The first part of a series of articles about scam methods in the world of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. I emphasize that the information was collected in order to protect people from scammers; you cannot do what is written below!
In a series of these articles, I will only talk about some of the methods; it is simply impossible to talk about them all, there are too many of them and new ones appear regularly, the main thing that you can take away from the article are two things:
1. It is easier to deceive an inattentive person.
2. You cannot trust those who promise mountains of gold.
Method No. 1. Fake exchange. I previously wrote in my channel about one of these exchanges. The essence of the deception is that some exchange offers more favorable conditions in some area than on other exchanges. For example, high interest rates on staking, bonuses for registration, or an arbitrage link that is visible to the naked eye. You will be able to top up your account on this exchange, but there will be problems with withdrawing funds. It will be impossible to do this.
How to avoid getting caught?
1. There is a list of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges: link. We come here and look for the exchange, if we don’t find it, perhaps we shouldn’t interact with it. There is also a rating here, if it is low, you should think about using this exchange.
2. We check when this exchange was created. If she is a couple of months old, you shouldn’t meddle in there. You can do such a check, for example, here: link
3. Check the site, if it is clear that it was made on the knee, that the photos are from Google, that half of the links are not clickable - this is a scam.
4. Well, just google, you can find reviews about the exchange on the Internet, and if you can’t find anything about it at all, it’s 100% a scam.
Method No. 2. Somehow you received a seed phrase from someone else's coin wallet. Let’s say that in some chat or somewhere else, someone left a secret phrase from their wallet with the wording “Cryptocurrency has been banned in my country, you can do whatever you want with it!” or “Help a newbie, something’s wrong, here’s my seed phrase.” You go to this wallet and see that there are coins there! Let's imagine that this is 1000 USDT with the BEP-20 protocol. You want to withdraw these tokens to your wallet, but bad luck! There is no BNB for commission, but you only need a little bit! You transfer a couple of dollars for a commission to someone else’s wallet and... a bot that works on this wallet instantly transfers them to another wallet. There is no way to withdraw these 1000 USDT from this wallet while the bot is working.
How to avoid getting caught?
The only way is don't try to take other people's money!
Method number 3. Blackmail and threats to leak personal data. Yes, there is that too. Someone may write you a message on one of the social networks with wording containing threats about leaking some of your personal information, for example, a video from your phone camera taken without your knowledge. And this someone demands, in exchange for non-distribution of these materials, a conditional 100 USDT to his crypto-wallet. A lot of money is being thrown away.
How to avoid getting caught? The main thing in such a situation is not to panic. Calm down and think about what kind of terrible information about you could be leaked? And to whom? Where did they get them from? Where is the evidence that they have them? Well, in the end, go to the website (link) and in the search bar enter the address of the wallet to which you are asked to credit the coins. If there are a bunch of transactions with the same deposit amount, it’s a scam.
