Bitcoin Forum

In crypto market there are a bunch of people (especially newbies) who are looking for quick profit. Due to the lack of experience most of them register in every single airdrop and share their data to the left and right.
SCAMers do not waste their time and always ready to rob your assets from your wallets.

Recently I've come up with some suspicious Airdrops like "Atomic, Flashblock and ZillowBlockchain". All this kind of Airdrops stand out from the rest with promises of giving you huge amount of their tokens worth up to $500 in some cases even $1000 for completing simple tasks. After these kind of "simple tasks", usually "KYC process" needed to finish the airdrop and at this point they redirect you to "MEW Phishing site" where you're asked to enter your PRIVATE KEY to get tokens. As you may realized with this way they will get access to your wallet. This is how that kind of "airdrops" work.
To cut long story short keep in mind that no one will not REFUND YOUR TOKENS and it is up to you to double check your every step.

P.S.
If you come across with these airdrops "Atomic, Flashblock and ZillowBlockchain" just skip them no matter how attractive they will seem to you.

do not send the KYC, Thanks for the warning.

It's incredible how easy it can be for people new to cryptocurrency to be lured in by such an obvious scam.

Anyone that's spent an hour reading about Bitcoin could learn that if you give your private keys to someone that person can steal your bitcoin, yet people continue to do it because they're blinded by the greed and naive to the risk.

Sharing the existence of these scams is helpful for everyone, thanks for calling it out!

i stop when they ask for the sign eth address,thanks for the warning

Not the KYC, private key is what gives them access to your wallet.


Eth address is not controversial here, Airdrops do usually require your Eth address to send the tokens to your wallet, unless they store your tokens in the wallet on their site/platform. It's the private key you should never give to anyone.

Newbies should learn basic information first. The proble is that people "sold" the idea of crypto as a way to get quick money.
Quick money is always risky...
The first rule is never to give private keys to anyone.

If there is a question about private key in the form please think again if you don't want to lose you asset. I suggest you to follow bounty project, especially social media campaign

Thanks so much for this information it really helps as I am new to the Cryptomarket and come across these scammers all the time, will be on the lookout for Atomic, Flashblock and ZillowBlockchain. Are there any other false airdrops I should be on the lookout for ?, and what are the common factors in determining wether its a scam or not?

KYC - is stands for Know Your Customer this is normal process held by ICOs to identify personality. However, the scamers include to this process step where you have to insert your Private Key, which obviously nonsense hence private key doesn't carry any information about you.

How to find SCAM or not SCAM?

For this reason I created new thread, where You will be able to track all Scam-airdrops in one Google spreadsheet. Here is the link -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4381266.new#new

There are some personal data which you don't have to share with others. Private key, Mnemonic(Seed) phrase and 2FA code are the ones which you must keep in secret for your own safety.
If any kind of Airdrop, application or platform will ask you one of the above, it means that you encountered with SCAM!

There are two red flags in this specific case that newbies need to look out for:

1) Promise of high returns - if it's too good to be true, it likely isn't true. If a company is essentially willing to give people a fortune for free, it's not a good company. Remember that businesses can't give away money if they want to survive.

2) Making you click a link that points to an external exchange/wallet - you should always type these kinds of services out manually or access them through a bookmark. Opening them through external links/PMs/emails is a very common way to get phished.

There's also another red-ish flag, which is KYC, but that's not inherently bad. Just make sure you know what you're getting into. I would recommend only giving up info if you absolutely trust the party you're giving it to.

But yeah, thanks for the heads up OP!

Thank you for answer. Very helpful thread.

a very useful suggestion, Im very rarely follow the airdrop program, first time a saw the airdrop advise to login in the personal wallet, whatever it is, if you are prompted to login, make sure the site you visit is legit, to avoid pishing or piercing private key, to KYC please decide for yourself if you will continue the airdrop program or you did not participate.

There are many scam airdrops on Waves wallet too. If you are using waves wallet, some tokens will be sent to your account with some url as name, and when you access it, it will be asking the waves seed (phishing website)

ETH address publishing is not an issue at all. but revealing your pvt key is indeed a problem.

The point is, as strong and as detailed as any reason they should never give a private key in giveaways or airdrops of any form because the organizers do not need it to send tokens.

Most newbies in the cryptocurrency world often get baited by these sort of programs that lead them to think that it's easy to acquire money with crypto. Turns out, they are the ones being tricked into giving their personal details because ICO/airdrop operators could sell these into advertising companies that net them a good sum of money or worse, be used in nefarious activities such as identity spoofing and credit card fraud which is the norms nowadays. I suggest people to stop supporting such kind of schemes and just work their way up to gather a sizable and decent amount of crypto to play with.

thank you for warning, that makes sense

first you should understand what data is sensible and what is not

Thanks for the warning

Now you can track all scam-projects and their airdrops in this spreadsheet -> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14pnXuZJjjXy8Ug43XA31891Qm8_g2q-BtRnftQes-bU
There you are also able to distinguish scam-airdrops sources from the sources of original project! Table will be updated on regular basis.