7 Crazy Crypto Scams and Rug Pulls and How They Scammed People
The cryptocurrency business has grown to become one of the major trading platforms in the world today. Due to the rapid growth of cryptocurrency, there is a noticeable rise in scam cases in the business. In the noticed scam cases, the thieves use old and new techniques to steal money from traders. This has made some investors lose hope in the business while others shift to other investment opportunities. Here are some of the latest crypto scams and rug pulls witnessed in the cryptocurrency trade.
#1. The Bitcoin Investment Schemes
In this scheme, the scammers who claim to be seasoned make contacts with different investors. This way, they title themselves, investment managers. They further claim that they have made millions of money as investment managers in the cryptocurrency trade. By that, they promise the victims they have trapped that their investments will yield a lot of money. However, to begin the trade, the scammers will ask you to send some upfront fee. In addition, they will also ask you to provide your identification information. The scammers will steal your upfront fee after gaining access to your confidential information.
On the other hand, scammers can also impose real photos on fake accounts. In most cases, they take their photos and use them to promote a bigger financial gain through a particular celebrity in an investment. They always use reputation names that make their sources claim to be legitimate. They also ensure they use logos and websites with a professional outlook even though they have a fake endorsement.
#2. Rug Pull Scams
Rug pull is another type of scam that involves starting a new project with investment scammers to get funds. When the project matures and the scammers get their targeted amount of money, they disappear with all the funds leading to the project’s collapse. In most cases, such projects coded to scam people limit many people from participating in the trade. Investors always find themselves left with an investment that does not have meaningful value. This is after they have avoided selling their bitcoins to the suspicious site after purchase.
#3. Romance Scams
The increasing number of dating apps mainly brings about romance scams. This type of scam involves forming a relationship with the opposite sex. Long distance relationships are the most common type evidenced in this scam. This way, the scammer builds trust with the investor by engaging in a strictly online relationship. When the relationship matures, the scammer will try to convince the other party to start trading together in cryptocurrency. The scammer suddenly disappears when the business grows into a reasonable amount, with the money cutting off the relationship.
#4. Phishing Scams
The phishing scam is another popular challenge in cryptocurrency and other online trading platforms. In this type of scam, a person with selfish gain uses malicious links to send emails to an illegitimate website. This helps scammers gather your confidential information from the cryptocurrency website. Information like passwords and some unique keys is private to your specified wallet in the cryptocurrency platform. This can make you lose every coin from your wallet and sometimes lose your account. For instance, it is always impossible to update a new unique key to a wallet in cryptocurrency, and you may create another wallet.
#5. Man in the Middle attack
This scamming always happens when users sign in to their wallets in a public place. The scammers use the shared network in a general location to steal their private information. They manage to get away with sensitive information by intercepting every piece of information that is sent in a shared public network. Their primary interest is to get your confidential information such as passwords, wallet keys and other user information. Therefore, note that every time you log in to your personal account in a public place, a scammer called the man in the middle can access your sensitive information. Most man-in-the-middle scammers are always intelligent enough to intercept WI-FI signals, especially when they are nearby.
#6. The Fake cryptocurrency exchanges
In this type of scam, the investors are always lured with fake promises, mostly from scammers, to have a great cryptocurrency exchange. For instance, they may request to exchange fake cryptocurrencies claiming to add some extra bitcoins. However, you will only realize the exchange is fake after you have sent all your money. In this case, the based way is to stick in the crypto exchange market you know and trust for a successful exchange. Some crypto exchange includes crypto.com, Coinbase and the cash app.
#7. The Cryptocurrency giveaway scam from social media.
This scam involves posting fraudulent information on social media platforms. In the posts, the scammers promise to give you bitcoins. They can attract many viewers by using fake accounts of known celebrities. For this reason, you will get trapped thinking that the post is from the trending celebrity you know and risk being scammed. However, you can easily detect this type of fraud when you click the link. The link will take you directly to the fraudulent site, where you will be asked to provide your verification of bitcoins and get bitcoin. They will request you to provide your confidential details by asking you for verification. They will also ask you to make a small payment to make your account legitimate.
How Can you protect your cryptocurrency and bitcoin?
You can consider the following precautions to protect your bitcoin from being stolen or your account from getting destroyed.
* Always ensure you accept any form of cryptocurrency as payment.
* Minimize sharing your sensitive information during money transfers or investment time.
* Avoid promises of money that seem not to be legitimate.
* Also, avoid making multiple transactions in a day.
Conclusion
Cryptocurrency does not provide insurance cover for lost money, even if you are their customer.
For this reason, you must learn how to protect yourself and your business from scammers. This will help you secure your bitcoins and grow your business. I hope you have learned some of the most common crypto scammers that are a significant threat to cryptocurrency by reading this article. Therefore, considering them, you can secure your account and wallet to enjoy your cryptocurrency trade.