Part 1 - The devastating loss of the first battle.

I'm back bi... baby!!!

Aaaaah…. This feels good if I am being completely honest here. It has been a long and grueling battle, and i have certainly sustained losses and taken damage. But i sit here, typing before you, victorious over my enemy, the copy and paste malware, and i have forced what remains of my hard and software to submit to my will once more.

As usual please have a look at my sponsor's pages. Their content is awesome!

[edit]this article is dedicated to my dear departed friend, Erwin "Dj Wakiyan" Smids! Rest in Peace buddy@[/edit]

What we gonna do right here is go back, back into time.

I can’t believe it all started about two weeks ago. I think it was the day that i happily declared i was joining the 1BCH club, and what my plans were for making it into 2 or 4 or something. Well, no that’s not really when the trouble started, but i am convinced that was the day that gave cause to whatever forces of reality and this Universe that relentlessly insist on punishing me for either having good luck or being happy to strike down upon me with furious anger.

The prelude to the battle.

The trouble started a few days after that. It was when the bridge for SmartBCH became available, and the cats and dogs tokens was almost the only thing you saw both on this site as well as on reddit an twitter and you name it. And though my experiences in the past have made me less prone to throw myself into the throng of the gold-rush to get a piece of the pie or die trying i am not averse to making a few quick bucks. That and a genuine interest in the way the SmartBCH sidechain, the bridge and the tokens would actually work made me decide to have a go at it myself, in the hopes that at the very least i would end up with a nice article for my cashing read friends here.

Hindsight. 20-20!

Man if i knew then what i know now, i’d closed down my computer, downed a couple of beers and went to bed for a day or three. It would have saved me a lot of aggravation, BCH, close encounters of the ironic kind and so many hours of time it is too ridiculous to actually count and contemplate. But bottom line is that i didn’t, and as you might have guessed by this point, i am going to tell you all about it.

Let some good come from.... or some shit like that.

Not because i’m fishing for sympathy but because, as always when someone goes through misery and adversity, somewhere in the misfortune and stupidly bad luck shitshow that i went through there is probably a lesson to be learned by some one, some how, some time. Hope you can spot it, because so far it has successfully eluded me.

The battle i didn't know was a battle.

So there i was, having some BCH without a purpose and the rest ready to go to the paper wallet that i had made just for the purpose of longer term HODLing. I fired up the computer and logged into the exchange where i had consolidated pretty much everything crypto i owned and grabbed the paper with the paper wallet’s address and the seed phrase for importing it into a wallet on it, and continued to prepare to move the BCH in two transactions to my HODL wallet and to the account i had set up on coinflex.

I had a nice dj set by DJ Wakiyan

(Rest in peace my friend, we are still missing you every day!)

...pumping out of the speakers which informed me my neighbors were listening to good music… whether they wanted to or not.

No moments of feeling good go unpunished?

I had a fresh pot of coffee, some snacks and was in a better mood than usual. I was almost happy. In that happy mood and relaxed atmosphere i went through the motions of importing the paper wallet into the wallet app, logging onto the exchange where i had the bch’s and fired up google authenticator for the 2fa that i’d be asked when doing the transfer submitting. Also fired up a separate window with coinflex logged in, and the deposit address ready to go onscreen.

Like lambs to the slaughter

Once in the exchange i started the first withdraw, filled out the amount, 0.5BCH, and then copied the destination address of my HODL wallet, and pasted it into the withdraw screen on the exchange. Submit, click, 2fa code from google, click submit. Ok.

One more submit. There. First job done. On to the next.

The first casualty fallen, and didn't even know it.

Shoved two frikadellen into my mouth (love those things, i’m guilty. Sew me!) and washed it away with a nice steaming cup of coffee. The music was bouncing loudly from the sub-woofer and i was enjoying myself pretty much.

Clickety clackety... the sound of disappearing BCH.

The second withdraw transaction, clickety clackety, yes the rest of the amount that was left, 0.6BCH, and then switch to coinflex screen…. Copy address, clickety clackety, paste…. Submit… google authentication…. Clickety clackety….

Done.

Or rather, unbeknown to me at that moment, GONE. It would take me another three hours of growing despair, anxiety, and fear, trying to figure out why my two transactions were not reaching the destinations i thought i had sent them to. I even went through a period of frustrated denial, and a conversation with a support desk employee whom i still feel guilty towards to this day despite sending a bottle of wine and flowers to the company she works for addressed to her name a week ago. It was not my shining moment of glorious humanity, lets just keep it at that.

Cut open belly, wrench out guts, feel that.

But finally, the realization that the address in the transaction on the blockchain was not the addresses i had sent the transactions to forced me to accept that 1: I was a dumb ass. 2: I had just sent 1.1BCH to an unknown address probably belonging to a Russian script kiddie and 3: As i am not totally stupid and did not enter the address the bch was now being joined by brothers and sisters from many other sources into the destination address field myself i had to be infected with a malware some how… A test copying my own hodl wallet (not hodling much) into cache with ctrl-c and then ctrl-v it in anoter withdraw screen on the exchange confirmed it alright. The pasted address was the same address that the blockchain said my bch’s were now residing.

At least i learned the true meaning of "sickening feeling", that's got to count for something.

Thinking back to that moment, the moment i couldn’t deny anymore and i accepted the facts that i was infected and lost my bch, literally makes my stomach churn, my eyes burn and breathing feels like someone is sitting on my chest. It is still very much painful for me to think about it. That feeling like there is suddenly no floor beneath you and you’re falling down with nothing to reach for or grab to stop you from falling… it is one of the most sickening feelings i know. And you’re going to have to trust me on this one, or read my previous articles, i know a lot of sickening feelings from experience. So when i say that’s one of the most sickening feelings there is… That’s saying something.

Let me explain something real quick for clarification.

I am no slouch when it comes to awareness of, experience with and skills combating the evil that is malware. I have had a 30 year career in the IT-sector, working in all lines of the IT services. From help desk to network management to server administration all the way up to service desk management. And believe me, you're not going to last and thrive for 30 years at the bleeding edge in the business if you're not very capable of recognizing, removing, protecting against the infectious viruses and prowling malwares that are constantly threatening to get into your computers to do damage or steal information.

I did, and i am.

I had several strategies in place to deal with viruses and malware. I had active protection installed on my computer, i had a scanner do a deep scan of all my storage whenever my computer was idle, and did a manual scan (each with a different antivirus software suite) once a week. Besides that i had a 2TB hard-drive specifically purposed for the sole task of backing up all my important data daily into an incremental back up and a separate full back up done once a week.

So i was better protected than 99% of any computer user on the planet. But still that malware copy/paste scam still managed to get onto my computer and stay undetected long enough for it to get the chance to fulfill it's purpose.

Bloated, nauseous and dejected right now.

I know that it would probably be better, in regards to the randombot, if i would continue now and make this a nice big article. But despite the disbelief i get when i say it, it is true i write for the sake of writing. Not for the sake of the rewardingautomaton's money.

But the simple fact is that writing this, thinking back to those moments actually physically makes me feel sick to this day. I'm also waaaaay out of my goof mood and halfway to being depressed again so i'm going to do a cliffhanger.

I have decided that this is going to be a two parter. This part was the part where i lost the first battle. Where it all went to... well, you get the point. In the next part i will write all about the struggles, the battles and the dying hard-disks and..... the turning point, after which i beat back the enemy, clawed my way back from the brink of defeat to my eventual victory.... of sorts.

So keep an eye out for the second half of the two part mini-series!!!

Thank you for reading this!

Stay safe and stay happy!

@AnonSunamun