Tax Evasion or an Extremely Expensive Mistake?

We gotta be careful.

I say it all the time that crypto is the wild west, as many others do. When you are in charge of your own assets, you have the responsibility of keeping them safe. People seem to take security of their assets for granted, largely in part to banks being insured. Unfortunately, when you're dealing with magic internet money... There's no reversing transactions or getting a refund. Once funds are spent, they're sent.

Often times, we learn these lessons in an expensive way. Whether that be losing the private seed phrase to a wallet, or sending crypto to the wrong address. Let's be honest here, we've all made a mistake or 2 when transacting with cryptocurrency. I have been lucky enough to only make tiny mistakes and nothing that would cost me a lot of money, but some people haven't been so lucky.

Every day someone loses access to a wallet or gets scammed. When everything is pseudo-anonymous, you really have to be careful about what and who you interact with. Bad actors are out there chomping at the bit to steal your valuable crypto assets or NFTs. Whether it be a phishing scam or just being completely reckless, people are losing funds every day.

Our boy Franklin on Twitter lost 100 ETH yesterday by being a reckless degenerate. He's a pretty well-known Bored Ape NFT owner and is probably going to be totally fine after this loss based on his assets viewable on the blockchain... But it doesn't make it any less crazy that someone so well-known made such a giant mistake. A $156,000 mistake at current prices.

You see, what he had done was placed a fake bid on one of his NFTs for 100 ETH to make it look like it was worth more. This is common practice in the NFT space unfortunately, because people are greedy. I think in this case it wasn't greed any more than just pure trolling. He did it as a kind of meme because he was making a point that people do this all the time. They list an NFT and then bid on it with an alt account, then never accept the bid.

The point of doing this is trying to get someone to bid higher than your alt account bid. Artificially inflating the "value" of the NFT. The major problem here is that... It's all on the blockchain for everyone to see. Forever. He sold an NFT to someone for 1.9 WETH and didn't cancel his "fake bid" on the NFT... So the buyer then accepted his "fake bid" and it became very real very fast.

When you do things like this in a reckless fashion, you have to be prepared for the consequences. When an NFT has a bid on it, that bid doesn't go away when the NFT is sold. The guy was obviously in shock when it happened because he had 100 ETH less than he did before all of a sudden. He realized at that moment that he had messed up and ran to Twitter.

He sent the 1.9 WETH back to the wallet that made the purchase, and likely will never get back his 100 ETH or 1.9 WETH. So the total loss at the time of writing for ole Franklin is around $160,000. The buyer was probably shocked that it happened too, and then immediately swapped the ETH received for USDC.

There are some things to think about here though. For someone like Franklin, this is probably just a drop in the bucket. A tax write off, even. Now he has a $160,000 loss to report on his taxes. Not only that, but this has gotten an insane level of engagement on Twitter, so it's really a win-win situation if he's doing taxes as he should. Odds are he isn't because crypto and NFT taxes are a living nightmare... But it's a thought.

People do things like this all the time... It's part of the NFT bro culture, which you know I hate. I am a huge supporter of NFT technology, but the NFT bro culture makes my skin crawl. As you can see, everyone is going to roast him and it will take a long time for him to live this down. Let it be yet another expensive lesson in securing your crypto assets.

With great power comes great responsibility. We have to make sure that we take the security of our assets very seriously, or this could end up being us. Just for making a dumb joke for clout.

Article written by: @l337m45732 AKA 0xNifty.nft

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta