Just a few days ago a new scam project came to my attention, so I’m sharing to warn everyone to stay away from this and save your Ether.
A blog post on Publish0x.com named “New crowdfunding free token just begun Defi (XYFI) Yearn Finance” is sharing a link to what seems to be a website of a fork of the recently launched DeFi project called Yearn.Finance and their extremely high-value token YFI which shot to $40,000 just a couple of weeks ago. This fork is named XYearn.Finance and in my opinion is a fraud.
It seems that the scam is currently in full force and people are already falling for it. The website is looking decent…but only at first glance.
It has a fancy homepage and a slogan that promises to be the new DeFi Aggregate Platform. It states that XYearn Finance is a “fork of Yearn Finance that open to everyone for staking, Liquidity mining, Yield Farming and many more!” – if you noticed the obvious grammar errors, well-done, I did not mess up my spelling, it’s just copied directly from their page. Henceforth we spot the first red flag.
If you follow this blog and have been reading my previous scam alerts, you know that bad grammar and spelling mistakes are one of the most common early signs for spotting a fraudulent website. As usual, we can attribute such errors to foreign speakers and sometimes discount them as simply not too big of a deal, but make no mistake – only the scammers don’t care about grammar, punctuation or spelling… they know that many, who aren’t native English speakers, won’t notice these things and will still send their ETH in blind faith, so why bother, right?
The scam proposition
Let’s see how the scam unfolds.
The website promises to gift new users 0.12 XYFI upon registration in the form of an Airdrop for simply entering their Ethereum wallet address. There’s also a generous referral commission for those who drag their friends and followers into the scheme, which is always a great way to grow your business…or fraud in this case. Users are incentivised to share their referral links in the hope of earning more tokens.
If it’s free, where’s the catch you may ask…
XYFI is in ICO stage. The token is in pre-sale and is estimated to be worth 0.20 ETH (in the current stage of the pre-sale) and the catch is, that after receiving a tiny amount of the token for free, users will then be inclined to take part in the presale and buy more tokens with their ETH.
This is precisely what happened to many if we judge by their twitter account. A quick look at the twitter account of XYFI provides a lot of answers and I found many users complaining that they have not received any tokens or that the wallet address provided for the pre-sale has changed and various other issues.
So far, the XYearn twitter account has not provided response to any of their users queries or complains. Instead, a fake account has been quite busy with the replies, providing yet more fraudulent wallet addresses for vulnerable people to send their ETH and get nothing in return.
If this is not yet enough to convince you that XYFI is in fact a scam, let me bring out my last, and most compelling argument (if I may say so myself):
All the links on the so-called “official website” are sending you to the Yearn.finance website – the original project and the roadmap link is not even working. This is by far the most telling sign.
If Xyearn.Finance was in fact a real project and a fork of Yearn.Finance, then why would their website links send users to the original project website, after all, they are creating a fork for a reason – to create competition, hence why it makes ZERO sense to be sending users to their biggest competition (which is Yearn.Finance). The answer is simple. Because the scam project doesn’t have the resources (or the will) to build all the necessary elements that are needed for their project to go live. It’s because they will never go live and therefore, they don’t need to bother with all of these details. They simply use the original project’s website since the similarities make it seem like it’s the same thing. Pretty convenient, right?
For those who don’t care to do their due diligence there will be some great losses. For the rest (and especially those who are reading this post) – congratulations, you just saved your hard-earned ETH. Keep it safe and don’t send it to any fake giveaways or ICOs – keep following this blog.
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