As cryptocurrencies become more and more familiar to the public, many novice users wonder if the decline of the days is temporary if it will continue in the bear market resulting in losses.
But a common way for a new user to lose money from cryptocurrencies is not the decreasing price but to fall victim to cyber fraud.
Due to the complexity of cryptocurrencies, many people fall into the trap of trusting illegal companies and strangers who promise some form of easy or quick profit.
A cryptocurrency scam can be done in various ways and we aim to introduce you to some of the most "common" frauds.
Read the most common cryptocurrency frauds
- Wherever you see a Twitter post or YouTube video or anywhere that says send this X amount of X cryptocurrency, and you will get back the double is always 100% a fraud. Do not be fooled by any mentioning that it is only for the top 100, is only for the next hour, or is someone famous doing it because it is not valid.
- Very often, scammers create celebrities’ accounts to create these scams. Anyone who wants to give something on the blockchain can automatically send it to our address (e.g., in the form of airdrop). Never send coins or give any passwords.
- If you follow groups from a cryptocurrency and are particularly concerned with Instagram Twitter and telegram, there will be dozens of scammers who will send you messages every day about anything from investing in a new currency to selling their cryptocurrency.
- The well-known phone scams made by countries such as London, England, Sweden want to introduce us to a new company in which they want us to put even a small amount to start and make money for sure and quickly. I mean, there are people in my personal life who, because they know that I deal with cryptocurrencies, keep asking me if it is worthwhile to deal with the companies that have presented them in the respective phone calls to make money, as well as those who order ledgers. Unfortunately, they have to change their number because the situation became unbearable. There was an attack on the Ledger company as a result of which personal data leaked and so now there is a list available on the internet with names, emails, phone numbers, and addresses. This personal information is now available to anyone and scammers try by phone to present opportunities to a ready audience.
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Continuing the list, it is time to report mistakes that are made due to haste, such mistakes have to do with the search in Google or other browsers. Someone for example may want to install MetaMask and in google search appear first a sponsored advertising for MetaMask wallet. However, scammers have made a page clone so most likely we will not be able to spot the difference and download instead of MetaMask infected software on our computer or even worse give our security words to make a transaction. Never write your seed phrases to log in to your account because in that way we give unlimited access to our account and our money.
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Another scam alert is when you search for a specific cryptocurrency on google, and instead of going to the page of the currency you go to a clone page and buy a cryptocurrency that has the same name but has nothing to do with the token you wanted to buy. To avoid all this carelessness, the simplest solution is when someone wants to be transferred to a cryptocurrency site or exchange platform, visit coinmarketcap or nomics and click on the official webpage. It is 100% accurate you are in the right place.
Frauds with wallet interaction
As it is logical, most of us who are constantly looking for what new project come out or what new decentralized application is being made, many times in some of these pages, we permit our MetaMask wallet or other decentralized wallets to interact through Web 3.
There are several such pages that, after connecting to MetaMask, ask us to make a transaction with the smart contract address of the page and move us to the next tab with the acceptance, and here comes the fraud!
In the tab that will come out, usually many do not read what they give permission and just click accept, but even if they do read, the smart contract will have many tabs and we will only see the last one which may say something ordinary that will not arouse suspicion.
To see all the tabs we have to go to a small point below that says transfer to the previous ones, and only then we will see the point that writes about consent to give permission for unlimited transfer busd, bnb, usdt, or anything other.
If someone accepts it without realizing it, those who handle the smart contract address can steal your coins any time, not necessarily immediately.
Frauds with dust attacks
Crypto users who watch their wallets on etherscan and bscscan explorers will have noticed too many times that they have been sent small quantities of cryptocurrencies without having bought them themselves. These cryptocurrencies may not seem to have any value or may have great value depending on what scammers want to do.
Usually, those that have no value are sent to too many wallets at once and their purpose is to try to gather information more easily about the transactions of your wallet. When they do this on a large scale, scammers try to combine information like what other wallets we have, what we do with our money, etc.
This information, in combination with some leaks that will be made from our data from time to time by various points, creates an information profile that can be used by several third parties.
Now in case they have great value, it is usually to make us try to redeem this value. However, since there will be no liquidity available in any exchange, they make us search a little more to find the currency’s website. Then they ask us to connect our wallet with the smart contract of the currency, and we permit to empty our money.
Always double-check a new cryptocurrency
The safest way to invest in a new cryptocurrency like Puppy coin is by checking the following:
- Token white paper
- Website
- Social media presence
- Exchange platforms
- Official partners
- Community forums
- Tokenomics
- Blockspot.io verified badge
The best solution is to search a lot for any new project we are interested in and trust nobody that offers us easy ways to gain money from cryptocurrencies. Be smart, be a krypto hodler!