You weren't hacked, you got scammed. But why does the distinction matter?

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to victim-blame anybody. If you or somebody you know got scammed, that's horrible and the person/people responsible deserve their coins going the luna route. Also, this post obvioisly pertains to private users, not bridges etc.

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If you got your wallet drained, you weren't hacked. And we should really stop using that word. Why?

Hacking implies an active role for the offending party. In the vast, vast majority of cases, this just isn't true. The classic bad guy dodging firewalls, frantically typing behind a black screen with green letters, doesn't exist outside of movies.

You got scammed. You either accidently accessed a malicious exchange, accepted a malicious smart contract, gave somebody your seed phrase or you had spyware on your computer.

In all these cases, you got scammed. And it fucking sucks. I sympathize. You let your guard down, didn't pay attention for 1 second, and you got taken advantage of. You got scammed, but not hacked.

By using the term "hacking", we give people the wrong idea. It gives, especially people new to the space, the idea that there are malicious people who can get into their wallets with no chance of defence. And this just isn't the case. Nobody can actually hack a metamask account. But they can trick owners into accessing it for them.

This may seem like some semantic pet-peeve. But it is so important that people understand, that your accounts/wallets being actively hacked, is insanely unlikely. It would require much more effort than 99.99% of the people on this sub are worth. But there are scammers. Some simply try to get your seed phrase, others are tech-savvy enough to create fake exchanges and malicious smart contracts. Even others go the social engineering route. (Dm's on social media platforms are an infamous example)

But all of these people have US play the active role. We actively have to go to sites, accept smart contracts or download infected files. That way you get scammed. But never hacked.

Our space is unfortunately a breeding ground for scammers. This makes it so crypto has a bad name already. Let's help adoption and show that you CAN stay safe in this space, as long as you take precautions.