Don't give it away to anyone. No one's ever going to ask you for it. Well, can't say that the scammers will ask you for it, but no legitimate company is ever going to ask you for these private keys. That's another phrase that you'll hear them call private keys. Seed phrase or our secret recovery phrase. Don't give them away. It's the same thing. Don't give them away. So I just wanted to leave that with you and take a collective sigh of relief that, that I think everything's going to be better once you have all this stuff buttoned up. And let's hope that everyone else has lost and stolen things, that they come back in some form that's better. But that's our episode for today and I wanted to just give you a shout out for, for watching and actually sticking out with us because this is an interesting time with crypto. There's a lot happening. There's, you know, things are going to be just crazy for a while, I would say as this, this whole industry kind of shakes up and gets a little, little, you know, just warmed up to mainstream. Because right now, if we go back to like on that Monday episode I did with Matt, we had that chart that Matt said, he actually has it on his, in his office where it shows the usability on one line and then like the, the amount of money you can make above. But like over time they kind of crisscross. I can't really do it with my hands so well. But basically, you know, as more of the usability and the onboarding of mainstream happens, that means the earning potentials kind of go down. So the fact that it is really rough around the edges in terms of usability right now for a lot of folks, that's the earning potential. So that's the risk that's happening with being in the wild, wild west right now. But you know what, if you can, if you can kind of do it right and maybe you have a little bit of funds to play with and get involved, then Go for it. But again, do your research, not financial advice. But I hope you learn something new here and definitely join our Discord because we'd love to hear from you. We want to hear feedback from these episodes. Episodes, but also what you guys want to learn as well. Go over to hustleandflowchart.com Discord it's totally free. We're not charging to join the Discord. We're going to do some a lot of fun stuff over there. We already are. But we have a lot of new stuff planned that's coming with tokens that are just going to make it even more fun and open up new access. So good. Join us over there. House on flowchart.com discord and that's about it. So appreciate you very much and go share this around. Go hit the subscribe button. I should be hitting the. I don't know which one it is. It's one of these. I don't know the switcher for that. I don't have the call to action. But go subscribe. Go share this around if you can with your friends and someone that needs to know, and we'll see you next time. Peace. Thank you. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that, and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much and I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time. And Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of Easy Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zieman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. Well, and right now, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle that's H U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle. You can go grab a free trial and easy webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars, I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times, and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're gonna make more money and you're gonna work less with this thing and you're gonna create better relationships with the folks that are listening. Cause it's a good experience. You wanna give that good experience along with some great content, of course. And a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did, if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance. And we will talk to you next time. Bye. Bye.

Sam.