A cryptocurrency security expert has published a list of common cryptocurrency fraud on Twitter.
8 methods of Cryptocurrency fraud
According to coinTelegraph, a cyber security analyst named Serpent, who is the founder of the Sentinel security system, published this list on his Twitter.
Serpent says: Fraudsters target inexperienced cryptocurrency users by using fake websites, fake addresses, fake user accounts, verified accounts, introducing fake projects and airdrops, and sending various malware.
Among the recent flood of scams related to this field, phishing and hacking digital currency protocols are more worrying than other methods.
Hackers are targeting people who have recently lost their capital in massive hacks with the promise of “recovery of stolen digital currencies”.
They ask these people to pay a fee to execute a smart contract that can recover their funds. But finally they run away after receiving the money.
Another strategy of fraudsters is exploiting users’ use of security holes or exploits. According to the analyst, scammers have been tricking users into visiting a phishing website for some time using the fake “revoke.rip” URL. In this scam scheme, victims are given warnings that their digital currency is at risk, and then given a sense of urgency, they can click on malicious links.
Another common method of fraud on Twitter is the use of Unicode letters. Scammers replace the letters of a legitimate site’s address with matching Unicode characters, so that the phishing URL looks like a real URL.
In another method, a Twitter account is verified and then renamed and used for impersonation. With these fake accounts, they encourage people to participate in Iradops or to mint tokens of fake projects.
Another common method of fraud is targeting users who are looking for schemes to make a lot of money in the short term. In this method, spam messages are sent to users through robots. The message asks users to watch a video on how to earn $1,400 per day, but instead tricks them into sending their winnings to the scammers’ wallets.
Another method that is common on Twitter is known as Honeypot Account. Fraudsters ask people to help them transfer their assets and intentionally give them their wallet’s private key. Upon entering this wallet, the user realizes that there is no fee required for the transfer, and immediately after making the deposit, a robot transfers the transaction fee from the wallet to the fraudulent person’s address.
Another tactic scammers use is to commission fake work from NFT artists or ask NFT collectors to test an early version of a project. These requests are just an excuse to send malicious files that copy browser cookies, passwords, and add-on data.
The total income of digital currency scams reached 1.6 billion dollars from the beginning of 2022 until today. This figure decreased by 65% compared to the 4.6 billion dollar income of frauds in this field last year.
The most important reason for this has been the decrease in the price of digital currencies, followed by the withdrawal of inexperienced users from the market.