Someone Stole My Betcoin Poker Chips!!! A story about complacency...

I was on a heater playing the WPN sit-n-gos w/ the Betcoin skin.

I build a cheesy half chip bankroll up to 3 chips, then 15 chips. From $4 to $150 in no time at all.

Then I went to sign in earlier and, oh noes, where did my chips go?

I did not initiate that withdrawal. I wanted to keep playing poker with those chips!

Somehow, someway, some jerk stole my chips.

The first thing I thought was that I had been hacked. Then maybe Betcoin had been hacked.

I talked to their support, and they said everything was "OK" on their end. From what I could tell, nobody else seemed to be having issues with Betcoin. If it was just me, that meant I had been hacked.

That's when my faulty memory came flooding back to me. A few days ago, I received a 2FA message on my phone from Coinbase. I wasn't trying to sign in. Someone has also been trying to break into an ancient twitter account of mine.

They had to have my passwords. The thing is, I use strong passwords. So they were either logging my keys or... that's when it hit me. I'm not terribly bright, and I let Chrome save my passwords for me. I went ape nutty with one email account in particular that had pretty much every password I'd ever used for the past 4 years stored on it.

I clicked on the "Details" link at the bottom of my Gmail accounts, only to find out someone in the UK had been "stalking" them for the past 3 days. Here's a screen of their IP address:

I'm not in the UK. I live in the US.

The kicker is the password to that particular Google account would be, ahem, trivially easy to guess. Not "12345" easy, but nearly the same thing in practical terms.

Once they had that password, the least secure of the bunch, which had not been changed in many, many years, all they had to do was go to passwords.google.com to reveal the rest of my passwords, including the ones I used to access Poloniex (also hacked, nothing there), Betcoin (hacked to the tune of $150), Coinbase (nothing there, 2FA saved me for now) etc etc.

I was not taking my online security seriously. Now someone's been prowling around in my email accounts, looking for opportunities to steal my Bitcoins. I'm sure they were checking out the accounts and waiting for a good time to start robbing and stealing.

On one hand I admire their gumption. On the other hand, violence! On my third hand, the invisible one the aliens gave me (hussshhhh!! secrets!), it was just my stupid poker money, and the fun I had winning enough tournaments to go from 0.0004 BTC to 0.0150 BTC hasn't exactly worn off. I'm pretty sure I know how the "bad guys" got me, and I'll take steps in the future to protect myself from them. Some people pay a lot more for this lesson. I consider it a rite of passage, albeit a totally unnecessary one.

As far as I'm concerned, this is totally not Betcoin's fault. I enjoyed the heck out of playing there.

From now on, I'm going to take my security online more seriously.

P.S. Please don't send me STEEM in sympathy. Buy some poor kids presents or something! Charity!