Despite telling him that this happens to a lot of people, he is still too embarrassed to let me use his real name. So let’s call him David for the sake of the story.

This is David’s story as written by me.

On a random Wednesday afternoon, I was on a Snapchat group when one of my friends sent a telegram link to the group. He then explained how it was a link for a Token airdrop. The name of the token was called IRON.

Now, I am usually very skeptical about things like this, but he sent a three-minute voice note explaining how simple it was and how much money we could make from simply referring people and getting them to use our link. He then took a screenshot of the IRON he had made, which was worth about $155 at the time—or so we thought.

Regardless of my reservations, I joined all the telegram groups the IRON bot instructed me to join, which allowed me to get my own referral link. It was pretty straightforward; every time someone uses your link, you get 10 IRON. An IRON was worth about $2.20, so we effectively made 22 dollars every time someone clicked on our referral link. Now, someone who was thinking clearly would have realised that there is no way this is possible, but Nigeria is hard right now, and we were blinded by the hope of easy money, so we went ahead.

The IRON bot had a rule that you could not withdraw IRON to your Trust wallet until you had up to 60 IRON. This was not an issue, as I had gotten 70 IRON within two hours. I thought it might be a first-come, first-served payment system, so I wanted to be in the queue as quickly as possible.

So I clicked on withdraw in the telegram chatbot and pasted my Trust wallet address. The bot said I should wait for 15 minutes and then check my Trust wallet. I did exactly that, and to my surprise, There was actually 70 IRON in my Trust wallet, and I could see that it was worth $155. As you can tell, I was over the moon at this point. I felt like I had pulled off a heist, but as you can probably tell, this feeling was short-lived.

Now, I could see this money in my wallet; it looked very real. I had already started thinking about how I would manage my new-found liquidity, but the big question was, ‘How do I swap it?’. My friends and I started searching the web for different ways to swap tokens like this, but what we realised quickly was that we were searching for a needle in a million haystacks. What we were looking for simply did not exist. The coin seemingly had value because the creators of this scam token had apparently cloned an actual coin with value; hence, it looked like my 70 IRON was worth $155, but in truth, it was worthless.

Now, you might be wondering how this is a scam. You are right; if the story ended here, all the creators of this token would have been guilty of was wasting my time and energy, but sadly, this was not the end of the story.

It had been four days since I withdrew the 70 IRON to my wallet, four days since I saw $155 in my wallet, and frankly, four days since I was happy. At this point, I had already made peace with the fact that I was never going to get this money. This is when the scam happened.

A video was sent to the IRON network telegram network, giving us step-by-step instructions on how to swap IRON for USDT, and I was instantly full of hope again. They gave us a swap link we were meant to use on the Trust Wallet browser. After loading up the website and linking the wallet, it was now time for the swap.

This last stage involved using 11 MATIC, equivalent to 11 USDT as a transaction fee, to swap it. In hindsight, this should have been a giant red flag, but I thought I was about to use that tiny amount of money to make $155, so you can understand why my judgement was impaired. So I bought $11 worth of MATIC and sent it to my Trust Wallet, then clicked on the swap button; you can probably predict the rest of the story.

The transaction ‘failed’, but my 11 MATIC had unsurprisingly vanished. I went to check X(Twitter) to see if I was alone or if there were others like me, and I found out that others had fallen for this exact scam. This was when the realisation finally hit me. I was never getting that $155, and I had just been scammed out of $11.

Although it was just $11, I felt very embarrassed that I fell for this scam, but the truth is that it can happen to anyone. I am just happy that all I lost was $11, and I hope everyone reading this learns from my mistake; I know I have.