Bitcoin Forum

this seems to be a new scam making the rounds on Twitter. I posted a link to a photo, I'm not sure if that will work. here's the gist:

an obvious scam account, in broken English reaches out with the following:

Hi!  i'm a student  I received a sum of 686USDT(trx20) but I don't know how to sell USDT to get USD into my bank account. . Can you teach me how to use my Trust wallet? I will pay 200USDT as a reward!                                                                                                         

this is my wallet key: rate drip find gossip senior diet hungry mirror early absorb despair visit
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
address encoding: 11d1fde9b1f191efcef4e473fbd52ef3ed9e9201c8b1786fa5861031f6909606

https://photos.app.goo.gl/UywkhompYhL45Lsg9

here's what I don't understand: in the early days of the internet, when checks moved money, the "overpayment scam", was very popular. obviously, this has all the hallmarks of an "overpayment scam", but I am under the impression that there is a certain finality that is built into Bitcoin, or even the shit coins that these scammers try to deal in.

one of my favorite characteristics of Bitcoin is its immutability, but it seems as though, without a chargeback, this scam would not be profitable.

the only other possible attack vector that I can think of, is if somehow interacting with this wallet would open the mark up to privacy concerns.

I have only noticed this phenomena taking place over the last 2 weeks or so.

I can offer merit to anyone who knows what they are talking about! thank you for your time!

I'm pretty sure it's the same exact scam that's being described in this[1] thread.

In summary, victim tries to take the funds by sending in TRX(for the fees), and the scammer would front-run the victim by sending out the received TRX.

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[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5407105

The attacker first give out his seed phrase. If the victim do not know much, the attacker may ask the victim to tell him his seed phrase too. Some people can be so foolsih to that extent to tell the attacker his own seed phrase too.

You received 10 merits 3 times from 3 users, that means you had only 5 smerits that you can send. You have sent 5 merits 3 times to 3 users. That means you have no smerit left to send.

But we should be careful of scammers and hackers.

you're right. it says i have no spendable merit!

Twitter too? It means we are not really safe anywhere as these scammers seem to be everywhere on every social media and possibly forums. It is best we always ignore and not take too seriously promises made by individuals that we meet online. Don't let the greed of reaping where you did not sow make you lose the little you have.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is...

Scammers are everywhere so it is not surprising they are trying to get some victims on Twitter as well, and about the scam it is not really that new but it is important to remind people about it so they keep their eyes open and do no fall in it and lose their money because of it.

So it is important to use your common sense, because even if you have never encountered that scam before you will not lose anything as you will not send tron to steal the balance, and you will not loan any tron either with the hope you will be repaid by the scammer as we know loaning any cryptocurrency without any collateral is incredibly risky.

We'd hear scams almost every day. I think this never has an end. Scammers are also getting smarter, they never get tired of looking for someone to become a victim and fall into their evil plan.

As even though we keep spreading news and information about this but somehow, many people still got to fall into their hands. It looks like social media now is the common medium used for scammers as they can just hide their identity. That is why I suggest not to trust strangers so easily especially when it talks about money as that can lead to scam.

What do you mean Twitter? Haven't you heard about Twitter hacking of prominent individuals and being used to scam crypto?  Former President Barack Obama's Twitter account appears to have been hacked as part of a cryptocurrency scam. (https://www.businessinsider.com/barack-obama-twitter-account-hacked-in-cryptocurrency-scam-2020-7)

The scam here is pretty obvious, you need to send funds to be able to withdraw that alleged 686USDT. So once you send some TRX or USDT to be able to withdraw it, that money will be withdraw immediately because the scammers is running a bot that monitor that address. So the moment you deposit on it, it will be gone in a blink of an eye and transfer to a address that the scammers control.

This is not a new scam. But it seems like a new one because it’s on the Tron network instead of Ethereum.

How does the scam work? Well without using a block explorer I am going to assume that the address has only USDT and no TRX correct?

Hence to send the USDT you need some TRX for the transaction fee. So you send some TRX and as soon as it’s confirmed they send all the TRX with the USDT to another account and you are scammed.

Very popular on ETH network however seems new on TRX.

I guess the scammers is one step of the game here?

Yeah, and I agree that's how this cyber criminals are making a living out of these unsuspecting victim, luring them into a too good to be true offer and exploiting someone's greediness and thinks that he can have all that amount in one sweep. But then again, this scammers knows the game very well already, that we might say that we can't outsmart them.

It's not about how technically it is possible, it's about how "social hacking" you could do. Even today, I  could convince "someone" that I am a Nigerian prince stuck with a ton of money that I can't move and get their money. Yes I get that you may think it's not possible but in reality even if 1 out of 1000 people end up falling for it, I could go around 1000 people in a single month, meaning if 1 of them pays that 5k, then I am making 5k per month.

yeah, I wouldn't because I am a good person but there are people who still does it, and perfected it. So all in all, there are literally companies around scamming people all around the world and that's bad and shameful, but understandable because it's so easy.

^ Definitely right this is not a new scam but it is a new strategy rather.
Nowadays scammers always looking and finding ways just to scam, they have different techniques and strategies just to scam innocent people who are lack knowledge of crypto. But if you know that there is no TRX network on USDT but instead ETH network. Then probably you are safe because ta the first place you are aware of it. So we should always have a research before doing any transaction in crypto to avoid scams.

Twitter is overridden with spam bots. It’s hilarious that they even claim a % of users as bots when it’s been the same number since twitter began. There was hope Elon would clean it up but I think after he had his team look at the data they found that the valuation is insane based on the real usage. I would be cautious doing any sort of Bitcoin activity there.

Actually since the assistance of cryptocurrency, they have been a numerous scam platforms which many people who is into website developing have derived many strategies to extort funds from people through online investment. This scam investments take effect through social media and especially Twitter and telegram and Facebook. So we who knows many strategies of scammers cannot be trapped by them. I believe that cryptocurrency scam can only hold people who are desperate to make money

These scams are very rare these days because price of ETH gas for transactions is very low. You can send a erc20 token now for $0.50-$1.00 and nobody runs these scams because at best they steal a few pennies.

Someone sends $1 worth of ETH into the account, they immediately make a transaction using $0.50 worth of ETH and their profit is like $0.50.

Back then you needed like $50 at least for an USDT transfer and people sent usually $100 worth of ETH. And for TRX network it’s fees are in the pennies so this scam is not vert smart in my opinion.

Yeah, but still though, imagine if hundreds or thousands fell into this scam, could be worth something for scammers right? no effort whatsoever on their side, just looking at their address if they scam someone again.

And I have heard this scam or at least research it after seeing this, yeah it's all over the social media now and scammers are cashing this simple but yet very effective way to make money out of those innocent victims.

Once there's a begging included I just leave them alone plus I don't entertain someone who hasn't on my list of trusted people. Though, some people aren't just like me but they should consider what I'm doing if they want to not get involve with those scammers. Scammers are everywhere and they were trying their best to fish out those potential victims by tricking them and mostly who fall for this are newbies who doesn't have any experience about how scammers play.

Likewise many users send email for one thing or for another usually low ranks but I'm not quick to respond because I don't trust people with online except I have some personal relationship. Scammers give you attractive offers and if you have a greedy mind then you want to try and you get trapped. Scamming is always trap that they set for you if you fall you lose.

I just talked about a similar thing today in another thread. Scammers work on victims' greed, nothing else. For anyone to be scammed, check very well they too are greedy. I'm not talking of a complete hack where the victims may not even be aware. I'm talking about active participation of the victim in their bid to claim what wasn't even theirs. This day, it's dangerous clicking on links; even when they're from trusted friends. Some times our friends may mean well but will be ill informed on this crypto stuff and in their bid to help out they may endanger us. I've seen this happen on several occasions. This innocent friend who is naive finds a seemingly great site paying people who visit their site and then decides to share link to the site, not knowing it's a scam site. It gets dirty. I advise everyone to be their own detective.

In most cases people are fool enough to give these seed phrases to the hackers of which they take benefit and take control of the wallets draining out the funds and have seen it in many cases.This has been said many times that don't share it with anyone or fill out them over online links.This is pure scam and you should avoid it any cost but still people ignore these things.


The forum members are already helping each other in any situations regardless of merits and you don't need to give them because we are open discussion forum so would be happy to help you.

Well, I think it was simply - why do we give our passwords, seeds, and any login credentials to others? It is not a normal question asking for it, unless you know who you are talking to, a close friend, a family member...But if that is from strangers, it is a big NO NO.

Actually, nobody got scammed if we are too serious about keeping our access codes to our wallets. Maybe if they will hack it, that seems possible but just simply giving it to another person (strangers), it is really a big mistake.

It is simply the attachment to be honest. Regardless of who I talk to, I never give any of my login credentials even to my friends.

@OP I encounter these kinds of scams also in Telegram since I usually do some crypto-related stuffs there (not from the forum though) and this is not anything new.
It it pretty stupid if you would ask me. It translates to "hey random stranger, here is the access to my wallet, teach me how to sell these USDT. there's thousands of USDT stored there keep in mind".

 Yes, you are right. The begging pattern is well known by so many people now so they no longer beg rather they will appear as if they wanna render help to you but once you fall into their trap, zoom all your funds are gone so maintaining discussion or help from the people on your trust list will keep you away from becoming a victim.


This is so funny of you Tim101, you probably wanted a good contribution to your thread knowing too well that the forum members will give you the information and contribution that will guide you but you decided to trick some merit hunters with your merit offer that you don't even have bravo. LOL, it's sendable merit not expendable merit take note.

I have often found this kind of assistance in the official telegram support group, scammers will pretend to be customer support to help your problem by imitating the telegram username as closely as possible by contacting in a private message. Please note that the admin or CS will not contact first, if they contact first, it can be confirmed that it is a scammer.

and other methods used by scammers with the mode of asking for help to withdraw their funds on a site that they have created themselves, with a fairly large reward. Continuous updates on how scammers work so as not to fall into their traps.

don't ask why, remember that scammers also have smart brains to come up with some new scam methods that will fool their victims easily. On twitter only partially, they do it randomly and also with random people.
Not only on twitter, on several social media, especially on telegram, I often encounter the fraudulent method described by the OP. Be more careful to take some actions so as not to get into the scammer's device.

Scamming people may be very promising for the scammers. They maybe able to get high earnings from scamming people.However although scams have been here and have been doing here for a long time, in fact, there are still so many people who can be scammed every easily by only pulling by the small trap. Yes, this is because most the people are willing to get money as easily as possible, with high earnings but small efforts. Most people are still too lazy to learn and search for information about the project and scams.Moreover the victims are commonly newbises in which they know noting and they are very easy to be trapped. That is why scams are growing and still running very widely, moroever thourgh the social media in which we can find so many people out there easily.

It actually matters how we respond to them as not all scammers look like scammers during the conversation, in fact, they had offered help pretending they are totally good until such time trust has been built up, you'll just be wondering if the next step is to scam you. It comes to say that scammers are getting wise and very smart, that is why even if you are too careful enough, sometimes we got fooled by them.

We just have to be very careful on internet, you dont have to trust anybody you meet on social media, scammers  are coming up with new strategy daily just to scam people of their money, never send your wallet private key or your confidential details to anybody and if you are trying to help anybody you meet on the internet, you have to be very careful because the person might be trying to scam you. we all think some tricks all those hackers do use are cheap but lots of people are falling for it.

I don't think this is a good practice. A kind offering to reward anyone with merits if they can help on your post. As I have always said, there are no difficulty rules in this forum, just morality and common sense. Though I have seen people who opened merit thread to help newbies when they answer questions, but this is different from it.

Subsequently, you may consider not to mention that you will reward with merit because this forum helps everyone freely. If attention should be given to only people that has merits to offer, how about those that doesn't have. This does not mean you shouldn't merit anyone that helped solve your problems, but it shouldn't be mentioned.

If we still remain innocent of what happens around us, especially on social media, we are gonna be a target of these scammers. Social media now is a medium mostly used by scammers because they know that it was hard for them to identify if succeed their plan, exit was too easy for them. Well, we know greedy people are actively using Twitter which are mostly been easily fooled by scammers.
If we are into someone who talks about money, we are certainly careful with that person as even though we can assure his/her plan it was important to anticipate rather than regret it.

Whenever I receive random DM's from strangers or some users that I don't know, I'm only doing one thing.
Like the famous quote in Pokemon "Gotta IGNORE them all!!!"

The internet is full of scammers and if you are a newbie and you are easily attracted to these kind of scams, you really will fall into it and that's the problem right now. Even though many are spreading information in the internet, there are still some investors who are falling into these type of scams. I don't know if it's only but I don't hear anybody saying that they fell into a Bitcoin doubling scam.

Anyway, newbies will not learn if they will not experienced it and that includes getting scammed though there are some investors like me who learned while not getting fell into these scams. Just ignore random DM's and you're safe to scams.

Seems to me one good way to capitalize on this would be in the hopes that people (like me) will quickly import the addresses and then later accidently use that wallet to receive actual funds. At this point the wallet owner can steal the funds (as long as she is faster than all the other people who have access. Obviously there is no way to lose money if you start with an empty wallet since there would be nothing to steal. I imported the wallet (although I think it is a TRON token) trying eth and bsb because I thought if the person was really this stupid and had singled me out that I would steal their coins keep 200 USDT that they offered and then explain to them what they did wrong. It could also be a gage of honesty? While the advice to never respond to DMs is a good one, I prefer to respond so I can warn others of the scam. I am going to follow through and see if this is the usual send me 10 dollars and i will send you back 200 scam or if someone is monitoring the addresses to quickly capitalize on anyone who accidently deposits money into this wallet. Will report back...

My best guess on how this sort of scam goes down is the fees on transactions. Fortunately, fees on altcoi n transactions are not usually high especially when you are sending directly fron a wallet. Whe it happens to be an exchange, its a different fee rate as most exchanges have a fixed rate for transactions.

Should it happen that the victim is that greedy and doesn't know much, he or she might venture into some hurried moves in to secure the opportunity he or she was met with and could end up complying to whatever is demanded not excluding linking of wallets. Then, they would realise they are being scammed.
It's important to stay clear of one who goes the length to violating rules like seed phrase exposure, ha e large somes but don't know how to exchange it for fiat.

Sure enough, the wallet holds 400 usdt but only 1 tron, meaning you have to put tron in to the account in order to transfer the usdt out, and then as someone else described they take the tron out before you can transfer the USDT. All the tron  is being sent to the same address immediately after. I don't know how many different contracts were set up, but this particular address (my seed phrase was the same as the posters and I didnt search on the seed phrase or private key, i searched on 686usdt trx20.

It has netted 250 bucks worth of tron over the past 21 days. If someone can figure out a way to front run this front runner, they could cash in! You probably have to have access to the Tron mempool or spam send a bunch of .000001 transactions at once or something...  there is 400 dollars worth of usdt on there so a white hat could maybe front run the front runner and cause the scam to have a 150 dollar loss. Meanwhile I am playing dumb with the dmer to see if there is a social engineering aspect to this or just the former... tron transactions are super cheap so bombarding with a bunch of small tron txs might be the way...

if you act on my tip and succeed, feel free to drop me a tip!

BTC bc1qw2k9pwzg0yhj8523r3ysr43xgv4fmre2hf82dp
ETH 0x51062AF21E68007edfa5D4f8c19B59DeF76aBF4c

zksync or credit card potmo.argent.xyz

hope i am not violating TOS for soliciting donations. If so, my apologies but I am far too lazy to actually read the TOS.

In this particular case at least he isnt offering help he is asking for help and opportunists creating a wallet with the seed phrase and attempting to steal the 400 get punished so there's that.

Bro this isn't a new trick, some people intentionally reveal their private keys or key phrase just to lure greedy people, if you decide to let your greed take over and deposit gas fee in that wallet you ain't getting it back because somehow the wallet will send and incoming ETH to another address, its like a hunter getting hunted.

Because of the trend of the NFT, there are a lot of people waiting to have an upcoming project and one of the tool they are using is the twitter and some of them are having a giveaway like different cryptocurrency, and NFT itself and there's no too much restriction with the Twitter to create an account so some of them trying to scam other people like telling they win the event and they can redeem those through visint the link and this kind of action is already suspicious unlike giving the winnings already through an address so don't get fool around with this kind of thing if you win you can direct claim other stuffs things to do if there's something suspicious get out already.

Directly sending to another address may already be using BOT so that every transaction will always be executed quickly. This kind of fraud has often happened and is not a new type of fraud. and many more similar types of scams and some scams also use lots of fake accounts by creating giveaways like NFT giveaways and such. Don't be tempted by any promos that don't make sense, be more vigilant and always check before joining.

The problem is people are too greedy, they are looking for means to double their assets so whenever a good offer is tender in front of them they take it and its nothing but bait, crypto space will teach many newbies and even old users to be humble by force, right now not even airdrops and free offers are safe anymore.

I do advice people not invest anything of funds through social media investment platform. I believe that with investment platform most of them is so much made of scam. So anything concerning social media investment should be avoided, because from my perspective many people who indulge into social media investment ends up in losing their capitals and the multiplication of their investment.

Your comment lends credence to what I indicated earlier in this thread. Greed is always the bane of eager free receivers. How can someone expect to receive where they didn't sow? Scam victims of this nature don't deserve to be pitied at all. I like sounding a bit nonchalant on this because the supposed victims are those who have a mindset of finding a shortcut to wealth. Otherwise they should know that making riches is a gradual thing. People should avoid any investment or engagement with mouth watery offers. The end thereof is often disastrous.

Waw that’s really surprising, am surprise to see this kind of scam, the pattern looks different am sure people will have fallen victim for the scam. Maybe the person trying to help the user is also trying to scam the person seeking for help, it will be two scammers trying to scam each other. But some people having good mind will also fall for that, we have to be very careful and smart to avoid being scammed.

happy to see this thread, I am cleaning my mail box on Twitter and see that I got the same message

I also wasn't aware of this scamming technique and luckily when I copy pasted the hall message your thread popup as first in google search, this is great because many people will avoid being scammed when they read it, good job