The real dangers of crypto — and the older ones already in your bank.
A research-driven book about recurring financial patterns — built on years of documented incidents and publicly verifiable evidence.
In August 2024, a man in Washington lost $243 million to a phone call. No code was broken. No wallet failed. Everything worked exactly as designed — and that is the problem this book takes seriously.
The book takes crypto’s real dangers one at a time and sets each beside its twin already running in ordinary finance.
Each chapter ends with an honest verdict about which is worse — and the verdicts do not all go one way. Crypto did not invent these crimes. The technology changed; the financial mechanisms didn’t.
Crypto did not invent these crimes. It wrote them down.
No stock art, no AI. Every figure redraws itself from a committed data file — the same numbers anyone can check. Three plates from the book.
Every incident in this book exists in the public record — court filings, regulator reports, on-chain transactions anyone can read. See it: the verification index — claim by claim, artifact by artifact.
650+ documented incidents, every one classified with a citation for every claim. Free and public on GitHub.
onchainattack.org →Claim by claim, artifact by artifact. Follow any number in the book back to the public record that checks it.
The verification index →Six rules that stop most of the thefts in the book. A free poster — print it, share it.
Download the poster (PDF) →Your wallet identifies an address by its ends — the first characters and the last. Here are two, exactly as it would show them to you.
Same address, or different?
The ends are identical — 0x7A3F … 4E21 — and that is all your wallet ever showed you. The middles are completely different. An attacker slips a lookalike into your history so you copy the wrong one and send your money to them. It is the shortest chapter in the book, because the whole mechanism is one sentence.
Chapter 1 — The phone call
Chapter 8 — 98.6%Subscribe and I'll send you The First Case: the opening of the book and its first chapter in full — the phone call that cost one man $243 million. After that, one email when the book is released. Nothing else.
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Dmytro Chystiakov is the author of OAK, a public catalogue of 650+ documented crypto incidents. He has worked in banking, cybersecurity and AI — and wrote the book he needed when he was first deciding whether to step into crypto. Why I spent years documenting crypto incidents →
The free incident catalogue (OAK) on GitHub →