A simple but brief message: Everyone wants to scam you

Over on our Facebook page, we had our first giveaway scammer yesterday. The giveaway scam began to appear late last year all over Twitter. Fake Twitter profiles were set up to resemble either influential people within the space or technological celebrities such as Elon Musk. They would offer an Ethereum giveaway whereby, due to some “recent success”, they would give you 100 ETH for free. The only catch was that you had to send them a small amount of ETH first to receive yours.

On paper, this appears as an obvious scam to the majority of people. Yet, when scanning through the wallet addresses, it was clear that many people were sending the scammers Ethereum in the hope of getting more in return. The whole cryptocurrency space is full of scams, so this is nothing unusual. As I have mentioned before, DYOR is essential, especially in this wild west.

The scam posted on our Facebook page was one of the more amateur ones I’ve seen. Rather than use ETH, they chose the less valuable XRP. This means much more XRP needs to be sent to make a decent profit. Added to that, the Facebook profile attempting the scam was pretending to be Ripple, except their profile picture was a terrible quality and cropped version of the logo. Grade: F – must do better next time.

Giveaway scams are just one aspect of the darker side of cryptocurrency. I can assure you with 100% confidence that there are many other scams out there. Pyramid schemes are rife within the cryptocurrency space, and hacking to gain access to your holdings is another form of stealing from you. Companies are keen to stress that their product is the Bitcoin killer. It’s a dangerous world out there, so make sure you are careful.