Ethereum chain scam and how to report scam. The vast majority of these scams happen on either the Ethereum Chain or the Binance Smart Chain. Because it’s very easy and relatively cheap for the scammers to launch these coins over and over again with different names and make lots of money."
Statistics provided by TheHackerspro
Scams in the cryptocurrency world run rampant. Reported scams on tracking site thehackerspro total more than 38,179 ETH (~$23 million) which have been taken from users. And this is only what we can trace!
- Fake MEW/MyCrypto sites: $7.57 million
- Fake ICOs: $4.5 million
- The word “give”: $1.48 million
- Punycode lookalike domains: $507,000
- Fake exchanges: $502,000
- The word “gift”: $459,000
- Elon Musk scams: $322.1 million
- TOTAL: $23 million
This data can be queried and verified on SEC site about how much scams have stolen.
Scams today are so effective that even when someone like Vitalik Buterin adds “Not giving away ETH” to his display name, scammers still copy his profile pic and display name (containing those very words) and claim to be giving away ETH.
Why are these scammers so resilient? Hopefully, this post answers that for you. We’ll explore:
- How much are these scams making?
- What are the most successful themes in scams?
- What trends are we seeing?
Fake MyEtherWallet/MyCrypto Sites — $7.57 million
The data below reflect all scams listed on EtherscamDB that posed as a fake MyEtherWallet site with at least one known Ethereum address.
This has scammed at least: $7.57 million (12,630 ETH)
The Word “Give” — $1.48 million | ethereum chain scam
A “giveaway” is enticing, and one of the most common scams in the Ethereum space. The scam prompts the user to send a small amount of ETH to a destination address with the promise of receiving a much larger amount in return.
As an “Aha!” moment, you’ll notice each Largest Victim entry is relatively low compared to that scam’s Total Scammed value. Why? Because these phony giveaways explicitly ask for small amounts of ETH in exchange for a larger return. They work on quantity, not quality.
The number of cryptocurrency giveaway scams are rapidly increasing and in the recent times we saw many people fall victim to these scams. These Bitcoin, Ethereum giveaway scams are not new. It’s an old free give away trick that we saw it happen on Twitter in late 2017 and 2018 when cryptocurrency prices were soaring. Now during the worldwide pandemic and economic crisis the scammers are back on form except this time they chose YouTube to host their fake Bitcoin giveaways.
Cryptocurrency giveaway scams on YouTube
Scammers now started hijacking popular YouTube channels to giveaway their bogus BTC / ETH giveaways. The thing is you don’t have to search these channels. They will frequently appear on your YouTube feed as an advertisement. Especially if you have subscribed to any crypto related channels. These ads claim famous people giving away Bitcoin.
During the recent SpaceX launch many thought the promotion is legit and got scammed. According to a report by bleeping computer scammers have racked up to $150000 in BTC in just 2 days. To conduct these cryptocurrency giveaways; scammers hacked legitimate YouTube accounts and impersonated Elon Musk’s SpaceX channel. They rename the hijacked channel to “SpaceX” or “SpaceX Live” and then perform giveaways promising you double the amount of BTC in return of what you send them.
For years they seem to spot a profitable trend like for example BTC halving and impersonate famous personalities like: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, CZ Binance, Vitalik Buterin, Twitter CEO Jack, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Bloomberg and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. Now it seems like they started impersonating Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos.
How these Bitcoin giveaway scams work?
Somehow scammers seem to hijack popular YouTube channels first and some of the hijacked channels are reported to have more than 100k to 300k subscribers. Maybe it’s because the owner of the channel used week login credentials like flimsy passwords or not using 2FA could be the reason for the hack.
After taking over popular channels; hackers change the branding and rename the channel to something famous such as: SpaceX, Space X live or Jeff Bezos depending on what’s currently trending.
They then start live streaming some old recorded footage of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos being interviewed. The broadcast seems like a live event and they promise you significant returns if you send them a small amount of Bitcoins.
These videos states:
To participate you just need to send 0.1 BTC to 20 BTC to the contribution address and we will immediately send you back 0.2 BTC to 40 BTC to the address you sent it from
Are people still getting scammed to these old technique?
Along with the Elon Musk’s recorded video you’ll also see live transaction feed to the scammers BTC address which is also fake. It’s all randomly generated and the amount of viewers watching the broadcast will make you feel the promotion is legit. It is all mostly bots viewing the live stream and commenting.
This has scammed at least: $1.48 million (2,482 ETH
The Word “Gift” — $459,000
Give vs. gift — which one is more meaningful?
It’s hard to say for sure, as our data rely on what users report most often, and what addresses we know about. Give seems to be more common, though, with 103 entries to gift’s 43.
This has scammed at least: $459,000 (765 ETH)
Punycode Domains — $507,000
Browsers support displaying character encodings beyond the English alphabet you’re used to seeing. “Punycode” allows attackers to purchase domain names containing these alternate encodings using only ASCII characters. For example:
The subtle discrepancies in the “e”s might go unnoticed, and the TLS “Secure” icon would only serve to further trick a user.
The ASCII character set does not deal with these symbols, so to represent these alternate encodings in ASCII, you would use an ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) prefix of “xn- -”. This tells the computing world to treat the text not as ASCII, but as an alternate encoding to render to the user.
These are all the Punycode domains reported on ETH
This has scammed at least: $507,000 (845 ETH)
Exchanges — $502,000
Spoofing cryptocurrency exchanges is a popular way to convince users to send ETH or give up their private keys.
No exchange is immune, so below is a list of all exchange-related scams listed on EtherscamDB with at least one known address.
This has scammed at least: $502,000 (838 ETH)
Fake ICOs — $4.5 million
At the time of this writing, Etherscan says there are 92,945 ERC20 token contracts deployed on mainnet. And that’s only ERC20 — that doesn’t include any of the more recent standards.
Many of these token contracts had a token sale associated with them. If they gained even a modest amount of traction, scammers certainly tried to spoof them.
This has scammed at least: $4.5 million (7,513 ETH)
We can break down the data into specific token sales, too. One example (not pictured in the truncated output above) is Telegram.
Telegram — $75,600
Telegram had an ICO planned which created plenty of excitement in the crypto space. Naturally, scammers took notice.
This has scammed at least: $75,600 (126 ETH)
Celebrities
Besides institutions, scammers impersonate high-profile individuals.
Elon Musk
For whatever reason, Elon Musk has become a popular target to impersonate for Ethereum scammers.
This has scammed at least: $32,000 (54 ETH)
Total — $23 million
Take all the scams reported on TheHackerspro with confirmed addresses associated with them, de-dupe any aliased scams, and sum all incoming transaction history to their addresses. That’s a total of about $23 million (38,179 ETH) going to these scams.
And these are just the scams we can trace! Thousands exist without any confirmed addresses tied to them. Thousands more exist that have never been reported!
How To Protect Yourself And Others
There was a recent global bust related to child exploitation, for example, that was built on bitcoin addresses so it is false that bitcoin transactions are “untraceable”.
Information other than bitcoin addresses can also help. The fraudulent company must have had a website, email addresses, maybe they phoned you. Any of those details may,
in some cases, help find the perpetrators. It is certainly possible to ‘cover your tracks’, but not everybody does this and does it correctly.
I imagine that there is nothing worse than being scammed out of your hard-earned money or Bitcoin.
The suggestions provided above might not always be unique to your situation, but you should always try whatever options are available before giving up.
Also, Try to find a way to connect with other victims so that the importance of your case is increased.
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tia mannose
To everyone reading this:
MetaMask is a hotwallet, meaning, that if you use MetaMask’s native wallet, the seedphrase/keystore that secures the funds is on a machine connected to the internet. Those funds are only as secure as your opsec and your PC.
Metamask is the best DeFi portal, but the nature of hotwallets means they make shitty places to store funds.
Everyone with more than a couple hundred bucks worth of crypto should be using a hardware wallet and hooking up to metamask through that. This way your keys will always be gapped from the internet, but you can still use DeFi by initiating all transactions on metamask, then approving on your physical hardware wallet
geely sanders
Same thing just happened to me last night. Set up MetaMask in Chrome, connected to Uniswap (both through the official sites), transferred ETH from Gemini to MetaMask with the intent of purchasing API3, and 45 minutes later it was gone.
I’m seeing it went from my Wallet to another, and then out to FixedFloat – an exchange I’ve never heard of.
I didn’t feel good about using this extension, and should have gone with that gut feeling.
grayfish
Its not a virus. I had the same thing happen – had 100 LINK stolen after using MM to trade on 1inch – seed words never leaked, Brave browser on MccOS, full virus scan – nothing found, transaction did not appear in my MM log but appeared on Etherscan nontheless 20 minutes later. DO NOT use metamask – they are pwned
omari akmed
Here another fellow, guys. Just few hours ago my 0.11 ether got stolen. It ain’t much, but it’s all I own on spare money.
I like to know if metamask chrome extension would be in danger if I connected to an unsafe website but never approved/clicked any transaction of tokens?
Well my understanding was connecting to a website only expose your eth address and no sensitive data like seed phrase or private key
Sorry for my English. It’s not my native language
amiri shakur
Hi All,
I wanted to share with the community that my funds where stolen.
I’m very surprised this happened, and still not 100% how it happened, I have never shared any details with anyone line or in real life.
The only thing I can potentially see is maybe I clicked on an add in Chrome, but have no recollection of that, and usually go to great lengths of security.
I have totally lost confidence in Metamask, and i’m sure their security is lackluster.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x432421456e45616137d40ea03e19d9987a2bc007
https://etherscan.io/address/0xa12431d0b9db640034b0cdfceef9cce161e62be4#comments
Here is the transaction, which seems to be a scammer for several years.
If anyone has any information please post here. I know its very unlikely I will get my funds back (1.4ETH).
I’m very shocked this happened and embarrassed to be honest.
Christopher B. Dodson's
Recovering your lost bitcoin or money as the case might be, is not what you can do alone, you’d require the service of a trained specialist. A recovery specialist is a person or a group of people who are well equipped to work around the crypto network. They have vast knowledge about the whole network and have the right software and private hashes and mining keys to follow any transaction and trace the money before it gets mixed.
It is also important to be patient and really calm during the process.
Isaac Salem
I’ve been hearing you talk about this on Twitter for a while and I think this article is a good and interesting summation. Definitely something to be aware of and I wonder how your site loads so fast within seconds
tia johnston
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) does now regulate binary options.
They have already created a list of unauthorized firms. While they are
not calling them scams, they are making it clear that these firms are
breaking the law by trading with UK visitors so they are best avoided.
By contrast, the USA along with most other EU countries do regard binary
options as financial products. Depending on where they are based, many
platforms will, therefore, be subject to oversight from a regulatory
body. Examples include the CFTC in the US and CySec in Cyprus. A
platform’s regulatory status can be a highly valuable trust-indicator
for traders seeking to avoid scams. It shows that the broker has to
abide by certain minimum standards when it comes to service and
transparency. What To Do If You’ve Been Scammed
Do you think you’ve fallen prey to a binary options scam? Read on to
find out what you can do if you’ve been scammed. There are many ways to
help ensure that you don’t fall prey to a scam but the reality is that
even if you follow all those tips there is still a possibility you will
be scammed. If that happens, what do you do? Do you sit back and take
it? Do you give up on trading? No, you need to stand tall and look out
for yourself. Trading is good, it is rewarding and can lead to a life in
which you don’t have to go to a job and punch a clock. You can’t let
the actions of one broker, signal service, robot or guru dissuade you
from that path. This article is a look at what you can do if you think
you’ve been scammed. It’s likely that you would be able to get your
initial deposit but it might take some work.
TheHackerspro are a firm specializing in helping victims of binary options fraud. They help claimants to explain the incident to the bank or credit card company, so that they fully understand what has
happened.