Stolen ENS - what should I do next?

💬 General Discussion
1

I always thought phishing hacks were so obvious I would never fall for this… and yet I did.

Honestly I feel so stupid that I think I deserve the loss, but I have some concerns as the ENS name is under my real name.

What would you recommend me to do?

FYI I’m still the controller. But from what I read, there is not much I can do apart from transferring the domain to a burn address.

Could someone explain briefly what are the risks?
I’m not sure I understand why I’m still able to connect with the ENS name.
If a token is being sent to that address, I guess the registrant will be the one receiving it?

Hope you have a better day than mine!

2

sorry for your loss :frowning:

Unfortunately only the registrant can transfer the domain. Whilst you are the controller you can continue to manage the domain, but at any point the registrant can update the controller address.

3

Hi @damiencourbon.eth and welcome to the forum, and I’m sorry you were scammed :pensive:

As Controller you’re not able to transfer the name to a burn address, only Registrant is able to transfer the ENS name. As controller you can modify records for the ENS name, but that doesn’t help much in this scenario.

Registrant only denotes the owner of the ENS name. When an ENS name is transferred, both Controller (administrator of records) and ETH Address (the wallet the name points to) remains set to the old wallet unless it’s manually updated which scammers often don’t bother doing.

So it’s technically possible to connect, administrate it and use it as normal. However given that you are no longer the owner of it, we don’t recommend it, because the scammers can change the Controller and all records at any time without notice.

The wallet set in the ETH Address record will receive it, which is likely still your wallet, but the scammers could change all of that, so it’s best to stop using it to accept transactions.

4

Thanks @hodl.esf.eth for the rectification, and @cthulu.eth for making the topic much clear to me.

I simply have 2 questions remaining:

  1. Do you see potential risks of a thief owning and maybe at some point using this ENS domain with my real name?

  2. Should I try to get it back, like reaching out to the thief to buy it back, or is this something you wouldn’t recommend me to do?

5

I don´t think so, and it’s likely that the scammers aren’t interested in using your ENS name at all. Usually sites like that aren’t after ENS names, but any potentially valuable NFT that’s in the users wallet. And even if they were, it’s not like people automatically accept someonesname.eth as identification (yet!)

Most likely the scammers won’t touch it and it will sit until it expires. You can contact marketplaces like OpenSea and let them know that it’s stolen as well at https://support.opensea.io - to make it difficult for them to sell it.

It’s up to you. I imagine scammers would rather have any amount of ETH than the ENS name, but your mileage may vary. Just make sure that it goes through a real marketplace so you don’t get scammed by them once more.

Personally I wouldn’t give scammers a dime.

6

Many thanks, @cthulu.eth
I sincerely appreciate the time you’ve spent answering me.

I did reach out to OpenSea, they marked as suspicious the NFTs and disabled trade for them. I feel bad for the people who have purchased them (all NFTs but the ENS domain were flipped within 1 hour). I asked OpenSea for a recommandation on this situation, as I don’t think the current holders should be impacted negatively.

1 Like