I got robbed. I need your help
Hey Friends -
It's taken me a while to get up the courage and the energy to try and put words on this, but here goes.
~11 weeks ago, just as Pluto regressed into Capricorn, I was robbed of what was, for me, a huge amount of money, about $80K. The person who did this was someone I had helped (and Seeds had helped) through our Community Fund.
I reported it to the cops and to the FBI. It took weeks of effort and energy to even get them to respond to me. It isn't an exaggeration to say that dealing with them was almost as bad as experiencing the theft itself.
When I finally got him to talk to me after ~7 weeks, multiple in-person field office visits, and many emails and calls, the Portland FBI Head of White Collar Crimes or whatever told me I had not had enough stolen to merit their time.
When I asked him how he could sleep at night, knowing that he only serves the rich…he hung up on me.
(I managed to record that part of the conversation (legal in Oregon), so keep an eye out for a YouTube video that includes it. I've moved through the stages of grief surrounding what happened, which kept me from speaking…and now I'm feeling strong enough to call these fkers out.)
Without burdening you with too many details, I also made an insurance claim. I assumed I'd be met with professionalism, and hopefully empathy - like it didn't even occur to me to think otherwise - but the insurance adjuster kinda yelled at me during our first call. I get it, she probably hated that job and was having a bad day. But I didn't want someone in that frame of mind wielding full power over the decision to be made on my claim…so I called the insurance company 5 times to ask that another adjuster be assigned. They never got back to me (illegal in Oregon)…and the original adjuster awarded me $200.
So now I'm learning way more about the law than I ever cared to as I proceed with a suit against them…which is not how I should be spending my time when Seeds is needed more than ever.
But that's the point, I think. These energies - Pluto's expression in the anaretic degree of Capricorn, which for me as a triple Aries is especially about capitalism's corruption and the failure of top-down institutions - were really working to drain me and knock me comatose, because the new energies that will make Seeds fly are on the brink of landing, and I need to be upright to harness them. And even if you think astrology is bullshit (and I've never come across anyone with a working understanding beyond sun signs who does), I think it's interesting to observe how this whole ecosystem surrounding what is probably my biggest unhealed wounding - lack of support in getting my material needs met (natal Chiron in the anaretic degree of Taurus) - collapsed like the big dumb house of cards that it is.
Because our “systems” do not work anymore… if they ever did. Trump x2 is their hoarse, shrieking death knell.
And the time to really put our energy into ushering in higher vibratory systems, like Seeds, is now.
I used my money to sustain myself, and to sustain Seeds - and now I can't afford to… and unless I ask for help now, I'll have to sell some of my SEEDS to cover basic expenses, which will deplete our mutual aid pool and drive down the SEEDS price - and I don't want that to happen.
I haven't taken a salary from Seeds in many years, and I've put the majority of my own funds in to Seeds when I couldn't get enough support from anyone else, even as I went through homelessness, as I was held in jail with a friend in Nairobi without cause, and while navigating a thousand other challenges that were more mundane. I'm proud of myself for finding the wherewithal to keep our project going when the odds were sometimes overwhelmingly against us, but now I understand this philosophy has ultimately been a mistake.
And I think that's the higher good in all of this! I've been too hyper-independent, too isolated, and too trapped in the belief that nobody wants to support what I'm offering, no matter how smart I am or what I've created is, regardless of how hard I work.
This theft happened to remind me that I have to ask for help, habitually, when I need it. Because I deserve support, and so does Seeds. And you do too. 💗
Me and my rescue puppy, Bowie.
Here's how the theft went down. Over three years ago, Seeds created what we call our Community Fund (you can check it out in its own channel in our Discord). We made it for people who truly couldn't afford to redeem a SEED to ask for help. The cost to redeem a SEED varies depending on market and gas prices, but it can be as low as say 10-20 cents USD, and if the Ethereum network is busy, it can be up to say a few dollars - which is a huge amount of money for many people in the developing world.
A couple women in the Seeds community had suggested that a Community Fund should exist. One Seeds giver, Wendi, explicitly asked that we put money she was to receive as a giver in a Community Fund instead. Encouraged by her kindness, in a spirit of pure good intention, we generated a wallet for this purpose, shared its information in the #community-fund Discord channel, and added the SEEDS Wendi had pledged to it, with a little bit of ETH from Seeds as well.
But then somebody started stealing from it. $10 or less. I figured out who it was, the only true ‘bad actor’ Seeds has yet seen (which is saying something, I think, that in ~12 years we've mostly attracted decent people).
So we removed the wallet information from our Discord, generated a new wallet for the Community Fund, and asked that the people who needed to use it submit a 20 second video to gain access. I was pissed off that we were forced to add this extra step for the people (overwhelming women) who really needed help because of this one selfish asshole, someone so corrupt that he would steal from a social good organization.
Fast forward like 6 months. My backpack with my laptop in it was stolen at Logan Airport. I bought a new laptop. I imported my Metamask wallet tool to my new device.
For those unaware, Metamask, like most cryptocurrency tools built by engineers who don't really care that much about making things accessible for the people who want to use them (this is a huge problem in software engineering generally, and it has to do with the wounded masculine, its ego and desire to gatekeep), has some design flaws. Its UX, or user experience, is not good.
One facet of Metamask's bad UX is that when you add its Chrome extension to a new device, you have to then re-add every wallet address you've ever used in association with your Metamask account, one-by-one. This can look really scary when you don't know this, because it first appears as though all addresses beyond your first have ‘disappeared.’
When do you ‘re-add’ you wallets, Metamask does so sequentially. So if you ‘remove’ a wallet at any point, it's still there in the Metamask queue, to be re-added at any time.
Maybe you already see where this is going. I had previously added the original Seeds Community Fund to my personal Metamask account, as all of us were encouraged to do to support it. I removed it when the thief forced us to shut that wallet down.
Once I had my new laptop, I didn't re-add the old Community Fund wallet that had been robbed for years…until I did so unknowingly, years after we had removed it from public access. I wanted a fresh wallet to use within my Metamask account so I could move a big chunk of my money to leverage an LP strategy I had found was really working well. So I added one.
I thought the wallet address looked a little familiar, but they're 42 alphanumeric characters and I certainly haven't memorized every one I've used in 11 years. I also saw that a few small transactions had been made in this wallet previously, and I naturally assumed they'd been made by me.
And so the thief had apparently kept the original access information for years, biding his time…and weeks after I moved my personal funds into what I believed was a personal wallet, he stole my shit.
I figured out what happened within the hour and we confronted the person we believed was behind the crime over email immediately. He quickly admitted to stealing around $10K in fraudulent Requests for Help, confirming our suspicions from years ago. He acted like he didn't know what we were talking about re: the old Community Fund and my personal money.
Although it seems overwhelmingly likely that the personal theft I suffered was also committed by him, given that to our knowledge literally no on else has ever stolen from Seeds in 12 years, and he’s been caught in numerous lies, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt, because the police and the FBI refused to go to Binance to confirm the identity of the person associated with the account the thief used to trade my funds, which is easily viewable on the blockchain.
We have all of this proof…and they wouldn’t do shit. So I’m turning to my community instead.
**
If you'd like to help in other aways beyond making a gift toward my need, you're invited to:
make a larger off-market SEEDS buy (please email us at team@seedsgives.com if you're interested).
LP your SEEDS and ETH, which takes just a few minutes, and helps our mutual aid pool grow (and means you get paid whenever the pool is used, and you may earn additional airdrops and bonuses too)
join the How to Build Abundance in Cryptocurrency course. Deadline to be a part of the current on-demand session is Thursday, November 28th.
if you've already made a Request for Help, share your page with your community. Not only can it help you, it also raises awareness about Seeds, bringing new givers into the fold so that they can benefit from the project too.
All gifts, shares, prayers, and good vibes are appreciated. And I wanna send you strength, so that you're able to find the courage to ask for help when you need it too.
xoxo,
Rachel