Before any advice about what to buy, it is worth knowing what actually removes money from people. Very little of it is picking the wrong coin.
MODULE 6 OF 64LEVEL 2: CUSTODY AND SECURITY8 MIN
The real ranking
What takes people's money, roughly in order
1. Approving a malicious transaction
Most common
You connect to a site, sign something you did not read, and a contract is granted permission to move your tokens. It then does. This is the single biggest cause and it is entirely preventable.
2. Buying something that could never be sold
Very common
A token engineered so buying works and selling reverts. The chart looks perfect right up until you try to exit.
3. Losing or exposing a seed phrase
Very common
Photographed, cloud synced, typed into a fake site, or simply lost. No recovery exists.
4. Impersonation and support scams
Common
Someone who appears to be support, a founder, or a friend. Always initiated by them, always urgent.
5. Leaving funds on a venue that fails
Occasional but catastrophic
FTX, Celsius, WazirX, BitForex. Balances on an exchange are a claim against a company.
6. Leverage
Fast and total
A liquidation does not take some of your position. It takes all of it, often on a wick that reverses minutes later.
7. Actually picking a bad asset
Slowest
Genuinely the least urgent risk on this list, and the one people spend the most time worrying about.
The pattern behind almost all of it
Nearly every serious loss involves the victim taking an action: signing, pasting, sending, or approving. Crypto has almost no passive theft. That is good news, because it means attention is genuinely protective in a way it is not with, say, card fraud.
The corollary is uncomfortable. If you sign it, it is done. There is no chargeback, no fraud team, and no court that can reverse a valid transaction. Your carefulness is the entire security model.
The three habits that prevent most of it
Read what you are signing. Use a wallet that simulates transactions and shows the balance change before you approve.
Revoke approvals regularly. Five minutes every few months at revoke.cash.
Assume every unsolicited message is an attack. Not most. Every single one.
Approving a malicious transaction after connecting a wallet to a fraudulent site. It outweighs exchange hacks by a wide margin, and it is preventable by reading what you sign.
Can stolen crypto be recovered?
Almost never. Occasionally a chain's validators freeze funds or an exchange intercepts them, but you cannot count on it. Anyone who contacts you offering recovery is running a second scam.
Risk warning:
crypto is highly volatile and largely unregulated. You can lose everything you put in. Nothing here is
financial, investment or tax advice.
