Steemit Crypto Academy Contest Season 6 Week 5 -Common Crypto Scams And How To Avoid Them

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Hello everyone, how are you doing, I hope everyone is doing great, I welcome you to week 5 season 6 of the engagement challenge, and here I shall be participating in the contest discussion of "Common Crypto Scams And How To Avoid Them".

On this topic, I shall discuss the common cryptocurrency scams we witness daily, some scams hide in plain sight while some are camouflaged but without us being careful, we might fall victim to this scam, and cryptocurrency is irreversible meaning there is nothing that could be done in such case anymore, Happy Reading!!.

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Explain Your Understanding Of Crypto Scam

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Cryptocurrency scams come in a lot of ways, it's simply the idea of moving away with a user's funds, or deceiving a user to a scam link in other to poison their wallet and go away with their funds.

Crypto scams occur in various ways, a user can be deceived of a return on an investment whereby they get you to invest in their token, then they promise to give you some interesting returns, whereas the idea of this is to let users come with their funds and when they have enough investment, they tends to close down the business and move with the user's funds.

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Cryptocurrency scams are instances whereby other individuals are trying to bypass another user's wallet through whatever attack possible, they do this to move away with the user hard earned funds, its a common attack that is witnessed in every financial realm as well, and its an objective of other users trying to bypass your cryptocurrency wallets and move away with your investments.

Crypto scams also occur in a way that some set of individuals or businesses will be willing to create a token or coin with a superior advertisement, they trick people into investing in their coin, then when they have made enough investment, they will rug pull this and move with all the investor's funds, and this is a cryptocurrency platform that uses the blockchain, it is decentralized meaning it can't be traced, there is no identity of the owner, so in that case, assets lost are never recovered.

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Explain The various Types of crypto Scam

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There are various types of scams in the cryptocurrency realm.

• Rug Pulling:

This has explained is the common type of scam whereby some individuals or organizations conjoined together to create a new cryptocurrency token, they tend to pay for good marketing advertisements which will attract investors, and they come with a lot of promises of how they plan to create a safe investment, and after this, they deceive people into investing, when they get to their target of investment, they close down business and move with the user's funds.

• Phishing Link:

This is also another common type of scam in the crypto realm, I have also been a victim of this, the phishing link occurs in a way that the scammers will be willing to share a link either for airdrop or they impersonate that they are trying to solve your problem, and when doing this, you might have mistakenly connected your Trust wallet or Metamask to their website, this makes it easy to access your wallet, and before you realize it, they would have run away with the user's funds.

• High Investment Scheme :

This is also a common type of scam, it is also known as Ponzi, this will work for a couple of times, then when you eventually trust them enough and invest big funds, they eventually move with your money, this is coupled with greed, they target crypto users with a lot of greed, this investment could be promising 50% weekly ROI without any basis project, they are easy to identify as it sort of feels like a giveaway.

• Fake Airdrop :

There are a lot of scams that also occur through an airdrop, it is always advisable to have a different wallet specifically for airdrops, the idea of airdrops is a giveaway to familiarize more users by giving them some token for free, scammers have found this as a way of scamming people as well, where their idea of the giveaway is for them to penetrate the wallet and go with users funds.

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How Can We Do In Other To Spot This Types Of Crypto Scams?

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Spotting these Fake Crypto scams is easy, the important thing with crypto is to avoid greed as much as possible, and do away with any circumstances that will make you invest in a coin that promises big returns.

• Try as much as possible to read the White paper, all cryptocurrency projects are first presented on the white paper, from this you can understand what the project is all about, and from there on, you can factor whether it is a safe investment or not.

• Excessive Airdrop: It is easy to spot fake cryptos using airdrop, the scam cryptos have a way of utilizing airdrop to attract investors at first, they give free coins out to attract people, this is to pump the value of the token and make a lot of people invest with them, cryptos that utilize excessive airdrops are often scammers as well.

• Spot the Members: Real crypto investments are backed with some known members, to figure out scam crypto, try as much as possible to identify each member of the project from its whitepaper, if the members are some people with no names or not affiliated to a good influence in the crypto space, they are likely to be a scam as well.

• You can as well spot scams by their devoted attention to trying to win your approval, they are always in your DMs asking you to invest or always mentioning you in discord to participate in a challenge, any challenge that involves you linking a link to your exchange is likely a scam as well.

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Have You Ever Be Scammed Before? Or Have A Person That You Know Ever Be Scammed? Explain To Us The Incident.

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Yes, I have been scammed before and this was because I was not paying full attention during the process, it was indeed a painful experience for me.

This occur when I made a steem transfer to an address on Binance but I didn't include the memo, so I reached out to the binance exchange and within 24hrs, Binance retrieve the steem for me and sent it to the exchange I sent it from, but Binance sent the coin without a memo so there is no way to confirm whether this was done by me or not, so I reached out to the exchange customer service on Twittetoto lodge my complaint.

The moment I sent the message, a support account followed me on Twitter and ask about my issue which I did complain to them, so I was asked to enter a link and lodge my complaint through the link, my attention was diverted so I was not paying attention to the page as it is the same as the original exchange, little did I know that immediately I had login through the link, the user access my wallet and converted all my assets to Tron, and he/she immediately transferred the token out, it took me some minutes to realize this and it was indeed a terrible day for me.

This could have been avoided if I was paying attention, but I was on a conference call with my friends that very day, so I was partially paying attention to the customer service without knowing it is a scam, it was later I realized that the account was a fake account created on Twitter for such scams.

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How Can One Protect Himself From Crypto Scam

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Crypto scams are everywhere, the best is to stay ahead and avoid anything that promises double investment without committing any effort.

• Make Use of 2FA - It was after my incident I realized that my 2FA was off, and hardly been that the Google Authentication on my exchange was enabled, the user wouldn't have had the liberty of transferring the assets out as it will be surely required before transactions can be made.

• Use different wallets for Airdrop - There is nothing wrong with participating in airdrop as it is a way of familiarizing yourself with some investment, but a lot of airdrops are scams and their purpose was to get into your wallet, but you can avoid this by setting up a new metamask wallets purposely for your airdrop only.

• Always verify Investment - To Protect your investment, make verification to be sure you are investing in the right coin, I don't make investments that aren't listed on a common exchange like Binance or KuCoin, this is the top trustworthy exchange, the coins listed on this exchange are more trustworthy as they have bypassed verification before listing, so its another way of protecting yourself by verifying from this exchange.

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Coclusion

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Here comes my conclusion on the topic "Common Crypto Scams And How To Avoid Them" . the crypto scams are what we witnessed day to day, it is unavoidable, but the best to do is to stay ahead of them, protect your holdings as much as possible, avoid clicking an unnecessary links that might lead to attacks, and mostly avoid greed investment, some scams are known for promising high returns whereas their sole purpose is to deceive you to invest with them, then run away with your money afterward.

Thank you everyone for coming, I hereby invite @solexybaba, @josepha, and @Sahmie to participate in the contest as well.