5 Crypto Scams You Should Be Aware of in 2022 l What is a Giveaway Crypto Scam?
The rising popularity of cryptocurrency as an asset of investment has also invited various scams and frauds. The reports of crypto scams have increased manifold in recent times. Rug pull, giveaway scams, and phishing scams are among common scams that are the way of targeting people on various online platforms especially social media such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. New investors and traders often get trapped in such scams and lose all their hard-earned money.
For those who have already been the prey of such scams, or the budding investors planning to enter into the world of crypto, we have listed the 5 most common crypto scams so that they can spot them and protect themselves from such scams.
What is a Crypto Scam?
Crypto scams are more sophisticated forms of financial crime in which swindlers are after your crypto assets. Scamsters, equipped with high-performance equipment, use multiple ways to dupe you across online platforms, especially social media including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Fraudsters use tactics to lure investors to make them purchase assets from scam websites and convince them to send their crypto assets to a compromised wallet. They send you suspicious links of Ponzi schemes with fake claims to get hold of your crypto wallet once you click on the links.
Giveaway crypto scams are widely used by scammers wherein, the victims are convinced by perpetrators to send their digital assets such as crypto tokens and NFTs to their accounts. Ripple giveaway is a recent example of such a scam in which victims were lured with various schemes with tall claims by the scammers and persuaded to send their digital assets to swindlers.
Types of Crypto Scams
Below are the most common types of crypto scams used by fraudulent to cheat investors:
Phishing Scam
In the context of cryptocurrency, phishing is the most common type of scam in which scammers use various tactics to steal your private keys. They send you unsolicited links that will land you on some fabricated websites or apps where you are asked to enter your wallet’s private key. Once you enter your private key on such suspicious websites or apps, the hackers will have access to your crypto wallet, and they will steal all your digital in the blink of an eye.
Business or Investment Scam
Online bogus claims made by crypto scammers to deliver guaranteed unexpectedly high returns entice unprofessional investors to pull their money into Ponzi crypto schemes, leading to financial disaster. The fraudsters can contact you through various social media platforms, mobile apps websites, and pop-ups, impersonating you as a crypto investment manager, celebrity, or a love partner making bogus tall claims to give you guaranteed “huge gains” to convince you to invest your large sums of money. Once you pull your money on such a scheme by transferring your crypto assets to an unverified wallet address you will find that they will run away within hours, and their website or social media handle won’t be operational.
Giveaway Crypto Scams
Nowadays giveaway crypto scams have become the most common form of crypto scams prevalent on popular social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In such types of crypto scams, users are convinced to send their crypto assets to the scammers with a false promise to get large numbers of crypto assets in return. Those who invest in such bogus scams, never get their funds back. In a recent incident of a fake Ripple XRP giveaway, the official Twitter account of accounting firm PwC Venezuela was hacked and links to the fraudulent Ripple giveaway were posted from the Twitter handle on September 4, 2022.
Rug Pull
Another most widespread type of crypto scam is rug pull, in which members of a new crypto project raise capital by creating hype through websites and social media platforms and run away with all the money. Such scammers run social media trends to funding their project, also link it with popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ether, etc to gain people’s trust and all of a sudden remove all the liquidity and disappear, leaving the project’s value to zero.
Fake Crypto Exchanges and Wallets
On social media channels, you will come across a lot of fake websites offering cheap crypto coins. They advertise to sell cryptocurrencies like bitcoin at 5% to 10% below the market price if purchased through their website. Such websites also claim huge returns to catch eyeballs. Most of the time such websites are fake and they cheat the investors once they transfer their funds to the fraudster’s account to buy a cheap coin.
Summary
In recent years cryptocurrencies have emerged as the hotspot of scams, with people having lost their crypto assets worth millions of dollars, while the perpetrators remain in safe havens. It’s the due diligence of the crypto traders and investors that they keep themselves safe from such scams by being abreast with the latest security threats and the ways to stop them. Hopefully, the above piece of advice will help you to stay away from such scams.
