A recent survey suggests that about 60mm Americans own crypto assets. That's almost 20% of the country. That's three times as many people as belong to unions. That is twenty times the number of Americans that own an electric vehicle.
Crypto holders/advocates should be a potent voting bloc in the US and hopefully we will see that in this election cycle.
The non-profit StandWithCrypto.org is all about activating the crypto voter.
Almost 400,000 individuals have joined StandWithCrypto, including yours truly, and I want to encourage all pro-crypto readers of this blog to join me in doing that.
You can do that by going here and click on "joint the fight."
I've also added a call to action to join StandWithCrypto to the top of this blog and will keep it there through this November's election and possibly beyond that.
I have been a T-Mobile customer for many years. I switched to T-Mobile back when they offered "bring your own phone" and ATT and Verizon were not doing the same. I like companies that let you do things your way.
But T-Mobile does not have great service in several important locations for me, like our home in NYC, our beach house, and our ski house. So I use wifi calling on T-Mobile in those locations and it works reasonably well. But it is not perfect.
I became a Helium Mobile customer last August and wrote about it then. Helium Mobile is the 5G cellular service offered by our portfolio company Nova Labs using the Helium hotspot network and backfill via T-Mobile.
And a month or so ago, I bought some of the new Helium Mobile hotspots and started installing them in our homes and offices. I did this to participate in the Helium network and earn Mobile token rewards.
However, I realized a fantastic side benefit which is that my second sim (a downloadable esim) on my phone has way better service when I am near a Helium Mobile hotspot than what I get using wifi calling on T-Mobile.
On Tuesday, I had my @fredwilson account taken over.
I haven't used that account for almost eighteen months, but it has almost 700,000 followers and has the potential to do a lot of harm in the wrong hands.
I am writing this to explain what happened so that others might learn from my mistakes.
On Tuesday at 3:35pm eastern, while I was in a taxi on my way from a doctor appointment to my home office, I saw this email come into my inbox.
I've always thought of Helium as a way of participating in a network and earning rewards for doing so. But now Helium is also providing "single user utility" in the form of way better cellular service in locations that don't have that.
So if you live and/or work in a location where you don't get great cell service and if wifi calling doesn't completely solve that problem for you, trying signing up for Helium Mobile for $20/month, getting a second sim in your phone, and putting a Helium Mobile hotspot in that location. It works great for me.
That got my attention. A "login to my account" from an iPhone in Greece was certainly not me.
I should have looked more closely at the sender email address. That would have told me this was a scam. But I was on a call on my phone, in a taxi, so I clicked on the "Secure your X account now here" link and logged in to change my password. In doing so, I provided my password and two factor code to the hacker.
There are a host of mistakes in that last paragraph. All of them are things I know better than to do. But I did all of them.
First, I should have inspected the sender email address more closely. I did not.
Second, I should have inspected the URL of the webpage that the "secure your account now here" link took me to. I did not.
Third, I should have just ignored the email because I have a strong 2 factor system using Yubikeys on that account. I also have a very strong password on it. A login from an iPhone in Greece would be almost impossible.
But I did none of those things. I was multi-tasking, in transit, and jet lagged. And I screwed up.
I knew it almost instantly. And then, for three hours I tried escalating the situation to Twitter/X support to get them to shut the account down. I knew what was coming. Anyone who has access to that account can run a scam at almost 700k followers.
I was unable to get to anyone who could escalate to Twitter. I filed several account takeover support requests and texted a bunch of people I thought could get to someone at Twitter. But none of that worked.
It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I knew what was coming and could not stop it.
Around 6:15pm eastern, this scam was posted to my account.
Almost immediately my phone filled up with messages from all sorts of people letting me know my account had been hacked. A few of them offered to escalate to Twitter/X. I encouraged all of them to do that.
In particular, Sriram Krishnan came to the rescue. Not only did he escalate to the right people at Twitter/X, but he also helped me in the following days to get control of my account back. I am extremely grateful for all that he did for me this week.
I am not clear what kind of scam was run on claim-fred dot com. It could have simply been a way to get minting fees. But I fear it was a more sophisticated attack aimed at sweeping wallets of funds and NFTs. I feel terrible about that. It would not have happened but for my mistakes.
I'd also love any suggestions for getting claim-fred dot com taken down. Coinbase Wallet has a warning on it already which is great.
But I'd like to see it come down entirely if there is a way to make that happen.
I am frequently targeted with hacks. There have been three now that I have written about on AVC. Two of them have come in the last few months. I understand I am a target. I also understand that I have a responsibility to exercise great caution because of that.
I failed to do that this week and I am very sorry about that.
