Impersonate me not…
Cryptocurrency-related scams are on the rise these past few years. According to statistics, scams related to cryptocurrencies in 2020 alone have risen by 40%.
And in 2021, this statistic was expected to rise to 75%!
The statistics I’ve mentioned came from the “Cryptocurrency Scam Report” published by Bolster, a fraud prevention company through analyzing and scanning over 300 million crypto-related websites.
That’s quite the increase if you ask me but considering the profit that could be made through cryptocurrencies; it’s not really that surprising anymore.
Impersonating well known personalities, and crypto exchanges was one of the preferred methods that scammers liked to use in 2020 and would undoubtedly continue to be a favorite of scammers in 2021.
Elon Musk, John Mc Afee, and Yusaku Maezawa were the top three personalities that scammers liked to impersonate online due to their grit and popularity. Other lesser known personalities were also victims of impersonation but none as much as the aforementioned three.
Popular exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and Gemini were obvious targets too due to the sheer volume of cryptocurrencies being traded in these exchanges.
Identifying fake personalities was not too difficult since these scammers would usually ask for cryptocurrencies.
For example: The impersonator of Vitalik Buterin once tweeted that he would send 2 ETH to anyone who sends him 0.2 ETH.
Another way to spot impersonators was to look at their usernames. These fake celebrity accounts will have slight difference in their names, either in the first or last names.
For example: Vitalik Buterin (real), Vitalik Butter (fake), Vitalik Buterjn (fake).
Identifying fake websites on the other hand might be trickier especially if they’re well made. But like fake usernames, fake websites names have slight difference to the real ones.
The more terrifying ones are those fake websites that uses special characters in place of a letter or letters. Like this special character (ą) that can be used to replace the letter (a).
Sadly, the slight difference in name was enough to fool people that are not paying attention to the websites they’re entering…
All your NFTs are Belong to Us!
NFT or Non Fungible Token is quickly becoming a global phenomenon with some digital artworks being sold in the millions if not tens of millions of dollars.
But along with NFT’s ever increasing popularity, so does the bad elements that wanted to profit off of it.
Did you know that domains registered with the word ‘NFT’ surged by 250% by March 2021?
That’s quite the terrifying surge if you ask me. It’s especially true if one consider how those domains are going to be used for.
From those registered domains that uses the word ‘NFT’ how many of them were to be used in real NFT focused websites and how many were to be used to scam people?
In my opinion, it’s highly possible that majority of those domains are for the purpose of scamming people, or stealing their private keys.
Speaking of private keys… Many of these fake websites or replica stores are out there was made for the sole purpose of stealing other people’s log in details like username and passwords and of course, private keys.
Once a private key was compromised, any cryptocurrencies, or even NFTs in that account will be stolen.
But it’s not limited to just that.
There’s actually a good chance that many of these registered domains will be used not just to create replica stores in order to steal passwords and private keys but also to create fake stores.
Fake stores are a variant of replica stores whose purpose was to sell fake NFT artworks to unsuspecting buyers.
These stores would not be able to victimized seasoned NFT buyers but could fool those who just recently entered the NFT market after being attracted by the booming NFT economy.
Because NFTs deals with digitalized artworks, it won’t be long before we see a surge in counterfeits and replicas. It won’t even be strange to encounter digital version of classic artworks like the ‘Mona Lisa’ and the likes.
Actually, there’s already a precursor that that.
Well, calling it a precursor for counterfeit artworks at this stage might be a bit of a stretch since the artworks involved wasn’t actually counterfeits or replicas of existing artworks but rather of style.
I am of course, was talking about the Banksy-styled artworks that was sold in the NFT markets for $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies not too long ago.
Although the Banksy-styled artworks that were sold recently weren’t really considered as counterfeits or replicas, there’s actually a moral dilemma that needed to be addressed – is using other people’s style acceptable on not?
Honestly, I don’t know… I’m not an expert so I rather not judge whether that was acceptable or not.
What I do know is that it will become a recurring trend. Or rather, it’s inevitable…
My Thoughts
Scams are aplenty both in real life and online. Whenever a large amount of money was involved, we would inevitably encounter scammers that would try to “forcefully” take the fruit of our labors away from us.
Worse still, we cannot even avoid them since they’ll come to us whether we like it or not.
It’s a sad reality but it’s something that we must learn to live with.
Right now, the only thing that we could do was to be always vigilant so as not to fall for these scammers’ scams.
What do you guys think?
How should we go about, avoiding these pesky scammers?
Please write your thoughts in the comment section.
Thanks for reading!
Source for the Article:
Image Source:
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/hacker-scammer-scam-identity-man-3081816/
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/fake-forgery-counterfeit-fraud-1726362/
