As you know, it is scammers that are most susceptible to everything related to new technologies. The more sophisticated tools to combat scams, the more sophisticated methods of deception they invent.
Here I will tell you about the most popular scams associated with ICO, over the past year and a half. Despite the tightening of legislation, the ban on advertising ICO, etc., some of them are still used by unscrupulous and not very inventive scammers.
In general, I ask you to take this seriously.
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This method was especially popular around the second half of 2017. HYIP around the ICO on the eve of the public sale of tokens reaches its maximum. Sometimes tokens are bought up in the first minutes after the sale. The situation is aggravated by the fact that because of the influx of visitors ICO site starts to slow down.
Some investors are so afraid of not having time to buy the coveted tokens that fall into the clutches of scammers.
By the time enterprising guys create a copy of the original site with a similar domain or / and launch a viral advertisement about selling tokens on all popular channels with a fake number ETH. You will be surprised, but last year, thus, investors lost about $ 100,000.
Now it's a little more difficult to do these things because of the ban on advertising on Facebook, Twitter and restrictions in Google Adwords, but before it was possible to bring such a fake site to the top and collect money from investors, it was easy.
The advice is simple and universal: check the information and do not get caught up in viral advertising.
Imaginary experts
This is one of my favorite ways of divorce. Not in the sense that I used it, I just can not help admiring the ability of other people to throw dust in the eyes. Crypto-currencies and ICO around the world are experiencing the stage of "infancy", and therefore experts in such a young industry by definition can not be. But they exist, and many of them manage to gain authority and become leaders of opinions among mostly young investors. As a rule, they all lead beautiful social networks with thousands of subscribers, make convincing posts about their beautiful life and give useful advice.
Since the scope of the ICO is young, what do most startups do here and how they do not, they turn to such experts. In the worst case, they trust them to lead their portfolio for a share of the profits. The project eventually fails, the "expert" makes a helpless gesture, throwing like: "Understand, dude, I did everything I could. This is a harsh market, the strongest survive "- and goes into the sunset with your money.The sad thing is that you can not prove that this man deceived you, because you yourself turned to him for help.
In the end, no one will be able to sell your product better than you yourself, because this is your favorite child. No outsider expert is interested in selling your assets to investors, he is only interested in the money that you have and that you are willing to spend on his "services."
Pumping
There is another interesting way of fraud with the help of experts. It looks like this. Some popular "crypto enthusiast" starts posting on his resources enthusiastic posts about the crypto currency and stories about fabulous profits that he received from her. This process is called "pumping". Part of the community is conducted on the appeals of the expert and begins to buy up the crypt. The cost of tokens really grows, the graphs soar up, the HYIP grows and other market players also start buying tokens. After some time, the "leader of opinions" merges its crypto currency when it is at the peak of the price, gets its interest, post on Twitter a prophecy about the imminent collapse of the currency and, of course, it turns out right. After passing the peak, the price of tokens is rapidly going down.
As a result, the belief in the foresight of the expert is strengthened, his state has grown a little, and if you were led to such promotion, you lost your money.
Private keys in exchange for money
Quite a strange way of fraud. During the sale of tokens and Airdrop, some projects offer users to provide them with their digital keys to get tokens for free.
This is a clear wiring, never give anyone your keys.