If I wanted to leave a big impression and I showed you my profile on Coinbase, would you think I was a billionaire?
That is a legit screenshot of my profile at https://profile.coinbase.com/sean3.eth. It’s not hacked or photoshopped. My balance is $48 billion. Not bad eh? If I asked for a $10,000 loan, would you give me one? I’m clearly good for it.
You could even copy and paste the address into etherscan and authenticate that the balance you see on coinbase is legit.
The only problem with all this is that I’ve tricked you. sean3.eth is me but the address it’s pulling the balance from (0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa) is not me. That’s because Coinbase is pulling the address that the name resolves to which is an open-ended field that an ENS name owner can populate with any address that they want regardless of whether or not it belongs to them. In this case, I’ve entered a wallet address that possesses $48 billion worth of eth and now I’ve created the impression for anyone who doesn’t fully understand how everything works that I’m the wealthiest crypto holder in the world.
If you went to https://app.ens.domains/sean3.eth, you’d see that the manager and owner of sean3.eth is actually eth.loan, which I suppose would also come across as confusing to an amateur.
If you typed in eth.loan into etherscan, you’d see that the DNS owner is 0x64233eAa064ef0d54ff1A963933D0D2d46ab5829, who only has $695 worth of eth. That’s the real me. I’m not a billionaire after all.
What’s the lesson to all this? Be careful. Appearances can be deceiving!
—
Note: I’ve since changed my wallet address back.