The rise of cryptocurrencies over the decade has been a source of blessing to a lot of persons, which sometimes occur in the form of airdrops.
Every day, different coins and tokens keep popping up and airdrops are the order of the day. It's no wonder people keep coming up with "smart" ways to get as much as they can from airdrops.
Once upon a rainy Saturday morning
Waking up on Saturday morning, I got into my usual routine of going browsing the internet and social media, starting with whatsapp.
I mistakenly stumbled on a group I haven't opened for months and a particular picture caught my eyes;
Someone explained that to get this amount, you will have to be getting 10 million lovecoins daily for 40 days. (Now things are starting to get interesting).
A lot of persons asked how they will be getting the 10 million lovecoins daily and someone replied: "fake referrals". lol, fake referrals? At this point I decided to stay in the shadows, silently waiting to see the end of the conversation.
But really, fake referrals? The person continued his explanation;
Use like 1 or 2 hours every day to do the work, but I don't have free 2 hours, so I really don't know how that person did it
At this stage, more persons are now interested in it and are now asking for clarification, so he pressed on;
First signup. They will give you free 1 million tokens but you can't withdraw. You will need to buy 1$ worth of coin or refer two persons before you can withdraw to trustwallet. The trick is to make fake referrals.
Lovecoin must have built their website too quickly for them to have such flaws or their technical team didn't put in a lot of work into building the site.
He continued;
Get a temporary email online. Register your referral with the temporary email, put any name and password, then refer another fake account. Now you can withdraw from the first account you created. Use two browsers so you will be fast. Continue the cycle from the last referral you made, use it to do two referrals, then withdraw, then start the cycle again. Like that, 1 million coins each time.
Damn! Suddenly felt like I was listening to Darth Vader making sinister plans.
I finally understood the heist
Basically, lovecoin offers 1 million tokens to new users which you can't withdraw until you purchase 1$ worth of tokens or refer two people.
But instead of referring other persons, they rather open fake accounts by clicking on their referral link and using a temporal email.
After getting two fake referrals, they withdraw 1m+ lovecoin and then move on to the next account, refer two more fake referrals, withdraw and move on to the next, and they keep doing this every day (looks like a lot of work for just a few dollars).
Here comes the roadblock.
After the explanation of the scheme, a lot of persons jumped right in and rushed off to create fake referrals, but one person came back with a problem; "it's not working". I laughed, what happened?
It turns out lovecoin managements are aware of the heist and have started applying measures to stop it (or at least slow it down). But I decided to go see things for myself.
I went to lovecoin to sign up, but I noticed they said they are giving 10,000 lovecoin tokens to new users. Wait, I thought it was 1 million? I signed up to see if it was really 10,000 lovecoin. I got 1 million tokens (maybe the 10k was a typo).
I opened up another browser and got a temporary email. I went to lovecoin and tried signing up with the temp email and got this:
That's the roadblock!
Lovecoin has taken a step in the right direction but there are still a lot they can do because as it is now, some persons can still go ahead and sign up with new fake referrals (don't ask me how).
They seriously need to step up their security, probably by restricting the same IP address from signing up twice or even take it further by keeping track of phone IDs. The harder it is for a person to sign up with two different accounts, the less likely it will occur.
As it is now if lovecoin has over 100k users, over 60% of it are ghost members. I think they now know that they have a bunch of fake users, seeing as they have started putting measures in place to restrict signing up with a temp email, but it's still not enough.
Lead image source
Wow nice