My friend James had been trading crypto for a while and finally decided to secure his funds by ordering a hardware wallet. He went on Google and searched for the most popular one—Ledger. Unfortunately, the first link he clicked on was a spoofed version of the official Ledger site. It looked nearly identical, complete with product photos, checkout pages, and support tabs.

He ordered the wallet, paid in crypto, and received what looked like a brand-new device. But the wallet came with a pre-filled recovery phrase and instructions that said he should “activate it using the included phrase.” That was the red flag—but he didn’t know better. He transferred a large portion of his savings, about $8,000 worth of ETH, to the wallet.

Within 24 hours, everything was gone.

When he contacted the real Ledger support, they confirmed the device wasn’t from them—it was tampered with. The website he ordered from had been reported multiple times, but it kept getting re-listed under different domains.

This experience was heartbreaking. James lost years of savings because of a single fake site. Please, if you’re buying any crypto hardware wallets, only order through verified links directly from the official company website, and never use a pre-written recovery phrase.