Avoiding Crypto scams! An investor's guide.
"It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a reverse sales funnel!"
We've seen many investors boasting investing strategies or even downright fake ICO's, and most of the time it's definitely too good to be true. There are many things to look out for when someone may contact you or you may see an offer that you may not want to miss out on, you may be better off buying that bridge someone offers you instead! Let's take a look at some sites that you can help report crypto scams and prevent being victimized and if there were official guidelines on what to look out for we think it would involve some of these classical crypto scams such as:
Imposter websites & Spam Email: Don't get phished, your account info on any of your exchanges and crypto sites could be pillaged by someone desperate enough to send you to a clone of your exchange and email you an emergency alert to get you to take action. Always double check URL's, sender's emails & also of course your 2 Factor Authentication settings. These imposter websites can come in the form of even fake mobile app downloads from unreliable sources, so probably best to stick to the normal avenues to download your updates.
Mining Botnets & Crypto jacking: If you aren't already familiar with securing your computer you may be wanting to know how virus's are still spread now a days, ranging from PDF documents to just visiting a site, your computer can be taking part in one of this Crypto Mining Botnet's without you knowing. With many miner's being late to the party, there is usually no point in mining alt coins with subpar GPU's, but if it's not costing the person any money then they won't scoff at spreading it. Even visiting some websites could have a script mining in the background of the site using the least of your resources but usually they're nice enough to tell you as we know most people traverse the web with an adblocker these days. Another common trick of the crude trade we have seen are Crypto jacking or clip jacking as it is referred to. Once your computer is infected it can detect your copy paste clipboard has a bitcoin address in it before you send and actually replace your paste output with their own specified address thus making you lose your coin in the process.
Questionable tweets & Social media crypto spam: Don't get carried away by the latest celeb offering their latest pointless crypto giveaway, awhile back someone managed to get access to the twitter admin tools thus being able to make tweets on some major big wig's accounts to trick people into sending bitcoin to receive back more ten fold, why would anyone do this? For all we know they really though that Coinbase would not bat an eye at their ill gotten gains or they were just that daft to attempt to cash out the bitcoins that left a loud smell on the block chain reeking of scam. This also poses another question about being at liability of getting questionable bitcoin, I personally like to keep an eye on WhaleAlert.io (link) by following their twitter or telegram which propagates a database containing thousands of distinguished crypto addresses of owners, big exchanges & businesses constantly updating both manually and with the help of AI.
Also if anyone is wanting you to join their reverse sales funnel aka a more than likely pyramid scheme and you are unsure if that is even what it is, no one in their right mind is going to contact you out of the blue and ask you to start investing with them huge yielding gains with no risk or downside. If you think you've been a victim of one these crypto scams please check out Cryptoscamdb.org