With This, The Odds of Getting Scammed in Crypto is ZERO.
"To know your enemy, you must become your enemy." -Sun Tzu
As I went down the crypto rabbit hole, I've come across a lot of articles, websites, and applications that promise to be the next big thing, make you rich quick or offer enormous APYs for virtually no risk. Have you ever fallen for that kind of scam? The rule of thumb to avoid a crypto scam is: if something sounds too good to be true, then it's definitely suspicious. But sometime we are so blind by our emotions and make bad decisions because of it. Let's talk about the common crypto scams that I've seen and are very prevalent in the crypto space. Obviously, the scammers are making a lot of money; otherwise, those scams won't be so widespread.
"Send me X amount of BTC, and I will send it back with double the amount." This is the low-tier scam that spreads everywhere around social media. One of the best ways to identify a scam is to think like a scammer; I know it sounds sickening and revolting to think like a scammer, but it works. When you clearly understand their thought process, the possibility of falling for it decreases drastically.
So, how do you make the scam works? Promising 2x the victims' crypto won't have a high chance of success. The keywords for making it successful are authenticity and traffic. Either you brute force your way by sending thousands or millions of spam messages to the potential victims (traffic) or make the scam looks as authentic as possible. Obviously, the former tactic will get you banned from social media very quickly unless you have an army of bots that work for you 24/7 (This is why Twitter is full of scam bots; it's a competitive business, after all). The latter requires efforts like building a scam website with a good interface, gaining fake followers, imitating well-known brands or public figures, buying a domain name that looks almost identical to the real one, etc. You might as well just straight-up hack the checkmark social media accounts for the highest success rate.
So what did we learn?
1) Look out for spam accounts with fake identities, as those are the most prevalent cheap scam tactics.
2) Beware of phinishing website. Double-check the domain name.
e.g.,
www.binance.com (real)
binance.giveaway.com (scam)
3) Followers and checkmarks don't mean shit.
4) Your favorite influencers can be hacked.
5) Websites that look professional don't mean shit; scammers can easily copy and paste website themes and templates.
There are tons of other crypto scams out there, some more advance than the others: Frontrun bot scam, Arbitrage scam, tokens with no utility scam, NFTs with no utility scam, Defi staking with high APY scam (rug pull), rewards token with enormous selling pressure scam, influencers get paid and shill their shitcoin scam (but didn't disclose that the shitcoin is the sponsor), shady exchanges that freeze your crypto scam (like Celsius, but some just straight-up lock your account for no reason), exchanges with extremely high fee scam (trading, deposit, withdraw fees), online trading courses that look promising but don't work scam, scam help and recovery scam, shitcoin inside job rugpull scam (definitely not talking about XVS).