How a hijacked Lens handle happened and what to do about it

Transcript

gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead and we believe that security that verified links are going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. welcome to another episode everybody today we are talking all about how we got fished sad sad times over web to Academy a few weeks ago one of our team members wallets got drained from a phishing attack and in their wallet was

our lens handle which had over 60 000 followers tough tough times for us tough times for our team member who also lost a bunch of his assets what are we gonna do about this how do we learn from this mistake how do you or listeners stay safe with your asset and what are we going to do moving forward we've worked with lens and come up with some great Solutions really lenses come up with some great Solutions on how they are going to ensure security and safety of others lens handles so this doesn't happen to anyone else because it really sucks because we can't get this handle back even though we've tried many different ways and then we also brought in a new

partner wag who is going to talk all about their verified link solution which really is possibly this Silver Bullet that we've been all been looking for to ensure that phishing attacks aren't a thing in this space but in order for that to happen we all have to learn what wag is and we've all got to start using it or use some sort of verified link solution so that you don't click on a link that is the wrong link without even knowing it and Sebastian the founder of Weg who joins us today talks about how good these scammers are at making links that you would 99 or nine percent of humans would never be able to know that

it's a fake website and a fake link and because wallet transactions are also so difficult to read you know a bunch of zeros and x's and most of us don't know what that is we blind side all the time and so there's a big problem here a big big problem that we are going to talk about in today's podcast along with how we at Webster Academy are doing our part to fix it and what you can do as well so yeah really important episode this is the vital stuff this is the stuff that we need if we're going to have mass adoption we've got to iron this stuff out ourselves the builders here in web 3 so that when the hundreds of millions

come on over when they come on chain over the next couple of years that we are ready and that they don't get scammed and then leave so safety is so important security is so important thanks so much to everybody who showed up to our Twitter space we do these every week on Twitter so if you're not at this one make sure every week noon on Twitter will be doing these spaces which then get produced as a podcast so if you want to ask questions you can come to the Twitter space where we do a q a at the end and yeah enjoy this episode take a minute to hear from our awesome sponsors before we jump in the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and

right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving

along with you lens protocol enables self-sovereignty for your social graph and enter operability across the internet at Webster Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we've partnered with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today did you know that web 3 users lose billions of dollars every year due to phishing attacks if you've been in the space long enough then you or someone you know has probably Fallen victim to one of these scams this is why we've partnered with wag your guardian in this digital Wilderness wag is a tool designed to help you spot the difference between malicious links and legit ones with wag you can rest easy knowing that every link you click on is safe this is an absolute game changer for web3 as

part of our partnership with wag we'll be using their platform to create verifiable links to our community feels safe knowing that what they're clicking on is the real deal if you don't have a community to protect and you're just looking to protect yourself wake has you covered with safe stops which tell you exactly who created the link you're clicking on head to the link in the description click it see that it's verified by web Theory Academy and start protecting yourself today just use the code free 1000 when signing up and if you're among the first 1000 users you'll get free access for life we got Sebastian with us co-founder CEO of wag okay who is aiming to solve our greatest problem in web 3 in crypto which is security and hacks and all of our

wallets getting drained they're building an incredible app platform over at wag which is going to help us verify Lakes we'll be talking about that today we're also going to tell the story of how our lens handle was stolen we got fished at Webster Academy happens to us too Sebastian howdy gentlemen sorry about that Twitter was uh rugging my airpods again for usual it's excellent effects yeah I was just going to say that well that's the problem that I'm calling it the wrong thing so it's not happy with it yeah you gotta talk mess into it how are y'all doing today doing well Monday morning always excited to get back at it where are you calling inference about oh

I am in Dallas Texas and we by the grace of God have had a much cooler morning this morning than the past several days so I'm really excited about today just generally speaking I mean I grew up getting getting back to it and not melting every time I walk outside it's a big win go Cowboys I played rugby so I'm not going to be great at talking about football but I appreciate for nevertheless a Texan who doesn't play football oh boy that's a tough go for you I mean I'm from Jamaica so I'm at Texan but I'm not like holy Texan needless to say yeah definitely went through that hell for a bit but came out on the other side somehow well speaking about going through hell and

coming on the other side today we are getting into how we went through Hell by losing our lens handle our lens handle was stolen we got stashed we're going to tell you guys the story of what happened so you could all learn how to make sure it doesn't happen to you always important to share the stories of you know the bad things that happened to us we tend not talk about it so much but very important and then we're going to talk about what's next what are we doing to fix scams what are we doing at Webster Academy and that's why we got Sebastian from wag joining us so we're gonna tell you guys what we're doing with verified links and then we're also going to tell you

what's next with our lens handle which ties into Webster Academy 2.0 and our current roadmap we are in week two I hope you all minted our free event last week but if you didn't don't worry let's get her started by talking about the story of what happened to the web3 academy let's handle our lens handle which had over 60 000 followers was unfortunately fished Raul I think you were the first to find out yes why don't you start from the beginning what what happened how did it all go down yes so our less handle basically just switched hands a few times throughout like our time on lens we've been there since the

beginning since last hour and we've gained over 6 000 followers on there and basically what we did was one poor management of like how we held the handle the NFC and two we got scammed by web3 because we know that's a big problem so basically what happened is um we held the nft in a wallet that we interact with on a daily basis so the person who held our our lens was interacting for like personal stuff on the web3 space doing all the things that we love to do every day and unfortunately they clicked on uh wrong link that was not legit and there there was no way of them knowing like that it was a phishing link or maybe you didn't

notice it from from the start and that was basically the end of the story because once the hiker gets access to your wallet you're pretty much done that's the story of how we got Shish we just basically clicked the wrong link and we didn't realize it in time to you know to protect our acetate on there and uh especially our lead sandal what we're doing to fix the situation is thanks to our to lens they just implemented this this feature where you can send the nft out outside of your wallet so you can hold me like a hardware wallet for example and then share access to it through like four or five custodians that you know can interact on your last profile which is super great in terms of security but that still doesn't like fix all the spam and scab issues that web3 has to deal with every day which is like

mostly fishing things and we are using wag to verify our links and I think I'm not gonna give away how we're doing that just yet I think I'm just going to give the word over to Sebastian to tell us how this works and how we're using this you're getting ahead yeah okay sorry where are you going I'm the moderator bro you answer the question okay so Raul woke up one morning heard from another one of our team members he had got fished I hope we all have an experiences but if you have experienced it when you wake up and you realize that you look in your wallet and you've been drained what an awful awful feeling that is and it's just such a it's such a big problem in the case of web3 Academy we lost our handle which had over 16 000

followers so that's a real loss for us I mean obviously we believe we can build it back up but that sucks but also the individual on our team who was fished you lost many other things from his wallet as well so it was a tough day to Academy certainly I remember waking up myself I'm usually the last person on the team wake up because I'm in the western part of Canada so and we're waking up and Discord going off and everybody was like what's going on and where is it how do we get it back you know you really it affects your your mental state and you really get emotional and you get reactive that we all there was a bit of yelling at each other because you know you're looking to blame each other whose

fault at this thankfully our fearless leader Kyle came in and said hey guys everybody take a deep breath this is nobody's fault it happens we'll we'll take it one step at a time and we'll figure out how to fix it kind of know if you want to jump in and talk at all about that day and your feelings and what we've experienced yeah just to give some context in terms of fishing and how this works what happens for those that maybe haven't had this happen or unsure if you know it's happened to them because when you go to sign a transaction what hackers do or scammers will do and they'll get you to sign a transaction that allows you to or allows them to basically take anything from the wallet so you're actually signing a transaction that's sending everything out of the wallet but you don't know

that because the way the wallet ux is is you can't really understand what that transaction is unless you understand a lot of times there's a bunch of x's and o's and you're like well what does this even mean most of the time though you can did you really read the details the problems most people don't but if you read the details you can see that you're sending XXXX like all the different things so if you actually read the details before you click that sign you'll see what's happening most people just don't do that because we're used to the web 2 world click around and there's no risk there is risk when it's you know you custody your own assets unfortunately that's a great thing to cut your own assets but also it comes with the risk and the downfalls of potentially sending them to the wrong

spot so two things you want to be one is double check your signatures every time you're gonna sign anything read what the heck that thing says and read what you're signing before you do it doesn't matter if it's a hardware wallet if you sign that transaction and it's a phishing attack it's gone doesn't matter what wall you use so that's the first thing and then second is don't hold your assets on wallets that you're interacting with applications with we talk about this one all the time if you're going to interact with apps uniswap openc whatever have a dummy wallet that you do that with and then as soon as an asset goes into that wallet you move it out to a different wall that you don't interact with that's what our social media person should have done is they should not have had the lens in

their normal wallet they go and they use to like mint things you should always mint with a separate wallet and then hold drafts in a different wall so that was the big mistake and then the other problem was just they clicked on a link that they didn't realize was a phishing link and that's really where the big issue comes is about there is it's really hard to tell what's a bad link and what's not right oftentimes it'll be like let's say it's lensprotocol.com or whatever I think they're lens.xyz they'll like switch out a letter or something and so oftentimes you'll see you'll see it on Twitter too the account might be Webster Academy but they'll like get rid of the E and so it's WB right instead of w-e-b and a lot of people just miss that and so that's when you end up getting fished happens all

the time so just things to be aware of you got to be double checking when you're clicking things because again these are all assets a couple things I just want to get into what lens has done just so we we have that unlock and then we can go into further things cool so two things that lead has done to help with this so one is delegate access so like what Raul said this happens with lens V2 which isn't live yet but it will be in the coming weeks is you put your lens profile in I don't know a hardware wallet whatever that you'd never use you'd ever interact with and then you delegate access to other wallets to go and post and comment and do things on but they don't have to actually hold the nft which is great if you think of this compared to the web 2 world right now

for us to have multiple people use our own Twitter we have to have like five different people from different countries all log into the same account using the same username and password that's actually not a good idea but it's the only way you can do it for things like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and every other web 2 app you can't delegate access for another account to go and tweet on your behalf or do things on your behalf it's a risk so lens is actually ahead of other web 2 apps by doing that which is super cool the other thing they've done is something called profile Guardian this they did after we were fished there was a bunch of lens accounts that got fished some of them were quite big not just us we were the largest because we're one of the largest accounts on lens but what lens did is

they said hey all hands on deck we need to figure out a solution list because bunches are getting their lens handles stolen or fished so what they did is they actually stopped working on anything else on lens and they built in this functionality where now all lens handles have a guardian attached to it where as soon as a handle is like minted or shared to someone so it's transferred it has this delay where you can't do anything with it for seven days well actually you have to disable this Guardian and then after seven days of disabling then you can send it so even right now we've minted a new one I can't send someone else until seven days after I've disabled this Guardian so even if someone fished my wallet they could take other things out of my wallet but they can't take my lens handle it's actually

stuck there unless they go and disable it then they still have to wait seven days which by then maybe I can figure something out what the solution is to that I don't know but at least there's something in place to like have a bit of a break instead of waking up the next day and it's gone you wake up you're like okay someone has hacked my account but they can't take anything yet the other thing this profile grinding does it's really cool that I think everyone needs to implement is when you go to sign that transaction that phishing transaction that takes all of your stuff it a pop-up appears now in the wallet that says are you sure you want to give away your lens account or your lens handle which is good because the person that we had on our team when they went

to sign a transaction had nothing to do with lens they were signing something completely different that had nothing to do with lens but randomly this would come up and say are you sure you want to give away your lens handle which will mean immediately tell you oh I'm citing something that's incorrect I'd hope you then just don't go inside that transaction ideally so that's the other thing that they've just included in this profile Garden which I think is super key so we need more things that before you sign or before you click which is what we'll talk about where you why we brought them in already warns you ahead of time that's the key right there's great to do things you've already made the signature but once you've made it kind of screwed so we need things that are warning you ahead of time which is what life has done and

then more of what we'll talk about with wag as well great thanks so much Kai yeah so as Kai said we get stuck in web3 because the ux is so difficult in wallets that you end up signing a transaction that you do not realize is a phishing attack and you usually sign that transaction from a website that looks like an exact replica of the website you thought you were going to so I saw a fishing I seen a bunch this morning world coin is talking about some big announcements out of world coin coming and there's a whole bunch of phishing attacks already on Twitter people will pay for ads on Twitter they will create Twitter accounts that have

tens of thousands of followers so you think it's legit you think it's World coin as Kai said usually it's just a different spelling in the Twitter name and then maybe also a different spelling in the link and then you go to that link it looks like World coins website you click connect wall you see you connect your wall you sign to do a transaction and boom you've been fished so the biggest thing is always take a deep breath and read the names just look at the link and make sure it is the correct link and any of the other simple thing is rather than you go direct from let's say you're on Twitter and you want to go to worldcoin don't just click the link and go to worldcoin go type in the world

coin URL in your browser and go that way because then you know you're going to the correct home page the correct website where you want it to be Sebastian I want to get you over on here now to talk about wag let's start though with what's your view you know you as a Founder in the space who is dedicating yours and your team's tie to really solving being a part of solving the security and scam issue that we have take us back to sort of the beginning of like did something happen to you that made you want to start this company did something happen to a friend of yours what's the origin story of wagon so I'm so glad you asked last year we were

working another project and while we were working on that project we started to look around and see constant headlines saying more or less the same thing massive nft collection hacked community members wallets drained massive Twitter personality hacked sends out fake airdrop Lake followers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to connecting wallets to a fishing link it just seemed like something that was popping up again and again and again and nobody was really doing anything to fix that now as people that all believe in webstery and believe in the opportunity it presents and the potential that it represents

if you have an industry that's so full of scams and phishing attacks and big losses that are all over you know news outlets new people aren't going to come in and they're not going to join me so we really thought all right is there a way that we can actually step in build a product that makes a difference and make this into an ecosystem that's just generally more friendly and if the answer is yes we should do it so we started thinking okay what are we going to build let's build trust and that's really what wide was built around is that concept of helping people build trust in web 3. so we did all of our research we started talking to people that had been hacked before people whose accounts had have

been cracked into and whose followers had started suffering we went through What's called the mom test we asked all these people about their experiences and at the end of the day we realized hey we've got an idea here these people are interested let's go ahead and do it and that's pretty much how I was born I love the lump test that's a great start to any any business it's totally necessary too if we're being honest did completely so what is Wag that tell us we've been sort of teasing it and tell us what you've built what you are building yeah absolutely so wag is the verified link solution you guys were kind of talking about this a little bit earlier with stake links what hackers like to do is they replace Latin letters with visually

identical Cyrillic counterparts to create domain names so they can actually create domain names that look exactly like the correct URL and humans just can't tell it makes them a pretty difficult situation for a lot of these people the way that wag works is we allow anybody to create a profile with either a Google account or their web through wallet so metamask Etc as they go through the process of creating account they've got to actually verify their identity by connecting it these three other socials so you're just oauthing in and what this does is it makes it so that people can't actually create wag profiles unless they're real people that's a big deal here so when you create this account you connect your

socials you get what's called a wag tie which is your verified digital identity in our system and your wagtag can only actually be derived from your legal name or the handles of one of the socials you'd connect to verify your identity again this is a really big deal here it's an important concept like people are who they say they are in our system and wide actually stands for where humans are going after you've gone through this entire process and created your account you can start making what we're calling verified links ASAP when you create a link with us it's just like creating a short link with Italy but there are two key differences the first one is when you use bitly to create a shortened link you can create that link with anything bitly doesn't check it against any sort of list to make sure

that it's good or not and in fact fifty percent of links made with bitly are actually phishing links there are a lot of problems with that I mean if you're using that from a marketing perspective and you send stuff out like your email is probably going to get blacklisted not great deliverability goes down with us when you actually drop the URL in we run it against our block list so if someone tries to create a malicious link with wag the system is going to flag it and it's going to say we're sorry you can't create that link you can only create good links to complete that process you actually have to sign that link with your wallet so there is a digital signature connected to every single wide link if you've signed up with your

wallet your personal wallet that's your signature if it's all lost in with Google we actually give you guys a lot on the back end then it signs too so you can be a web two person and use wag you'll never know that there's blockchain in there but you're still going to get the benefits after that Link's connected or collected created when you share that link anybody who clicks on that link is going to be taken to an interstitial called the safe stock and that save stop is going to tell you the snake is verified with wag and it's going to say lens Academy made this link or it's going to say Webster Academy made this link and then it's going to redirect you to your destination URL so literally every single time somebody clicks on a wag link they're gonna know who created that link they're going to be able to

verify that person's a real person and they're going to know that the URL that they're being redirected to at the end is something that they can trust and interact with that's amazing this is exactly what we need in the space which is why at web3 Academy we partnered with wag to ensure that our links are safe Sebastian I also didn't know that wag stands for where humans are going that's awesome to know the origin story of the name Raul I want to go over to you to share how we are using wag in our links to ensure that our followers and our listeners don't get cushed yeah so I think that people have a really hard time understanding when we're like explaining how this works so what I've done is I've put a comment under the

space it's a link that's made with wag and that takes you to our lens profile so if everyone just makes that they will be redirected to the safe stop that Sebastian mentioned and then they can verify that this link has been made by webto Academy and they continue to the destination they will be redirected to lens friends where they can follow our profile so I think like to properly visualize how this works and like the benefits of this I think people just need to use this so expect more of our links to have this safe stop enabled so when you're when you're gonna click on uh to go to our newsletter or to a podcast or to lens or whatever we we send you to expect pop-up that mentions that this link is verified and that it

was made by webto Academy and then you can simply go and interact with the content on the other side and for those listening on the podcast we'll have the link action in the show notes so you can experience this yourself Kai I want to go over to you on what's your views on how we get the entire space to have better security using link verification is obviously a step in the right direction do you feel like we can get the space to adopt this at Mass obviously there's challenges with adopting new tools Sebastian I'll get you involved in this conversation as well Kai what do you think for the next steps yeah good question I think there's a lot we've got to do I mean the thing

is this isn't even necessarily a web very specific problem I mean there's been phishing you know in web 2 as well so this is just a problem internet we use links this is how we get around on the internet and we have no verification tool for them until Weg so I think absolutely this is something we need to adopt both in web 3 but just traditionally as well I think it would be amazing if every link We clicked on even if it was I mean right now it's kind of an intermediary link where you click it a page shows up so says it's verified and then you move and then it redirects you to the right thing which is amazing if we can find ways to like simplify that make it even easier maybe it's like a browser that pops up with a notification making sure that you know

that it's a verified link and just making that kind of an easier ux we'll just I think we'll make it something that'll become more more popular more widely used so I think absolutely we need to continue to push out which is why you know we decided to be one of the first ones with wag to push us out we hope that others in the space you know we'll continue to do this especially with with web3 links because obviously everything's a financial asset and we have self-custody so if you if you click the wrong link then you lose it then you're screwed in web 2 at least like if it's a bank or something they can always just I don't know change the numbers in their database and get your money back not possible in web three so we need to push that you know applications and

companies in the space start to use verified links I think it's extremely extremely important so one kudos to wag for building this and doing it so quick I know it was like last year where you guys came across that big issue and have built out something pretty amazing so we hope that we'll be one of the first to sort of lead this and we hope that others will continue to do it as well I think other things like account abstraction is going to be a massive change to the space that's going to get rid of a lot of these fishing links because this exciting aspect will be just very different so we need kind of smart contract wallets and account abstraction to continue to build out I think we're still years from that and so I think that just means that right now it's even more important that we

continue to push you know these verified links because it's really the only solution to this right now I don't think we're gonna get the mainstream to be like reading everything they're clicking on and to like take these steps of you know reviewing what the transaction is in your wallet and you know like you said going to worldcoin.com or whatever instead of just clicking a link like it's going to be tough to get people to do that and so we need verified links to be the thing that is telling people and kind of notifying people if it's a good or bad link so I don't really see another solution so I I'm a big supporter of what wag's doing and hopefully we can continue to push that so Sebastian over to you I'm sure the the thing that keeps you up at night adoption growing wag to more communities

and more projects not an easy task you know to get people to use a new service a new link verification how are you guys tackling that's a great question if you have an answer let me know oh I'd love to hear it the cold start problem is hard for everyone but we're a little bit different from most other cyber security platforms again we're not just building platforms we're building trust we are a trust-based system but we're also a trust Network so something I didn't touch on earlier that's really awesome wag is not a static thing it's growing it's living it's constantly evolving we've got a really cool feature that allows anybody who's actually a Community member to report a malicious link to the block list so anyone can report it will approve it add it it gets

added to the block list so it's another thing that's checked when someone tries to actually create a URL but more importantly we're working on a Chrome extension that when released if you have this thing installed it's going to block you from accessing anything that's on the block list and when we talk about this that's kind of the the unlock for General consumer adoption and also for communities if you want to do your part and help keep everyone else around you say well the people that you care about the guys that you talk to every day hey your parents and your grandparents you join wag you submit these links that you find that are bad that are malicious that are fishing links malware links you install the Chrome extension for them

and it protects we're also working on Integrations right now to try and actually integrate directly into Discord and slack so if you have a wag account you'd be able to connect it to your Discord go in slash wag drop the URL it would automatically create a wagged link for you and then you can share it with the people in there immediately so these are all things to kind of increase the surface area increase our ability to keep people safe increase visibility and really try to make a concentrated push out there to protect everybody and to give people the power to protect each other I love it those are great I think one of the biggest questions that I have and I'd love to get everybody's thoughts on is there's always this balance with creating a

secure ecosystem and a secure user experience with convenience right and quite frankly users generally the majority they favor convenience so they click fast they don't take the time to review and check how do we shift that user mentality even in the case of wag when we use wagon you you'll see this everybody listening when you go through this experience of as Raul said you click the link whether on the podcast and the show notes or in Twitter you can click it in the comments and you'll go to the intermediary page there's more clicks that people need to take so that's what enhanced security enhanced security meets more time and more clicks

which generally users do not favor now Kai you said that you think that things like account abstraction will remove a lot of these things which is great and I'm sure Sebastian you guys are working on that too but I'm curious what you guys think in terms of how you approach years of behavior if you're talking to somebody new what would you be telling them in terms of this balance of like convenience and security well I my immediate response is that we've been listening to every single thing that you guys as user has been telling us and we're actually currently updating the safe stock to automatically redirect to the destination URL after three seconds so that the person who clicks on it doesn't have to click again favorite convenience I like yes and also we've

got that whole secure link drop down section on our safe stops with additional information if you do click that and you're interested in the additional stuff clicking that and expanding will actually pause the countdown so that it doesn't automatically redirect so yes we're adding convenience but we're also still allowing people who are interested in everything on that page to pause it and take as long as they want to to view all of the information before going to the Final Destination amazing Kai Raul what are your thoughts on this balance of convenience versus security it's something that people are going to have to learn there's a learning curve to this right like we never had these issues previously to web3 so we just run around clicking things and it doesn't really matter there was no consequences

and now there are now people have to take responsibility for their assets and for the things that they're doing so I always actually always kind of say this is like every cycle everyone goes through this where they get fished or they put their assets on a centralized exchange and they lose them everything blows up bunch of people get screwed over and then they kind of learn and then the next cycle they're the ones yelling and screaming like about your keys not your coins and they're the ones that are like taking Extreme Caution and so it's like part of me just thinks that we all have to just go through this and then we'll just kind of learn but hopefully you know things like this whether it's preventive it then people don't have to go through it but it's a learning experience for sure because it's a completely new way of using the

internet and I agree like I think it's just a problem that we have before and now we do and people are not really realizing it yet I think like when people see like 2 billion lost in fishing types like just a statistic for them unless they're like part of it as more people realize this they that like the problem will will need to be solved well it's it's literally every 11 seconds of phishing attack occurs there are 3.4 billion fishing emails sent every day whether or not people think that this is an issue for them it surfaces in their lives on a regular basis Yes actually Sebastian just gonna ask you what other numbers do you have in terms of the the scale of this problem I've got all the numbers in the

world I won't bore you all of them though I will just give you a few select few so if you want to talk about financial losses big picture right so over the past five years the FBI has estimated that over 12 billion dollars has been stolen due to fishing and between January 1st 2021 and March 31st 2022 1.1 billion was reported to the FTC as lost to fraud originating on social media alone yikes and it's Edition the primary is there any other way that these attacks and scams happen or is it really mostly done through fishing a lot of it is fishing there are other more sophisticated malware specific attacks but fishing is the most common because it's the easiest to do it doesn't take much I mean again you you

fake the link you use bitly you share it people click on it and that's kind of the end of it the one that really gets people the most in in our world though it's if they're Discord is infiltrated or someone gets Sim swapped and we've seen this like with 10 massive accounts recently just last week what was it uniswap's founder I think got Sim swapped and then his Twitter got taken over and they started posting fake Air droplets right so if you trust that person and they've done you no wrong previously and these guys that have you know two three four five hundred thousand to a million followers on Twitter you know at least 10 percent of those people are going to click on that link and then

it's kind of game over some other issues that have happened recently I don't know if you guys saw this news article but this one was about nft drainers like Inferno and Venom that are being used to care at fishing attacks pretty often and they are compromising discords those drainers actually circumvent transaction simulated Chrome extensions so they're not helpful and they were used to steal about 73 million for 32 000 wallets and they compromised over 900 Discord servers recently and that's purely web3 focused yes Sebastian you bring up a good point on that a lot of people you see here last year people saying only click on links from like you know the original account so the verified unit swap account or whatever and then the problem is is now the standards have all gone hacked those accounts and then said it so for this to

really work it needs to be at the link level right that's exactly what you guys have created because you can't trust the account either because I've actually seen this a bunch I think it was is it Zora I forget it I think it was Zora but they also got hacked like a couple weeks ago and I actually clicked on it I didn't sign a transaction I was like ah this doesn't seem it seems off but it was their like business account that's verified on Twitter that had this fishing link and like you said Hayden Bermuda swab that happened here last week when he was at ECC I mean it's happening from the account level two so it's it's all about it's you got to go to the root of the problem which is the link itself and so that's why I like what you guys have built thank you and

that's what we thought too like these things all start off with one problem a malicious link like if you can kind of help people out at that basic basic level then you reduce risk considerably so let's say unfortunate situation one of us gets Sim swapped and our twitters get compromised and we've got all these followers and people are used to clicking on our stuff if people know that our standard is to only share wag links and then suddenly there's a link that's shared that's not a wag link you know at the very least that raises a red flag and people can go okay this is a little abnormal they only share stuff with lag links why is this one not a wag link I don't think I'm going to trust it and if we take this a step further once we have this Chrome

extension done and people have this thing installed if this happens and that malicious link is identified anyone can immediately if they're a wag member submit that malicious link to the block list and if they have the Chrome extension installed everyone else even if they click on that bad link they're going to be safe so everybody here become an away member start submitting your bad lengths and join in making the community safer because this is all of our responsibilities we all need to solve this problem together it's not a problem that one company or one person can solve it needs to be a community-led effort and then also we all need to push if you're involved in any projects bring it up to your project founder bring it

up to those leading your project of like hey I've heard about wag you guys should consider using them in order to verify our links I think it's a great way to make sure everyone in our community is safe because this really needs to come from the bottom it needs to come from all of us who are users in the space because if it comes from the top down it needs to be top down and bottom up in order to achieve the adoption that we need to make this happen Sebastian can can those that are in here get a link or yeah proving links absolutely let me go ahead and draw I'll drop our sign up link in here for you guys also I just want better be verified yeah you know it will be and also just sit like you know you guys are early users if you're using

this platform and you love it and it's awesome because it is but there are little things that you want to change tell us like we want to make this the thing that everyone's using and that means taking in feedback iterating accordingly solving all these problems and transforming this into something that is low friction and solves the problem and everyone is happy and excited to use every day and incorporate into their regular workflow and I just want to add in here so Sebastian mentioned earlier the cold start problem and right now when you click on one of the link that Sebastian's gonna share in the comments and we'll also put in the show notes or they'll link them around will shared earlier that takes you to our new lens handle you're going to experience the wag link verification

process and that might seem weird to you because you never experienced it before so there's going to be a page that comes up that says hey this is verified by wag and quite honestly sometimes to a lot of people that can feel scammy because you're oh my gosh I've never experienced this before so we want you guys to know those listening this is part of the process and this is the intermediary step that we need in order to make link verification work is there's now going to be we're going to encourage all people web3 to take this step where when you click a link there's an intermediary step where it says hey this is verified by wag we're using safe stop we are taking the time to make sure that you

know that this link is safe so first time you go through it it feel a little bit weird don't worry it's totally normal it's a new experience new experiences especially with links can be a little bit scary but that is part of the process that is part of how wag ensures that you are safe awesome I want to go to next steps in web3 Academy 2.0 we're in week two of web3 Academy 2.0 which is our new brand that we just launched last week over 100 people minted our free mint last week shout out to all those who did thanks so much for your support and this week is all about launching our new lens handle and following us on lens and doing so by experiencing what it is like to go

through Wags link verification Raul tell us how can people take the step to be involved in web3 Academy 2.0 this week yeah it's simple just use the link in the comments here or if you're missing on the podcast in the show notes to follow us on lens and that's basically then just stay tuned for for phase three Olympic Academy 2.0 easy peasy follow us on lens be part of the next phase in the journey web3 Academy 2.0 is a multi week new launch that we have as we are focused on really taking Webster Academy from where we are now into the next phase which is bringing up more on chain with more security and more safety and creating more experiences for you our listeners and for our readers of our

newsletter and for community members in Discord so that you can experience and be involved with our content in more of an on-chain manner moving Web Academy from online to on chain as we make this migration which we hope the whole world is making along with us we want to be leaders in that so excited for all of you to participate in the second phase of web3 Academy 2.0 before we wrap today Sebastian I want to give it over to you just one more chance to shill how can people get involved in wag anything else that you want to tell people or maybe just anything that you want to tell people in order to stay safe start using wag I mean we are free for the first thousand users for life and we've gotten

new people join in every day so that that free tier is rapidly going away that is partially thanks to you Kyle having you guys oh did Kyle go away oh maybe he did he didn't appreciate the compliment oh man that was my mistake but yeah I think really sign up join us tell everybody you know about what we're doing and get people to start using these lights because the more people use Wag the larger the network becomes and the stronger it becomes and the stronger it becomes the safer everyone who's in it becomes two I mean it really is a snowballing effect yeah follow us on Twitter join us let us know what you think if you want anything updated changed if you love it we want to hear it if you don't love it tell us

to and we're gonna make you love it that's what this experience is all about I love your approach Sebastian like building it with the community alongside the community you're a user tree your objective is to just keep everybody safe and be part of making web3 better for not just us but for our moms and all of our friends and family who are not here yet read all these articles with all these scams and they're scared of the space we're going to make it safe for everybody Sebastian I got one question before we wrap up here you talked about how users the general Community can be can participate in reporting scam link to your block list which I think is amazing is there plans in the future to you perhaps launch a token and

incentivize users to being reporters I realize I'm way down your roadmap here but obviously when we talk about building web 3 businesses tokens are a big part of that just curious if you guys have thought about that so we thought about it in every single person in this space has asked us that same question and I'm going to say that there is no token coming because I'm also a Securities attorney who has been in the space for several years and I know how this game goes we will come up with ways to incentivize people to participate but to be completely Frank the idea of issuing a token just right now I mean I'm based in the US Bible team is based in the US a regulatory environment it's just not particularly friendly if things change and things like that if the xrp decision

becomes final and we get some guidelines or congress actually we get some guidelines that tells us how we can do things in a way that we're not going to get in trouble then maybe we can come back and talk about that but for the time being that's not going to be a primary focus so if you didn't already trust Sebastian now you should really trust him because he's a Securities lawyer who's doing things by the letter of the law and he's not leaning into how to do this the scammy or the fast way which we all have seen many projects do before Sebastian once again leaning by example for the way that we should build companies in the space love to see it love to see it and Sebastian mentioned that the first 1000 users on wag get wag

free from light the link for that is also in the show notes Raul I don't know if you can throw that link in the comments here on Twitter as well so people can get that we're gonna wrap up the podcast thanks so much everybody for joining in really really want to just Hammer home this point please please use wag it is just such an important step to us ensuring that safety comes into the space and security and so use it personally use it for your projects if you know other projects please pass along the link to other projects tell everybody about wagon using link verification it's just so simple it takes seconds to set up there's no reason why we wouldn't all do it and it's going to make such a difference for

everybody when we can finally stop talking about scans and phishing and we can more so talk about building and all the cool stuff that's happening all right that's a wrap thanks so much for listening and everybody have yourself a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3.

make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and Webster are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one