How to Avoid Crypto Currency Scam

How to Avoid Crypto Currency Scam

How to Avoid Crypto Currency Scam: Due to the lack of regulations in the crypto market, there has been an abundance of scammers in the market, a massive rally in bitcoin and the anonymity of it has created a fertile ground for hackers and scammers.

How to Avoid Crypto Currency Scam

There have been different forms of hacks and scams since the coming of age of the crypto market, but small and large, one of the examples of the big crypto scam was doing the mid-2020, an incident involving over 45 high profile Twitter users ranging from Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, Elon Musk and many more were hacked, the group of scammers majorly teenagers, put out tweets from those accounts.

The issue here is that the scammers were able to use the accounts to promote a Bitcoin scam from those accounts, claiming that the user will double any amount of bitcoin the users send to a given wallet address, and unsuspecting users saw what appeared to be an amazing deal.

How to Avoid Crypto Currency Scam

Fraudsters and Hackers have taken advantage of crypto enthusiasts through hacks, meme coins, ICOs, multi-level marketing, and pump and dump schemes, to name a few to scam people, here we will be looking at various scam schemes and how to avoid them.

• Fake ICO

According to Investopedia, “Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are a popular fundraising method used primarily by startups wishing to offer products and services, usually related to the cryptocurrency and blockchain space”. Basically, ICOs allow you to invest in a company in exchange for tokens, say a company wants to launch a product, after stating their plans and the problem they want to solve after all these, they search for funds using IPO ( initial Public Offering).

In the crypto world, an ICO is like an IPO with no regulation and this gives room for scammers to take advantage of and abscond with investors’ funds. There are genuine ICOs out there just as they are fake, ICO pay to get your attention, they issue free tokens, random giveaways and other incentives during their start-up process.

When you join a telegram group to get information about an ICO and probably win some giveaway, of course, and the first thing they ask you is how much you are willing to invest, blacklist them as a scam. This may be false but they should start with their vision and product before asking you for investment

Before investing, ask them what problem they are trying to solve, if their answer does not make sense to you, just ignore them and if you are still willing to invest with them, make an inquiry about the organisation and its founders on google to confirm that the founders are real and reliable individuals. Remember endorsement from a reputable or popular individual does not validate the ICO, Vitalik Buterin the co-founder of Ethereum has been put in different teams of an ICO without knowing about them.

• Impersonation

With how far we have with technology, it is easy to impersonate an individual or an organisation online these days. It takes about 2 to 5 minutes to create any social media account, and anybody can impersonate on most of these social media platforms. Even if a verified account message you telling you to send crypto to him for whatever reason you should be sceptical about it, take the Twitter hack of 2020 for example.

To avoid been swindled online, don’t go for crypto deals that are too good to be true and be observant of the usernames of people you deal with as scammers are known to change little details of the real handle to look like the new one. You can also search online for chrome extensions that help identify fake accounts on Twitter as some developers have been working on those.

• Wallet Scam

Advice to our reader is not to use any wallet that is not listed on ProductHunt. Judge them based on upvotes as this signifies numbers of positive feedback received by the wallet. You can also do research ( by checking them on google) about the team that developed the wallet. Seach their Github repositories. If their Github reputation is not good, they are not likely to keep your coin safe.

How to Avoid Crypto Currency Scam

In summary, here are few things to watch out for to avoid a crypto scam:

• Anything that seems too good to be true it probably a scam. 
• If the message first appears in your junk folder. Email software is good in detecting scam messages and not from a legitimate source.
• Don’t believe just because a familiar or popular name is associated with it validate its authenticity.
• Make personal research about the company offering the opportunity real and reliable.
• Check for online reviews. Don’t just rush into anything, check for feedback online as people will share both their negative and positive feedback about the scheme online.

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