Unit 3 · Level 1 · Self-custody & security
Boss: Security gauntlet
Scams, approvals, cold storage: become hard to rob.
Free to play. No ads, no token, no account needed to start.
What you get asked
A 'MetaMask Support' agent DMs you on Discord: 'We detected an issue. Verify your seed phrase on our validation portal within 1 hour.' What do you do?
Unsolicited DM, urgency, seed request: three tells in one message. There is no scrambled or partial way to share a seed safely, and anyone asking for it is a thief.
Months after using a swap site once, your USDC vanishes, yet your seed phrase never leaked. What's the most likely cause?
Approvals are the silent drain: they outlive your visit and need no seed phrase. This is exactly why you approve limited amounts and revoke old permissions.
Your friend Ana is moving her ETH to her first hardware wallet. Put her safest sequence in order.
Every step closes a door: no tampered device, no digital copy of the seed, no swapped address, no irreversible typo. Slow is safe, and safe is fast.
Your phone suddenly loses signal, and minutes later password-reset emails start arriving. What's happening, and what would have protected you?
Dead signal plus reset emails is the classic SIM-swap signature: your number now rings on the attacker's SIM. Codes from an authenticator app never travel through your phone number, so the swap gets them nothing.
Before sending €5,000, Ana only checks the first and last 4 characters of an address copied from her history, so she could fall for address ___.
Poisoned lookalikes are built to match exactly those characters. Check a long stretch of the address, or copy it from the verified source, never from history.
An online friend of two months invites you to an 'exclusive' platform paying a guaranteed 3% daily, but says to keep it just between you. How many scam tells is that?
That's the full pig-butchering script, and yes, fake platforms happily pay out small withdrawals to bait the big deposit. You've cleared the gauntlet. Urgency, secrecy, guaranteed returns: see any one of them, and walk. 🐜
The rest of this unit
Scams, approvals, cold storage: become hard to rob.