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maggyoutthere · 3 years

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It's funny how I'm actually putting effort on this. I'm putting actual effort on a shitpost.

Anyways I said I'd write a bad sonic creepypasta so here it is. Here's the catch: I like how its turning out so imma make it a 2-pary story. This is the first part. It doesn't have any scary shit but it has the basics for a shitty creepypasta: someone gets a old pirated/unreleased/defective game and tries them out despite getting warned that bad shit might happen.

Again I'm not a fluent English speaker so expect some grammar error and stuff like that ._.,

So ladies, gentlemen and non-bis, I present to you-

Sonic: Battle of Metal and Blood (Part 1)

Synopsis: Teen gets nostalgic mid-quarentine and starts playing old Sonic games. She asks for some cheat codes and shit happens.

So for context; I'm a 17 year old girl stuck home because of quarantine.

It had been 4 or 5 months since the virus sent everyone home. Students were playing Animal Crossing and DOOM all day to fill in the summer hours since no one could go outside. I never liked going to the beach so I was never really bothered by it.

Like many people, I found myself going back in time to easier phases of my life. I was rewatching old cartoon shows from my childhood, getting into MCR and P!ATD and just living in pure nostalgia. I also started getting into gaming again, even going to the point of setting up my Wii again just to play Epic Mickey, but I didn't exactly grow up with the Wii. I was more of a Playstation kid, so much that me and my bro got a Playstation 2 from our cousin when he eventually bought the 3rd one for himself.

My cousin was older than us; I remember him being 16 or 17 when I was like 12, so he was kind of our gaming hero. If there was a level in Crash Bandicoot we couldn't beat, we'd call my cousin and he'd do it in 15 minutes. He knew all the cheat codes, all the secret levels and extra content for the games he had; he was like a genius to me and my lil bro, so when he gave us his old Playstation 2 and games me and my sibling knew we were in for a treat.

We got this Sonic Gems Collection for the Playstation 2 from him. It's like a port of various older Sonic games like Sonic CD, Sonic The Fighters, Sonic R and so on. I grew up playing that game, especially Sonic The Fighters since I wasn't very good at the racing games.

I still had a working controller and a lot of free time so I asked my bro for help setting up the console. The thing was so dusty I was actually scared it wasn't going to work. We clicked the power button and the light on the console turned on. Me and my brother held our breaths as we put the DVD in the console and crossed our fingers. As the screen lit up with the SEGA logo and music started playing, I just hugged him and cheered. He set up the console in my room so I could play without having to go to his room (he was the one keeping all the electronic stuff) and told me to have fun.

I didn't even know where to start. There was so much I wanted to play now that I actually knew what I was doing. I thought about starting with my favourite one out of the bunch: Sonic CD. I'm a sucker for the retro 2D pixel games so that was a must. It was better than what I remembered; the music was so catchy and the art style was vibrant and it stood out from a lot of games nowadays that go for a washed out "hyper realistic" look.

As I kept playing, I eventually reached the level where Amy tags along with Sonic for a while before Metal Sonic bursts through a wall and kidnaps her. Oh yeah, Metal Sonic was a thing. I remembered him from Sonic R and Sonic The Fighters - and the fact he was in the fucking cover art of the DVD case. I absolutely loved the fucker in the games though. He had a cool design, and the idea of the villain being a copy of the hero gone wrong was so interesting to me at the time.

I ended up passing the level and even making it to Stardust Speedway. I was sweating since I'd never come this far at any game. My bro was there cheering me as I tried not falling on spikes or getting hit by Metal Sonic's attacks. I ended up making it till the end on top, but it was kinda sad seeing Metal crash face-first against the door like that.

I was done with that for a while, so I went ahead and played Sonic R and Sonic The Fighters for nostalgia. Again, the fucker was there, either as a boss or as an unlockable character. I ended up noticing how there were a bunch of games missing. There were empty grayed slots with question marks instead of the game titles. I couldn't understand if the game was broken or if there was something I was supposed to do, so I called my cousin in hope he would somewhat tell me what to do. He ended up explaining how the game made you complete all the other games to unlock new ones. I thought that was kinda stupid so I asked him if he had any cheat codes or something to make the whole thing available. He told me he was going to dig up his old stuff and ring me again if he found anything.

A few hours later, he sent me a message telling me he'd found something that should work. He told me he did have a cheat code but he thought it was best if I didn't do it. Here's the transcript from his message.

"There's something that might work but it's kinda weird. I got this memory card from a friend of mine and he said this should unlock all the hidden contents within the disc, but when I tried it some weird shit started happening. Most of the sonic games were unplayable no matter how many times I restarted the console or cleaned the disc. There should be an extra game slot but that's just a glitch. Something about the system trying to make up storage for the extra code. Just don't click on anything that looks like a glitch and you should be golden"

Well that was a bit discouraging, but we agreed to meet that afternoon so he could give me the memory card.

When I got home and plugged the cartridge into the slot on the console, I was kinda scared. What if the thing exploded or something? I gave it a try and the thing actually worked! As I clicked on the games section, everything was there! There were some vectorman games but I didn't know who that was at the time so I didn't really care about them. What I was more interested in was the museum. There were a bunch of unlockable promotional art and illustrations there that I never got to see as a kid, so you could imagine how joyful I was when I saw the museum section filled with pages upon pages of illustrations and renderings of the games. Some of them weren't even on the Gems Collection like some screenshots of Sonic Heroes.

I went back on the game menu and was surprised to see another game entry below all the vectorman ones. It was called "Sonic: Battle of Metal and Blood". What the hell was this? It surely wasn't in the cover art and a quick google search turned up nothing. Was it a glitch? It couldn't be; it looked too clean and intentionally made to be a glitch, not to mention that whole game titles don't just appear out of thin air. Game or not, something was programmed in there. I concluded it was probably someone's fan project that was in the memory card my cousin gave me. Why hadn't he mentioned it though?

I was too curious to turn down a mystery like this one, so I got up first to make a cup of coffee since it was already getting late. As I returned from the kitchen, I remembered to look at the synopsis of the game. I can't remember exactly what it said but it was something along the lines of:

"In this sequel to the famous Sonic CD, step in the shoes of Sonic's friends as they face their biggest challenge yet. Control Amy Rose and Miles "Tails" Prower and fight against the metallic faker himself, Metal Sonic, and stop him before he puts his plan to become the only Sonic in action"

Woah, that sounded exciting; I wasted no time. I got all cozy, kept my cup of coffee next to me

And pressed START.

To be continued in part 2

#sth #sonic #sonic the hedgehog #creepypasta #creepy story #short story #sonic gems collection #sonic: battle of metal and blood #battle of metal and blood #maggy moment #shhh i actually like how its turning out #i'm not that good at writing but this is the best i've written in a while

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spamreports · 2 years

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For the past two weeks, I've been targeted in an extremely thorough social engineering scam that nearly cost me all of my ETH. I'm super lucky to have made it through unscathed. Here's the story 👇

1/ First a quick background. I'm the founder of Arrow, a DAO working to build open-source VTOL aircraft and air taxi protocol. We're still fairly early-stage and focused on growing the team. We're open to contribution and don't turn anyone away if they're excited to help.

2/ So two weeks ago, this user "heckshine" joins the Discord and introduces himself. He's currently working at Ubisoft and offers to help with 3D design and animation. The message seems a little strange, but I just attributed that to a language barrier.

3/ Heckshine also has a friend that is really passionate about VTOLs, and is working on a metaverse project. Her brother in law is a VP at Boeing. Wow, what a connection!📷

4/ Over the next few days, heckshine starts working on various animation projects for Arrow. He designs a really neat animated version of the hero image for our website and begins working on some aircraft renderings. We're all super impressed by his dedication to the project.

5/ While this is happening, heckshine also reaches out to his friend, Linh. She's apparently interested and heckshine asks me to send her an email. From what he has told me, Linh seems like a great connection.📷📷

6/ Linh gets back to me with a very thoughtful email. She tells me a bit about her metaverse project, Space Falcon. I'm not really sold on it, but I'm not really an NFT person so I didn't have any reason to think it was a bad idea either.📷

7/ She also tells me a bit more about her connection with Boeing/Wisk and offers some thoughts on Arrow. She seems eager to help with a potential partnership for us. The tone of the email is a little strange, but I assume it's also just the language barrier.

8/ Linh and I move the conversation over to Discord. We talk more about our backgrounds and end up deciding that she can best help out as an advisor. She offers to provide guidance and advice around what would work well regarding partnerships for us. I'm excited for her support.📷📷

9/ She then tells me more about Space Falcon. It seems kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme, but again, that's kind of how I see a lot of NFTs. With all that she's doing for Arrow, there's no harm in showing a little support.📷

10/ Space Falcon uses something called Armstrong wrapped ether. I don't really get it but I don't bother to do the research. Apparently, users will have to lease the NFTs and it can provide some passive income to the holders. I tell her that it sounds neat and to keep me updated.

11/ Somewhere in here I actually look up Space Falcon. I had never heard of it, but it seems like a fairly popular gaming project on Solana. I see Linh's name on the team page. Linh and I agree to stay in touch, and I move on to other things.

12/ For the next 10 days or so, heckshine is active in Discord every day. He puts out some super high-quality renderings. They're not particularly airworthy, but he's super excited to be helping and I figure we'll improve with some iterations.

13/ I can't overstate how committed and authentic heckshine has seemed through this entire process. We're super aligned on vision and I'm feeling great that he's so enthusiastic about what we're working on.

14/ Yesterday is when things started to get really crazy. Heckshine and I had been DMing back and forth for a while about the design for our v1 aircraft. He gets the entire configuration and he's ready to get started on a rendering when he gets up in the morning.

15/ As we're wrapping up, Linh reaches back out to me with some crazy exciting news. She's going on a tour of the Wisk facility and has invited me along to meet the team. She includes a screenshot of an email thread with Sebastien, who is actually a VP at Wisk.📷

16/ In hindsight, this is kind of absurd, but I had no reason to think that any of this wouldn't be real. We set a date for the trip and Sebastien is going to get back to me with a formal invite over email. I'm pumped and incredibly grateful to Linh for setting this up.📷

17/ This is when Linh mentions that their staking app has launched. She offers to send me the NFT. At this point testing out the app is the least that I can do! I ask her to send it to my hot wallet, but she sends it to my primary because it's so valuable. No big deal, right?📷

18/ She sends me some instructions on the staking app. The site seems fine and it has prompts for three transactions: The NFT approval, a token approval for Armstrong wrapped ETH, and a stake function. The token approval seems little strange but I don't hold it so I don't worry📷

19/ Now here is where I got incredibly lucky. Since it's a new project, I decided to move the NFT to a fresh eth address before going through the staking process - just in case they get exploited down the road or something. The stake goes through and I'm earning yield on it.

20/ I let Linh know that I'm staked and that it was easy. She offers to send me one of the other NFTs, but she wants me to stake it on my main account to help them with their growth. A little annoying, but I'm fine with it.📷📷

21/ I let Linh know that I'm going to read through the contracts before I stake it on my main account, and she starts getting pushy. This is when I finally realize that something sketchy is going on.📷📷

22/ So I pull up etherscan for the new address where I staked the first NFT and my blood goes ice fucking cold. The aWETH that I approved was not Armstrong ETH, but rather Aave's aWETH. On my main address, almost all of my ETH is sitting in Aave...📷

23/ At this point I ghost the scammers and they eventually start deleting all of their Discord messages. As some sort of final attempt, she sends me 0.2 ETH to cover gas fees and asks for the NFTs back. Not sure what the logic is with that.

24/ I dig further into the contract that I almost approved to spend my aWETH and find this truly terrifying function. This is where the scammers would have been able to transfer any amount of aWETH out of my account. I'm at the limit for this thread. Stand by for part 2📷

25/ As I continue poking through the scammers addresses on etherscan I eventually find the source of their funds - a 100 ETH Tornado Cash deposit. These guys were incredibly well funded and super smart.📷

26/ I have to assume that they hired a 3D design contractor that was putting out most of Heckshine's work. They also had built custom contracts and the front end that are entirely specific to this scam as far as I can tell.

27/ And what about SpaceFalcon, that seemed super legit, right? As far as I can tell it is a real project on Solana. The real project is using the (spacefalcon . io) domain where the scammers somehow acquired the .com.

28/ So the Linh that I've been interacting with is probably just an imposter of the real Linh working on the real space falcon...

29/ Ok, what are the takeaways here? 1. Token approvals can be super dangerous. I'm always going to be extremely cautious with them going forward. It makes sense to always put a cap on approvals when you can.

30/ 2. Scammers are getting smarter. Before now, the best scam I've really encountered is basically "hi this is tech support please share your private key so we can help"

31/ 3. Always verify, no matter how much you trust. These guys spent two weeks targeting my own specific weaknesses, and I was extremely close to falling for it. You can't be too paranoid

32/ I'm super lucky to have made it through all of this with minimal damage. You guys all stay careful out there!

#scam

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