I don't know if your crypto-lordships are aware of rule 2, it's to never give out your private keys or seed phrase!
Ok I admit, I borrowed that line from Bernard Montgomery but it rings equally true regarding the battle that is the crypto markets??
But for the sake of newcomers, and remember any one of us were at one point in time, it's important to help spread the word as much as possible and expose these scammers that are ruining their crypto experience or even chasing them away from it completely.
I remember the very first time I almost fell for it, well, not really, I reached out to the admin on the official chat and asked if this account sending me private replies was in any way associated with them. But I didn't flat out ignore the scam and the reason why is why so many are nowadays falling for it. At the time I was worried about some issue and update that was going on and requested assistance. These scammers are mainly focused on that atm due to the vast number of holders asking questions and seeking assistance. Any project that has some update or changes that require holders to take action is literally flooded with these fake accounts reaching out and offering their "help". Most of the time it's so obviously fake it's ridiculous, like this "MetaMask support" account reaching out to someone holding Safemoon in a Trustwallet asking about Coinmarketcap. Like, just why???
But some are so well read into the related crypto project and the developments going on that they are able to look and sound so legit it's getting increasingly harder to tell them apart from the real thing. So to everyone that ever felt like "this might just be a scam": Don't fall for it! Only reply to direct replies from the legitimate and verified account that you yourself reached out to. If anyone else reaches out to you, it's a scam 99% of the time.
Another thing that's rather widely spread and quite annoying nowadays are these accounts that hijack photo collections from girls on Instagram or other platforms, to pretend to be interested in a particular crypto and join chat groups of various projects. I guess their logic is that crypto holders will think "oh wow, I love this person and we are bonded by our love for the same crypto, let me send this random account that suddenly reached out here all my holdings". I've blurred out the faces since it's quite obvious this isn't the actual person who's trying to scam people here but someone who's profile pics fell victim to the scammers.
Then there are these weird re-run seminars or Q&As, where they run an old event of e.g. ETH, ADA or BCH and in the description have wallet addresses where if you send something like 10 ETH/BCH as "proof" that you're invested in, you'll get 50 ETH/BCH sent back in return. Yeah, I know, sounds so dumb it must fail, but I remember when I checked the wallet addresses they put out there, they actually raked in a ton of money?? Over the past 3 years I've reported dozens of these live stream scams and commented in the live chat so the +500 people watching wouldn't get duped. I immediately get blocked by the moderators and the account usually stayed up for at least 5 days rerunning the "live stream" about 3 times a day before finally getting suspended. Two weeks later the exact looping video and profile pic had a new account and again +500 viewers per live stream.
Another one I remember were these weird profit coach accounts that had some unique fake "cloud mine hack Bitcoin" tool. They made a dozen videos about basically the same scam which had the same fake fan accounts commenting on how "real" it all was and that they now finally had "a whole Bitcoin thanks to this hack". The scam behind this was that they claimed they hacked something regarding Bitcoin (yeah, they actually claimed to have hacked Bitcoin itself and people still fell for it, that's how serious this is) and if you send just some BTC to a specific wallet and ran some hacking tool, your 0.1 BTC would miraculously "mine" 1 whole BTC (or some ?? like that). Needles to say, it was just some HTML manipulation and you weren't "mining or hacking" anything, you just send your BTC to a scammer who's account was up for months without Youtube, Facebook or Twitter taking any action. I guess they were too busy checking facts or something??
These type of scams have diminished over time though but not before turning away countless people from crypto and building up a small fortune for themselves while depriving you of yours. Let me think how long ago this was?? Most of this was around end 2019/beginning 2020, Let's say your losses from the scam at the time were 0.1 Bitcoin at 7000 Euro per Bitcoin, meaning you lost 700 Euro. No big deal right? Well, that 700 Euro from back then would be about 4000 Euro today and at it's height even close to 7000 Euro.
We'll never do away with these scammers completely, the same way we'll never be able to warn everyone to steer clear from rugpull projects, but I sincerely believe if what you do and say saves only one person from losing just a few Sats, it's already an accomplishment?
