Reader Journey: ‘They Helped Me Set Up My First Wallet. Of Course They Did.’

Reader journey — shared with permission. Names and identifying details are anonymized; the operator named is a real record in the registry.

H., 66, had never owned crypto. The platform’s support desk was — his word — wonderful. A patient young man stayed on a video call for forty minutes helping him install a wallet, write down “the recovery words”, and — crucially — read them back to confirm they were correct.

“He said it was to verify the backup. He typed while I read. I thanked him.”

What actually happened

Reading a seed phrase to anyone is handing over the wallet — no exceptions, no legitimate use case. The “support desk” held H.’s keys from minute one. The wallet performed normally for weeks while he moved $23,000 through it into the platform’s “staking program”; the day after his largest transfer, both the wallet and the platform balance were gone in a chain of transactions he could see but not stop.

What he did right, late

• He saved the transaction hashes — the one thing that makes wallet-drain cases traceable at all.
• He reported the platform the same week, while the trail was fresh (timing matters).
• He checked the SARFund case registry, found the operator already under an open file, and attached his evidence to it, where the case remains under review.

“I keep the recovery words of my new wallet in a drawer. Nobody has heard them out loud. That is the whole education, one drawer later.”