Bitcoin Forum

Scenario: Scumbag Finance airdrop event (not a real or existing project, just for fun only)

Admin: We are announcing a SCUM airdrop to all participants for 30 days! Each participant can get up to $30 worth of SCUM tokens for completing social media tasks + $1 SCUM for every qualified referral! After 30 days, we will finalize all entries!!!
Participant: Yes, I am excited!!!

(In this scenario, the participant managed to complete all tasks and referred 20 of his friends. He was due to receive $30 + $1 (x20) = $50 worth of SCUM)

After 30 days….

Admin: The SCUM token airdrop event has officially ended! All qualified participants will receive their airdrop tokens 30 days after our IDO event on RugPull Launchpad that will begin a week from now!
Participant: Oh yeah!! Hopefully the Scumbag Finance IDO will be a success!

After the IDO event….

Admin: We have some great news to all of you guys! The Scumbag Finance IDO on RugPull Launchpad has finally ended and all tokens are sold out! The distribution of airdrop to the participants will begin 30 days from now! It’ll be distributed to your Metamask wallets!
Participant: Yes congratulations to us! Woohoo! Can’t wait to receive my SCUM tokens!

After 30 days….

Admin: Attention! We would regret to inform you that there are fraudulent and duplicate entries in our SCUM airdrop event. Therefore, the SCUMBAG team have decided that all airdrop participants must perform KYC and the cut-off date is 1 week from now. Thank you for understanding.
Participant: ARRRRGHHHHH!!!! Oh well, I guess I have no choice then.

(In this scenario, the participant have managed to complete KYC before the time limit)

After a week….

Admin: Congratulations to those who have completed KYC! For those who didn’t make it, we regret to inform you that your airdrop rewards are forfeited. Give us up to a week to distribute your SCUM tokens to your respective Metamask accounts.
Participant: Yes, it’s about time!! Let’s go!!!

After a week….

Admin: Hello everyone! We are about to distribute the tokens to your address. But in order to verify the activity of your wallet, you need to send us 0.001 BNB to our wallet address to cover the gas fees in distributing your tokens. It’s a small thing to ask from you guys if you want to receive your SCUM tokens from us. Thank you for understanding!!! Send the BNB here to this address 0xSCUMBAGRUGPULLGOODBYE.
Participant: DANG!!!! Anyways since it’s just a small amount, I’m gonna send it anyway. At least I get $50 worth of SCUM tokens in return.

(The participant managed to send 0.001 BNB to the address provided by the admin. The rest of the qualified participants also did the same.)

After a long while….

Admin: Thank you everyone for sending us 0.001 BNB each! Therefore, we have collected a grand total of 500 BNB! We would like to inform that you all have been officially scammed! Our scamming campaign was a complete success and we’re now freaking rich! Thank you guys! You can now cry all day! Bye2x!!!
Participant: WHAAAAAAT? NOOOOOO!!!!!

(The admins have left and abandoned the Telegram group, deleting their accounts and the project’s social media channels. Their website left a message saying “AAAAND IT’S GONE!!!”. And the worst of all, the KYC information from the participants were already auctioned in the dark web.)

The lessons that you need to learn from this topic. Never ever perform KYC (especially using passports) just to receive airdrops from new crypto projects who doesn’t have any reputation at all. It’s dangerous for our personal information to be leaked elsewhere. And not just that, if they are requiring you to send an amount of crypto before receiving the airdrop tokens (mostly common from Telegram bot type crypto airdrops), just stay away and ignore. Don’t be greedy! Always learn to have second thoughts, doing your own research before participating, etc.

Airdrop is airdrop right? But what about uniswap, 1inch, Apecoin, and many others? Any way you are right too many airdrops are scams this days it's very hard to get lucky with any at all it's not worth the stress but some are still very good it's about selecting and doing good research on tokens first.

As soon as project ask you to send money to get a reward - everything should spin on them and forget about them. Nowadays airdrops are more competition than free tokens. I would better buy a lottery ticket, than participate in competition to win free tokens :D Chances to win will be higher. It reminds me of "picture on camel - free, getting off the camel - 10$" :D Those who find airdrops where referral system is involved, skip it, as you will never see truth picture how many referrals others have.

You missed the point it's ok to receive airdrop but what's not ok is for you to do KYC in exchange for airdrop I received an airdrop from Uniswap but they did not ask me to go to KYC, it's to risky providing KYC for unknown developers you are betraying yourself if you do this, and you will regret later when you found out it's a scam project and they only after your sensitive information so they can sell it online.

I think to get the right airdrop into money we need capital in the wallet. carry out activities that have not occurred for requirements, staking, exchange transactions and others. every airdrop with a big prize, there is no news about rewards to users because this will cause data fraud activities to be carried out

Participating in an airdrop or bounty is, in a way, an investment of time. If we invest anything, we should do a good research of the project and the campaign to which we want to join. It is not easy and not everyone can do it, so if you want to reduce the risk, you should only join campaigns that are managed by experienced and well-known managers, because they will do the research for you.
In this case, it's hard to say anything because we don't know anything about the project, but asking to send any amount to get a reward is always a 100% scam.

Really outrageous Damn ! neatly arranged, as if it had been planned before. I agree with your suggestion @OP, hunter usually remember but sometimes they forget or forgeted it to get the rewards of what they are doing. KYC is important because it can be abused, I miss the days when KYC was not mandatory.

I think sharing personal information with a project you don't know about is anything stupider than buying tokens without submitting KYC to a fraudulent project. It is wise to act wisely and consistently while working in the digital field, as there are many and continuous fraud operations.

These days only very few airdrops reward participants. A lot are scam and this is not good for the crypto industry. An important step is to conduct detailed research on the project in question. Check persons involved, check if they are imitating an already existing website/company. Research is utmost even if you are not spending money, you are spending your time which I consider very precious. Secondly, KYC, IMO are for unique requirements that involve money especially in centralized exchanges. It may be required to allow for withdrawals up to some level. Another area is when participating in IDOs/ICOs, some companies may require KYC to avoid future complications in making payments. In all, research is the key to minimize being scammed as well as loss of funds. 

Good advise but I don't think that bounty hunters or at least those who love to participate in bounty programs have learned their lessons very well.

They will still fall for the same trap and then later bitch around shouting that this and that projects have scam them because they didn't received the airdrop and then KYC was required. So there is a huge risk in the beginning for joining this bounty and I would say a waste of time as well on your part so it's better to look for other means to earn crypto in a hard way.

It's not too bad with airdrop and bounty as much as buying a token and the price quickly dumps, dividing your money with like 20, and admin will be saying those dumping are weak fingers that diamond hands were coming to eat up the dip, and then you become a community member for 2yrs.

that's usually happening with the scam airdrop and this story is pretty the same like the story of Minereum airdrop. The scammer who has been creating the airdrop got bunch of ethereum a few years ago but people are getting exchanged with bunch of garbage tokens called MNE. I never see a this happens with the legit airdrop that launched by the big company. The majority of scammers are also using airdrop as a way to attract the demand, The mode people join in the project and then the more investors to come soon.

The classic scam attempt. Does it still work?
They will try to prolong the distribution because they are planning something else. If it's not an exit scam after reaching the softcap or hardcap, it will be the bounty hunters which will be the target.
These scammers do have a good working brain with lots of ideas in their mind but they don't use it for good. Easy money will be gone easy. Karma is a bitch.

There are hardly any airdrops these days that are worth it. The people who trade Defi about a year or so ago came out with tons and tons of airdrops. I think some airdrops were worth 5 figures even, that’s how crazy it was. These day’s there are none which are ever worth that much.

The trick with the airdrops back then wasn’t to dump it right away. Usually when it hit an exchange it would drop almost instantly. Then trade with a slow grind down and then usually 2-3 days later when everybody was done with the airdrop it would skyrocket. Those were the days…

when an airdrop asks for KYC I won't do it. I don't want to give personal data just for a few bucks, it's not worth it and very bad. That's why I'm not very happy with airdrops, it takes luck and in the end not all airdrops are worth it. the last time I took part in an airdrop was Safepal, and that was the last profitable airdrop for me, after that I only got shit tokens.

It is very hard to look for reputation in new crypto projects. If you can remember those years when the ICO hype was at its peak, there were so many projects that seemed reputable enough. There were so many projects who were bragging their partnerships with popular people and even international companies. But where are they now? They're all cramped at the bottom ranks. Many of them are already dead projects.

So there is really no reason to risk your personal information and money to something that is highly uncertain.

Not all airdrops should be called Airdrops there is a big difference between some, the trending Airdrops this days are those from Dex platforms and more are still coming, for example metamask wallet token and new name service networks or projects.

Lol, this is so funny and so true. And most of the projects do not even go this far anymore because people already learned this method. I have known this for like 3 years or even longer right now. I remember early days of ICO period in 2017 and so forth where projects did this on ETH, when gas fee of ETH was basically nothing. People are still doing this, and there are still victims falling for this too. Not as much as used to, but there are still some people who do.

Remember, when you are getting an airdrop, it is the project that is responsible to pay you because you helped them with something. It could be a twitter follow, or a telegram group join, or anything else and you should be getting paid. If they ask anything else, they are a scam.

The points that you have said are really signs to watch out for when an exchange asking for KYC, for what? Run away from KYC involving your picture or passport photograph because it may be used for another purpose that can endanger you into trouble like criminal activities committed by someone else. Particularly about airdrop, I don't consider it something being serious to waste time for, it doesn't worth the stress at the end it is just little benefit if you are lucky.

In order to avoid any of this, you have to get out during the first mistake and never come back. I get that you may not like it, but if you do not earn anything from the airdrop, and they request something more from you, just get out and do not look back. They may want KYC, and that could be free, still do not look back, just leave. Whatever they ask aside from just simply giving it to you, get out, get out as quickly as possible.

A good place will distribute the tokens right away without any issues, there won't be any problems, even if it is multiple accounts owned by the same person, they will simply just distribute it and that's it. No addition required.

Yes, indeed, many well-known projects such as uniswap and 1inch distributed airdrop among the first participants and this was a well-deserved payment for the trust placed in the project. The airdrop described by the OP was originally designed to deceive its participants due to the absence of the project itself.

Right. Asking money prior to distribution of tokens is already a red flag. Participants should never be the one paying, its the task of the bounty developers. This is mostly the case if you join a project without doing a research on it. Participants should always do a background check first before they  start to invest their time and effort. And yes, look for reputable bounty managers as they will never try to ruin their credibility just for a single mistake. Always have time to DYOR. That way, you will have an edge over the bounty.