You would be falling for a crypto scam and you wouldn't even know it. Here we will talk about top 5 crypto scams you should be aware off. They have become ever more brazen and elaborate and have stolen billions from unsuspecting victims. In this article, I'm going to tell you about some of the most prolific crypto scams out there, scams that could be waiting for you just around the corner, but before we look into scams i need to give you the lay of the land. Although this content may give you a hand, but financial advice is not part of the plan. I am not a financial advisor and have never been a fan. This is purely an educational article designed to help your mind expand. My name is "MrCrypt" and I think crypto is rad and on cryptolibrarynow, we think it's anything but a fad. Coins, Tokens, news reviews, and market moves too. It's all covered here just for you. OK, it's now time to tell you about some of the nasty scams trying to put you under their spell.
1)Giveaway Scam-:
I want to start with perhaps one of the most common scams out there. The giveaway. That's because these are so damn prolific that they permeate nearly every corner of the internet and these are also particularly relevant right now given that these are the scams that appear to be central to the conversation around bot spam on Twitter. Not only are they incredibly pervasive, but trying to stop them is like trying to kill a hydra with unlimited heads. So let's start with the basics. Then what is a giveaway scam? Well, as the name suggests, it's a scam where free crypto is being given away. The main m.o here is that if you send a certain person online a small amount of crypto, they will send you double, triple or 10X your investment. Now at the core these reckon to, well, someone anonymous on the internet offering to send you something for free. The scam is of course not new to crypto. These used to do the rounds as the famous Nigerian Prince emails that people got back in the early days of the Internet. The main m.o there was that someone wanted to send you a lot of money, but needed you to first send them a wire to confirm the bank account. Same play. Different day. When it comes to how these giveaway scams operate, you'll usually be told to go to some link that will show you a website or landing page detailing the steps of the giveaway. There'll be fake transactions that you can see going through as they try to convince you that people are indeed getting paid. Now, most of these scams usually have a timer on them as a pressure tactic to make you think that you have to act quickly. What this means is that people tend to make decisions in the moment without considering the potential outcome as mentioned, these scams are pervasive on Twitter, but they're also well known features of other social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, etc. In the case of YouTube scams, they're usually simple live streams, where you'll have a famous person or group of people who will be participating in the talk. Now this is all stolen footage with the instructions about how to enter the competition displayed around it. For those who have never come across these scams before, they can be deceiving. That's because they have thousands of people who appear to be present in the live streams. However, these are, of course, all bots that are controlled by the same scam operator. As to how these channels are able to get so many subscribers or the verified status, well, that's because they are hacked channels. Hackers commandeer these channels, delete their content, and run the live streams in their place. Beyond this, though, the scams sometimes actually buy ad space on the social media platform they're using now. I've seen these scam ads being run on YouTube and Instagram. We don't want to risk anyone falling for one of these scams. That's the best way to eliminate. These and all other scams is for people to stop falling for them. Now, I've said it many times before, the reason that they're so prolific is because they are profitable no matter how many spam filters the platforms attempt to throw on these, the operators will still try to make them work. So it's incredibly important to understand. No one on the Internet, is going to give you something for free. Onto our next scam, though, and these can be just as damaging.
2)Rug pull Scam -:
Yes, the rug pool. Now, as the name suggests, a rug pool is when someone else pulls the rug from under you. Back in the heydays of ICOS, back in 2017, these used to be called exit scams. Whatever the name, the MO is the same. They rob you of your funds, disappear and leave you holding the bag. Now, while back in 2017, the vehicle for this sort of fraud was an initial coin offering, or Ico's, today rug pulls are quite prevalent in the NFT and defi spaces. In the case of NFTS, the creators will usually get someone to create pretty bog standard images, issue them in a mint, promise some exciting road map, or pay some influencer to shill them. And you'd be surprised at some of the celebrities who've been shilling these types of NFTS recently. Once the mint is completed and the people have their NFTS, the project creators delete all websites, socials and digital communications. They pull the rug and leave you on your behind. These roug pools don't have to happen all at once, of course. Sometimes you have what is called a slow rug. In this case, the project developer slowly extricated themselves from the project over a number of weeks or months. Their goal is for the buyers to eventually lose interest and abandon their hopes of moons and lambos. Now the slow rug is actually a lot more common than the quicker one, and can sometimes be harder to zone in on. That's because you can't be 100% certain that the intent was to defraud. So how do you avoid an NFT rug pool? Well, you'll need to be a lot more discerning in the types of NFTS that you buy or the mints that you participate in now. I'll be straight up here and tell you that over 95% of all NFTS are going to zero. Sorry to burst your bubble. However, there are around 5% that could be highly valuable in the future, and if you want to try and find those, you have to be particularly discerning in your criteria. So that was NFTS, but you also have the rug pulls that are going on in the defi space Now these are a bit different from an ICO or NFT in that instead of sending a protocol money, you have to supply liquidity to the protocol. This liquidity is usually used in a decentralized exchange and you can get pretty attractive returns from supplying said liquidity. During this time, the creators will hype the project so that there's a lot of demand and hence liquidity in the pool. This is done using the same paid shill methods that are used for the rug pull NFT'S. As more investors buy the hyped cryptocurrency, they progressively exchange it for cryptos such as stable coins and ether. Now when the project is live for a few hours or days, liquidity pools can run into 10s of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. This is when the rug developers then strike and extract all the liquidity from the pool, leaving investors holding the bag for these tokens. The devs are sometimes able to do this because they've not locked the liquidity ,in the pool, they still control the smart contracts and hence what can be done with the funds in the pool. Now these are actually quite common and according to a report from Chainalysis last year we saw a total of $2.8 billion stolen in these types of fraud. You can see just how many there were and the total value lost in comparison to 2020 . So how do you avoid a defi rug pull? Well, this all comes back to broader due diligence. You're going to want to make sure that you're not locking your funds up in some random protocol. Don't let those deceptively high APYs fool you. You'll also want to make sure that the authors of the smart contract don't still have control over it. This is something that would allow them to extract the liquidity and run off with your funds. Beyond that, though, the due diligence that you should be doing for a DFI project should not be any different from that you'd be doing on any other crypto project. One of the best ways to avoid potential scams is, of course, to make sure that you're not investing in any shit coins, and if you're looking for a guide that can help you with that well, look no further and click on me. OK, that's rug pulls onto our next scam and this one can sometimes be quite hard to spot.
3)Phising Scam -:
That's the infamous phishing scam. Now, these are not exclusively related to crypto and have existed before to grab important details from users. Details like passwords and other credentials to access important services. They first started popping up in the crypto space when they were used by hackers to get access to people's exchange account details and steal their funds from there. However, given how secure these exchanges have become recently, the phishing schemes have evolved to start targeting users directly through their cryptocurrency wallets. Perhaps one of the most damaging, these is when they're able to successfully fish your private keys. Now this could happen because the scammers have exfiltrated the keys from your device, but it's more likely when you have voluntarily given over your private keys, and one of the most common ways of doing this is for the hacker to fool you into handing over your gnomonic seed words. These are usually used to recover your wallets and they are never requested unless you're resetting your wallet. Now there are a number of ways in which this can be done. Perhaps one of the most common is when you'll visit a website of some sort, where it will ask you to insert your seed phrase in order to access it. This is of course a scam, as you should never need to insert your seed phrase to send funds from a wallet. Please guys, if you ever land, on any website that asks you for your seed, navigate away ASAP. I'll also say that leaving your seed phrase on your PC in an electronic form is a bad idea. You may even be doing this without knowing it, as some IO meta mask users learned recently. Now another method of phishing your funds involves the attacker actually giving you their seed word. In this instance, you're usually being duped into going to a fraudulent website when trying to download a new wallet. When you go through the process on this fraudulent site, the attacker will give you a seed which you think is yours, but is in fact theirs. You'll then use this seed to set-up a new wallet, which unbeknownst to you, is under the Scammer's control. The moment that you have sent funds to the wallet, the scammer makes off with them. Now sometimes these fake wallet phishing schemes are able to also buy ad space on Google so that their links are presented before those of the real wallet themselves. Not cool. Now I'll leave a link to this security report that breaks down how it was done on the Phantom wallet last year, but of course this relates to any wallet that requires a download. So here's a quick rule of thumb. Never click on the ads. That's because it's easy for a scammer to buy some ad space on keywords. It's a lot harder for them to organically rank above that of the original site itself. Now there's another really sinister NFT related phishing method that's become quite popular recently. This is where a malicious DAP masquerading as a legitimate one will get you to unknowingly approve token spends. Essentially, when you connect your wallet to these dapps and authorize them to spend on your behalf, that's exactly what they do, except not in the way. That you wanted. Now this has happened to a surprising number of NFT holders. For example, last year this ape collector lost access to 16 high value NFTS, or roughly $2.2 million when he approved a phishing contract. This also happened more recently when it was disclosed that the official bored ape Instagram account, was hacked, and a phishing link was posted. The hackers were trying to take advantage of the hype around virtual land sales and required the users to connect their wallets to claim. Of course, this would have given the hacker token spend approvals that would have allowed them to make off with the contents. Now there are plenty of other examples of phishing attacks which are sadly too numerous to mention. So how do you avoid them? Well firstly you have to be very careful which Daps you're giving authorization to. You need to make sure that before you sign any transaction, you are on the official website of the daap and not a malicious one. It's also wise to make sure that you've not approved some dodgy smart contracts in the past. Onto our next scam to watch out for, and that is the impersonation scam.
4)Impersonation Scam -:
This is when a scammer will try to get you to part with your crypto by impersonating someone else. And this is a personal bugbear of mine as I have thousands of impersonators out there trying to rip off my followers. The reason why these scams can be quite successful is because they try to take advantage of someone else's reputation, a reputation that inspires trust in others. These impersonators are everywhere and on nearly every social platform.Now of course, when you send them the money, they tell you that they have successfully generated your profit. However, there's a catch. You have to send them a withdrawal fee or pay them their cut of the profits first,and I'm sure you can imagine what happens once you do that. These scammers are also extremely prolific. In telegram, for example, as I speak, there are these telegram channels over here that are impersonating the Coin Base. Not only that, but they have more subscribers than their official channel, which of course throws some people off. All bots of course. They either offer VIP trading signals or a trading package that goes down similar paths to the WhatsApp scam. Now the amount of people we get emailing in and telling us that they have been scammed by someone on Telegram posing as me is incredible. Sometimes these people are fleeced for over 40K. Then again, as is the case with coinbase or finance or overseas their Twitter, and Telegram channel will be verified blue tick stick. If it's not there, it's not theirs. Or if someone was impersonating to be me on any of these platforms and you were 100% convinced was me , you have to go back to the very beginning of this article. I say it all the time, but I really mean it. I am not a financial advisor, which means. That I'm clearly not qualified to trade your accounts for you. I will also never ask you to send me money. Now I also want to make it clear that we will never reach out to you via e-mail directly or through any social media platform (whatsapp included) .I only post these articles on this blog and that's it, nothing more. On occasion there have been projects that thought they were speaking to me and buying sponsorship on the channel. However, they were then quick to learn that they had been scammed through a spoofed e-mail. Yup, actual projects in the cryptospace falling for a run-of-the-mill e-mail header spoof. As a side note, projects should know that i don't do any sponsored promos on this blog. So if anyone is offering to sell you these services, you are being scammed my friend. Now of course, I didn't mean to make this all about me. Anyone in the crypto or investment space who has a decent sized following will have impersonators trying to fleece their followers.This just comes back to the simple edict. If it sounds too good to be true, then it almost certainly is. On to the next scheme, though, and this is one for the ages. I am of course talking about Ponzi schemes.
5)Ponzi Schemes Scam -:
For those who don't know what Ponzi schemes are, the simplest explanation I can think of is when you rob Peter to pay Paul. Essentially, you create a system where you sustain payouts from an investment scheme of some sort by bringing more money in from the. Stream of new investors. Fonzies have been around in the traditional financial system for over a century and have sometimes led to some of the biggest trade fire losses in generations.These Ponzi schemes have taken on a new life in the Cryptospace, and there have been thousands that have come and gone over the years. The reason why these are able to grow so quickly in this space is because of the opaque nature of the markets. People tend to believe that there really is a cloud mining package, lending scheme or trading bot that is making them money on the daily. Ponzi's also tend to payout pretty believable returns. This is part of the design. The more believable the stream of daily returns, the more likely people are to invest. And as all good ponzis do, these people are initially paid. This further creates the perception that it has to be true. Money in your hands must mean that something's legit, right? Now many of these Ponzi schemes also rely on current members referring them to their friends and family for additional rewards. These are called multilevel marketing or MLM schemes and they are perhaps one of the biggest red flags that something could be a Ponzi scheme. However, with the advent of defy, the line between Ponzi scheme and legitimate lending protocol sometimes becomes blurred. Some projects implement tokenomics structures that make selling the token or unstacking a coin economically disadvantageous. This creates an artificial demand as people are dissuaded from ever selling. Moreover, the returns of those who are invested can only be successfully maintained if more people join the staking protocol. So how do you avoid falling for a Ponzi scheme? Well, it helps to take all of these guaranteed return investment opportunities with a healthy dose of skepticism. You need to ask yourself how these potential returns compare to the market average. If they're consistently above that, then it should attract suspicion. You should also make 100% certain that you know exactly how this project or protocol is generating those returns. Sometimes the more complicated it sounds, the more likely that there's something fishy going on. In fact, some of the biggest Ponzi schemes in the world had investment theses that were incredibly hard to understand or pin down. In these cases, Occam's razor will serve you well. The most likely explanation is that it's a Ponzi. Now, the final scam that I want to talk about is the pump and dump PND.
6)Pump and Dump Scam -:
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