In a 19-part thread, scammers explain how they use complex schemes to trick cryptocurrency users out of their coins. A security expert named Serpent has talked about what he thinks are the sneakiest crypto and nonfungible token (NFT) scams on Twitter.
Sentinel is a way to stop crypto-threats based on AI and the community. The analyst made it, and 253,400 people followed him or her on Twitter.
After a recent wave of crypto phishing schemes and protocol intrusions, one of the scariest ways to do things was found. Serpent says that the Crypto Recovery Scam is a way for bad people to try to steal money from people who just lost a lot of money in a big hack.
“Simply put, they go after people who have already been scammed and tell them they can get their money back when they can't.”
Then, they charge these users to set up a smart contract to help them get their stolen money back. “They take the money and run,” on the other hand. After the million-dollar attack on Solana wallets earlier this month, Heidi Chakos, who runs the YouTube channel Crypto Tips, warned the community to be careful of scammers who claim to have a solution to the problem. It was clear after the trick that this was true.
There's one more plan that adds to what's already been successful. The analyst thinks that the Fake Revoke. Cash Scam tells people that the security of their cryptocurrency assets may have been broken, so they should go to a phishing website. Giving people a “sense of urgency” makes them more likely to click on the dangerous link.
Using Unicode letters is another way to make a phishing URL look almost exactly like a real one. Using a Unicode lookalike, a change is made to one of the letters in the URL.
The rest of the scams take advantage of people who want to join a plan to make money quickly. The Uniswap Front Running Scam is one of them. It usually comes in spam bot messages that tell people to watch a video about how to “earn $1400/DAY frontrunning Uniswap.” But the video is just a trick to get people to send money to a scammer's wallet.
You could also pay NFT artists to make fake art or ask high-value NFT collectors to “beta test” a new play-to-earn (P2E) game or project. People who collect NFTs with a high value are also asked to help with these plans. But in both cases, the fake message is just a way to send malware files to the target. These files could steal information about browser extensions, cookies, and passwords.
Chainalysis released a study last week that showed that in 2022, cryptocurrency scams have brought in 65% less money. This is because the value of assets is decreasing, and more people are leaving the cryptocurrency market. So far this year, crypto scams have made about $1.6 billion. At the same time last year, they made about $4.6 billion, so this is a big drop.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and hundreds of others are very popular when trading online, and a smart trader can make a lot of money by trading them. But the need for quick cash can make some people blind to the risks, which gives con artists a chance to trick them into falling for their schemes.
But unlike money backed by the government, the value of a virtual currency depends only on how many people want to buy it. This could lead to big market changes, making investors make or lose a lot of money. And the government doesn't protect crypto investments nearly as well as traditional investments like stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
In the past few years, there have been a lot more scams that use cryptocurrencies. This is more than the 570 complaints they got at the same time last year. The reported losses increased by more than 10 times, reaching more than $80 million.
I am a UK tech blogger and have been in the industry for over 10 years now, running Mighty Gadget and its sister sites and contributing to other sites around the web. I am passionate about all tech, including mobile, wearables, and home automation. I am also a fitness fanatic, so I cover as much fitness tech as possible.