# Revoke.cash | You Just Got Scammed, Now What? - Rosco Kalis | ETHDam III - 2025 - Speakers: Rosco Kalis - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 15:58 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-TG2qI4yPjJY - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG2qI4yPjJY ## Description Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ Revoke.cash | You Just Got Scammed, Now What? - Rosco Kalis | ETHDam III - 2025 𝕏 Follow: https://x.com/RoscoKalis https://revoke.cash/ https://x.com/RevokeCash ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and ZΓΌrich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ πŸŽ₯ Credits: Intro / outro by babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ETHDam Photography by Paulus – https://concretestate.eu/ MC of ETHDam - Collins Ejiofor - developer working at the intersection of Web3 and AI. Check out his LinkedIn for more about his work and upcoming projects! https://www.linkedin.com/in/collins-ejiofor/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com πŸ’› Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩢 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero πŸ’› Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ------------------ 0:00 Intro 0:30 Token Approvals & Risks 1:00 Phishing Losses in 2023 2:00 Seed Phrase Compromise 4:00 Recovery & Malware Cleanup 5:00 Preventing Seed Theft 5:45 Token Approval Scams 7:00 Preventing Approval Exploits 7:30 Marketplace Listing Scams 9:00 Direct Transfer Scams ## Transcript Welcome to East to E to E to E to E. Hello everyone, my name is Rosco. I'm the founder of revoke.cash which is a platform for managing your hello which is a platform for managing your token approvals. Um, let me get um, yeah, I'm gonna hurry it up because I know it's a short talk. Um, as a short recap, whenever you're using DeFi, uh, whenever you're swapping tokens, selling NFTs, taking any of those things, um, you have to give access to the, um, application so that they can take your tokens. Let's say if you want to sell your NFT, you give access to that NF uh, to that NFT so that OpenC can sell it on your behalf. If you use a lot of crypto, then you might have dozens of these apps that have access to your money. That's where you can use Revoke to manage that access. Um, today I'm going to talk about getting scammed online um through fishing websites and the likes. Um, this is a report from 2023. Uh, I have don't have the 24 report yet. Um, but this says that at least 300 million uh was stolen uh from at least 320,000 people in 2023. Uh, so that's a pretty big problem and a lot of times uh people don't even really know how it happened. So they, you know, they click a link, they do something on some fishing website, but a lot of times people come into our Discord for support and, you know, they just send us their wallet that looks like this. um that where they just lost a million and they're like okay well what what happened here um and then it's you know usually it's up to us to tell them what happened but I hope with this presentation um you know I can help you guys understand what might have happened and how to diagnose that. Um, so yeah, there's generally there's a few different classes of um getting scammed uh online with crypto. Um, and I'm going to go through the most common ones. And I'm going to start off with uh the seed phrase compromise because that's the most destructive thing that can happen um to your crypto wallet. Essentially, if your seed phrase is compromised, if someone else has access to that seed phrase, then there's no coming back from that. Um because you cannot make them forget that they have um access to your seat phrase. And um we'll start off with how do you diagnose this? Because you know, you're coming to us, you have this uh drop in in your net worth. And how to diagnose that your seed phrase has been compromised is that most importantly is that all of your assets or at least almost all of your assets get stolen uh pretty quickly. So if you're using multiple blockchains uh and multiple tokens NFTs on those blockchains then um if all of those get stolen including the native gas tokens like ETH or um uh B&B on BMBB chain um that is kind of the biggest indicator that your seed phrase has been compromised. um to be really really sure usually you can send a few dollars worth of ETH or worth of B&B to the wallet and if it gets stolen immediately then you really know 100% this is a CPA compromise. What to do like I said um there's really really no way to regain control of this wallet unfortunately. Um, what you should do though is make sure that this compromise wasn't due to malware or if it was um make sure that you get rid of that malware. So that means either running some antivirus um or if you're really unsure um resetting your entire computer. That's the nuclear option, but sometimes that's what it is. After that um create a completely new wallet, new seed phrase, new everything. Um, and if there's any remaining assets whatsoever, um, that the scammer just forgot about, um, you know, try to rescue that. There are some services, um, like Flashbots that do help with, um, like unstaking tokens and getting those, um, out of the wallet before the scammer can get it, those kind of things. But, um, yeah, that's kind of, um, the next steps, uh, when your seed phrase is compromised. How to prevent this? The biggest thing is using a hardware wallet. A hardware wallet just make sure that your seed phrase stays on that device. And even if your computer is compromised, even if your um you have a virus on your computer or whatever, um your seed phrase stays safe on that wallet even if you connect it to your computer, those kind of things. So use a hardware wallet. Then the second class, so the other classes that we're going to talk about now, there's always a way to regain control of your wallet. The only super destructive thing that can happen is losing your seed phrase or losing u getting your seed phrase compromised by a scammer. So don't do that. Um then the other thing is token approvals. Um like I said this is like giving you access to your money. Um and oftent times if you go to a a fishing website um there's this big button that says click here to claim an airdrop or click here to do some amazing thing and get rich. But then actually you're giving them uh token approvals to some of the valuable tokens in your wallet. Um and you can diagnose this usually because it's a single kind of token on a single network. So maybe only your USDC or only your Pudgy Penguins. Um and if you check revokec you will see these approvals show up in there uh by if you sort by most recently. So um what to do about that is revoke the token approvals. There's obviously there's no way to regain any lost assets. If if they're stolen, they're stolen. But you do want to make sure that the scammer doesn't keep that access that the next time you have the USC in your wallet again, it doesn't get stolen again. And that's why you revoke uh token approvals after something like that happens. And how do we prevent it? Um there's no real silver bullet for token approval specifically, but in general um how do you prevent getting scammed uh through these fishing websites is just really making sure that you uh doublech check every URL you interact with. And if there are websites um like Uniswap or OpenC or Revoke that you visit frequently, use bookmarks and just check that little star in the top right corner to make sure that you are on the right website when you expect to be on the right website. And then there are some security focused browser extensions with Revoke. We have one, but there are other um options like Kerburus or Pocket Universe. And what these extensions do is that they kind of give you this popup with some more information about what you're about to sign. So if you click this big button that says claim your airdrop and then you get this popup that says, "Hey, actually you're giving a token approval," then hopefully um that that makes you think and stop and figure out that you're being scammed before you um hit that confirm button. Then the third class of scams is uh the marketplace signatures. And this is another pretty um destructive scam because they are able to steal all the tokens that you have approvals for um to some marketplace like to OpenC. Let's say you trade a lot of NFTs, you have approvals for your Pudgy Penguins, your board apes, USDC, rep ETH, a bunch of these things because you're you're actively trading a lot. Then what they can do is trick you into signing a so-called like an NFT listing where you list all of those approved assets for sale and you get zero ETH in return. Um, and how do we diagnose that? Like I said, usually you lose a lot of uh different tokens and NFTs on a single chain. And if you look at the transaction in a block explorer, usually mentions the name of the marketplace. It says OpenC or Blur or something like that. And what to do about this? Um there's no there's nothing that you need to do to um get control of your wallet back because this is a single use scam. So they steal whatever you had and after that they don't keep that access. So that's that's the good news. You can just continue using your wallet. But how do you prevent this? I think the biggest thing is revoking unused marketplace approvals because oftentimes um maybe if you have like five board apes in your wallet and you want to sell one um you give access to everything and after you sell that one board ape but you still have four left months later you might get scammed and lose lose all those NFTs. So I think the advice here is to just make sure that once you're done with token approvals um revoke them and again the sort of general advice um that I said before you uh checking the URL using bookmarks using security browser extensions that still applies here as well. Then the fourth class that we're talking about is just direct transfers. So these other ones are more destructive generally um because with token approvals they keep the access with NF or with marketplace scams they can steal a lot of assets at the same time and usually what scammers do is they just check which one of these methods is going to make them the most money and as a fallback if none of these other ones are available they'll just ask you to transfer money directly to them. So, um, let's say you have a bunch of ETH, but no NFTs and no approvals and nothing like that. Then when you click that button again that says claim your airdrop, you're actually sending all of your ETH to them. And we diagnose this because it's always one kind of asset stolen on a single network. Um, there's no other symptoms. So, you don't see any approvals on revoke. You don't see like marketplaces mentioned. And oftentimes they have like this masked um hidden name where it says something like claim or security updates or even like claim airdrop. So it if you see it in your wallet it might look like you're doing something um legit. And so those are the kind of things that you have to look out for. And again just like with marketplace approvals what you can do is continue using your wallet because this is just a single use scam. um they don't keep access and how to prevent it is just the same general advice of being very very careful what you actually sign. Um these are sort of the the four main scams that we see on a regular basis or the main sort of methods that that scammers use. But oftent times they might use different like uh combinations of different scams. So if they see that you have a lot of open approvals to um to OpenC, then they start off with that with the the marketplace scam, then if you keep clicking, they're going to they're going to look for other ways to to keep scamming you for more. So then they might also ask you to send them all your your ETH um and and so on and so forth. Um so this may sometimes look like a seed phrase compromise because you're losing a bunch of different assets. Um, but you can usually also find symptoms of other scams. So, you might see transactions that mention the marketplace. You might see some uh approvals on revoke.cash. And um the biggest thing is that when you do send a few dollars worth of the native token worth of ETH to that wallet, it stays in there. So, when we discussed seed phrase compromise at the start, we said if you really want to be sure that it is that, you send some money there. If it gets sold in again, it's a seed phrase compromise in this case. If it doesn't get sold in again, it's not a seed phrase compromise, and it's a combination of any of these others. Um, there's a few other less um uh uh common scam methods. I think address poisoning is one that is that might be uh getting graduated up to the common scams as well sometime soon because we do see it um quite often recently. And this is where they um where scammers see that you're sending some money to like an exchange and then they generate an address that looks kind of similar to that wallet and make it seem like that's where you send your money by creating a fake token and creating fake transfer events for that fake token that shows that you're sending to this other address. So when you copy that over from your block explorer for example, then you will see the um you'll accidentally maybe copy the wrong thing and and send it to a scammer. Spam tokens is another one. Usually um I think if you use Ethereum, you've had a lot of these where you just get an airdrop in your wallet that says something like uh visit some website.com. Um, and the trick there is that they want you to visit that website and that's where they apply any of these other scams that we talked about. Another uh third one is fake approvals. This is um something where they try to um hijack the the revoke method of some fake tokens um and and scam you in that way. If you're using revoke, this is not something that you have to worry about because we have all kinds of safeguards um against this. Um but we have seen that other uh appro approvals platforms like uh the one of BMBB scan or Ether scan uh can sometimes be vulnerable to this. So definitely make sure that whatever you're revoking on those platforms um you kind of know what the token is or better yet just use revoke. Um this is a uh sort of flowchart that kind of goes over what we just discussed. This is also on the revoke.cash website in the FAQ. So, make sure to check that out. And uh if if you're on there, we also have a sort of an article form of the things that I just went over, so you can read through everything uh in your own time to just make sure that you kind of know how to prevent getting scammed and what to do if you do end up getting scammed. That was Thank you for your time. This is um thank you very much Rosco on telling us how to identify scams and how to you know find out if you can still use the wallet that already got scammed because that's very important. Are there any questions? No. Okay, we'll take one question please. Yeah. uh if I understand then you can't get money back um crypto back that it's not possible but you have people who say uh I can uh refocate back the um the transactions what is your opinion yeah so generally when you know let's say you're on Twitter and you share your story or you're in some discord and you're asking for support then um sometimes there's people that say yeah I can I can help you get it all back but generally these are scammers and they are trying to steal even more of your money because they know you're in a vulnerable state. You'll you'll maybe slip up and um they sorry they usually always ask for your uh for your for your seat phrase as well. So if they do that then you you can immediately know they they are not trustworthy. Exactly. All right. Another round of applause for Rosco and uh