Crypto Scams: 3 Crypto Scams That You Should Avoid

If you’re new to the world of crypto, I am going to say it is pretty complicated. You will have no idea about how many scams are out there, You might even lose a decent amount of money due to these scams that you might fall prey to if you’re new. Here, in this article, I will discuss some of the new scams that you might not even know exist and how to avoid them.

#Scam 1. Any Website Asking For Private Keys

Do you remember the first time you set up a crypto wallet? You probably didn’t even know if you were doing things correctly and everything was really complicated. Scammers take advantage of this all the time. The trick is very simple. They ask you for your personal information specifically for something called your private key. They take advantage of people’s lack of knowledge and get them to enter their seed phrase.

By doing this, they are actually getting access to all of your crypto funds. Some of these scammers might say things like they want to send you some money and ask for your key or even tell you things like you won an Ethereum, tell us your seed phrase so we can deposit the funds in your account. They’ll try every trick possible to fool newbies into giving them their funds. 

When it comes to crypto, there are actually 2 keys– a private key that you should never ever share and a public key that is kind of like your email address. The public key is the one you intentionally share. Many people confuse the two which leads them to get scammed.

#Scam 2. Asking to Invest for You as a Trusted Creator

In telegram groups, scammers will create a bot that seems official or try to impersonate a project specifically a team member and then they will DM you so that they look official. They do this in the hopes of scamming you in some way. One of the most common scams is the way that they ask for a hundred dollars and then they’ll turn it into two thousand dollars for you and give it back. They’re basically claiming to invest your money for you. 

To avoid this, you should never reach out to someone in the comments section of a youtube channel especially if they look like the owner. Once you reach out to one of these fake accounts, a scammer will send you a DM moments later saying that they’re a project’s team member and they can assist you. They often change their username and profile picture to impersonate a real team member on discord or youtube.

For discord, you can do something really simple. You can check out the handle and check if it matches the information of the impersonated team member. For youtube, it can be as simple as clicking on the account and seeing they have 0 subscribers

#Scam 3. Smart Contract Bug

Another trick that scammers use which you may not even be aware of is a bug where people can buy a token but then they cannot sell it. There are actually three ways of doing this. First, when the developers are creating the token, they simply disable the approve function in the erc20 token contract basically meaning decentralized exchanges cannot get your approval for putting the token to be sold.

The second way is to add a rebase function into the token contract so at the moment you try to sell the token you’ll lose 99% of it. The third way is that they could easily write a few lines of code that prevent the token from being sold to a dex only bought or supplied.

This means a lot of money coming into the project and none is going out making it a perfect situation for scammers to run away with your money. Technically, they could make it so that when you sold your token, the money you would have received goes to the developers also.

Conclusion

To sum this up, I am not saying you should learn how to read smart contract code but I will say before making any buy over $1000, you should find a friend who can.

I really hope that you learned something from this article and that it will help you navigate your way through the world of crypto.

Written By- Anika Sharma