5 Crypto Scams to Watch Out For

In this very short article you will learn how to stay vigilant against bad actors if you are involved in crypto in some capacity wether it be as a retail investor, developer or someone just learning about the ecosystem.

Before you read any of this, the main takeaway is to not trust anyone essentially. It is your job to know this space inside and out so that you can spot bad actors.

1. Youtube Ads for Trading Bots

There are real use cases for bots in DeFi as they help balance liquidity pools when there are large arbitrage gaps between DeFi swap protocols. But I don't think you need to be a genius to be able to question the validity of earning 1.2 ETH per day from some trading bot that you download on youtube from this guy below.

Unless you have $1,000,000 in your account and you are scalping 0.5% of your total account with a bot to make $5k a day then you can just add these fake bot ads to your list of stuff to ignore.

Don't be a greedy noob, 95% of people here lose their shirts.

2. Random Airdrops to your wallet

Sometimes you will get random tokens in your wallet that claim to be airdrops that you were selected for. These are the equivalent of spam emails in the crypto world. Since the code is onchain and you can go look at it. Many times you will see that once you interact with sending these tokens somewhere to sell them, they will compromise your wallet account and end up draining your other balances.

If you don't know the token, you didnt ask for it, you didnt buy it, dont even interact with these. Since all addresses are public. These scammers will send out fake tokens to any address and see who responds. Once you interact with it you run the risk of being hacked essentially.

Don't Interact with any tokens you find in your wallet randomly.

3. Malicious Crypto Job Ads

Here is an example of a malicious crypto job.

Upwork has a job ad for "Crypto Developer Wanted". The guy that posted the ad needs a developer to build a Web3 application that has some type of payment system with a MetaMask wallet.

A user finds this ad and contacts the guy. After talking for a bit, the guy sends you a half built program that is a prototype so you can see what you will be building.

Once you get it locally and hook up your MetaMask, the next thing you know is your MetaMask Balances are drained.

Don't download anything till you've spent time learning what the hell is going on.

4. Fake Discord Moderators

If you are active in this space you will be in Discord channels, Telegram channels because they are a great place for information on developer resources, theory and learning. However since these Discord Channels don't do a good job at screening bad actors, you can come across this problem.

If you ask a question in a channel. You may get a DM from someone who has spoofed the same name as a legit moderator. They will also steal the moderators actual profile picture. So it looks like you are actually speeaking to a legit person from the Discord moderation team.

However they are scammers. They will try to harvest information or get you to download something.

They prey on a specific situation where you need advice and assume that you will think they are a legit moderator. Don't fall for this.

Don't answer any DM's from people you don't know.

5. Fake Telegram Messages

Same as above. Telegram is a wasteland for scammers. It's a shame because communities for Dev tools, blockchain ecosystems or community events are a great place to learn.

Don't answer any DM's. Period. If you knew them, they would have your number.

Those are just some basic things that you will see if you are involved in this space. It is terribly scammy despite there being a large majority of good people in this space. You have some of the brightest minds in tech in this space building the next generation of financial products and games.

It's too bad people around the world are pinched financially and resort to scamming people.

Stay safe out there.

Thanks for reading.

#halifax #blockchain #softwaredeveloper