May 30, 2020
Technology: A boon, or A curse. It is often seen that your biggest strength can become your biggest weakness. This proverb goes hand in hand with our daily life as well as in the crypto world, other than the traditional banking systems. The Cryptocurrency companies are making constant efforts to make the trading and transactions fast, safe as well as secure for all the traders.
However, just like the traditional banking world, the cryptocurrency market is no new to scammers and fishing attacks. Thus, it becomes an absolute priority to ensure one’s safety.
Cryptocurrencies are often kept safe in wallets, which indeed stores public as well as private “keys” or “addresses” which can be used to send or receive the cryptocurrency. Although, Cryptocurrency is globally known to people it is still not understood by most people. Even there is so much information available about this in media still, people fail to understand the basic concepts which make them volatile to crypto scams and frauds.
As the companies are taking enough measures to ensure more safety to their investors, so are the scammer’s improving their tactics to loot more money. In the recent past, there have been measures have been taken to avoid such scams and frauds but there is no particular to tell any trustworthy platform. Even social platforms like Facebook and Google have been banned to allow running any ads for cryptocurrencies as it is really difficult to trust the sources.
Let us take you to some of the commonly occurring cryptocurrency scams:
Exchange scam:
There is number of exchanges available to trade on their platform and it also allows you to make payments in USD or other currencies. You must research before putting your money on any exchange pretty well, (provided take advice from a known source) and understand its withdrawal policy. These exchanges have very strict withdrawal policies and often restrict you to make any withdrawals. Make sure that the contact numbers and email ids are active and they have active customer support to address your queries.
Fake free Promotion:
There are numerous messages occurring in your inbox or DM’s telling you about free promotions and giveaways. These are supported by a group of people who will immediately reply in their comments on how they deposited on transferred the money and got back huge returns instantly. They will leave various addresses for you to deposit money, make a transaction, or deposit some sort of account activation fee through various addresses. The amount transferred or deposited will be gone before even you will know it. Beware of such links or messages and always check with the official websites and handles.
Impersonation Fraud
As cryptocurrency industry is digital based, many scammers have started impersonating other high-profile investors. They try to contact your through various social media channels and promise to help you in investing and getting your stakes up. They will ask you to create an account on their given platforms or will ask you to share your address and user details. Such people may contact you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, etc. always remember, you don’t have to respond back to them. Big or real investors will not have to approach you like this.
You can always search and check for their profiles or their website URLs. If you will inquire, you will understand that these are fake profiles. These people will in no time steal your money and run away with it without leaving a trace of their transactions. Hence, beware and don’t trust such fishing Dm’s or messages.