Print Page - Avoiding Faucets and Airdrop Scams

I'm happy to see new members joining our community here on Bitcointalk. With a steady influx of newcomers, it's important to make everyone aware of potential threats in the world of cryptocurrency. We're all on this Bitcoin journey together, and we want to ensure it's safe and successful for everyone.

So, I'd like to share a tip with the community that I think might be helpful. One common thing, especially among newcomers in the crypto realm, is the allure of faucet sites. These websites claim to reward you with crypto or Bitcoin for completing daily tasks or simply watching ads. I understand the temptation, as a newbie, the desire to have a few coins in your wallet, but let me emphasize that connecting your wallet to such sites can be a risky move.
Why, you ask? Well, here's the deal. most of these faucet and airdrop sites are created by scammers with the sole intention of hacking your wallets and stealing your hard earned funds.

Just a few days ago, I came across a heartbreaking post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5468203.msg62905807#msg62905807)from a forum member who lost his entire stash because he connected his wallet to an airdrop site that turned out to be a scam. His tokens were stolen, and he was left in despair, even considering taking his own life. It's painful to witness the suffering he's going through because he knows how much effort he put into saving those funds.
I won't lay all the blame on him because anyone can be a victim. But it all started with his initial mistake of connecting a wallet with existing funds to an unknown site. Considering his rank, I wouldn't have expected such carelessness from him. From this, we can see that it's a lesson we should all take to heart.

To cut a long story short, we should remember that while collecting rewards from such sites might not always end in a scam (because there are a few legitimate ones), they usually aren't worth your time spent. The real danger lies in linking a wallet containing your Bitcoins or tokens to these shady platforms. To stay safe, if you're considering participating in an airdrop or faucet, create a new wallet specifically for these purposes. The crypto space is indeed filled with risks, but how you manage your funds and keep your keys plays a pivotal role in safeguarding your assets.

Remember, nothing in life comes truly for free. If you stumble on offers that seem too good to be true, proceed with caution or, better yet, stay away altogether. We're here to share knowledge, protect one another, and avoid stories that break our hearts. Let's all be smart in these times. Cryptocurrency can be a rewarding journey, but only if we navigate it wisely.

I Know how painful it's to get one token or coin stolen from their wallet as a result of sourcing for additional profits or additional tokens which makes one lose all their holdings. After my experience with this airdrop drama I totally dislike anything free instead I prefer to work to earn the airdrop than just someone telling to join their free airdrop rewards this seems not clear and phishy to me, whatever that sound too real often turns to be fake and people should avoid such drama or limit their rates at which they hunts for airdrop.

One can't be too cautious
Airdrops are risky but it was very profitable in the old days
Like has been said earlier
One can use something like a dummy wallet,Email and others
To partake in project's like this
Importantly, DYOR
Sadly gaining correct/Accurate information from the web now is Difficult
Bloggers promoting airdrops they barely know about
Or are accomplice of said airdrops
Sadly the post won't be seen again after sometime.
This is my first time learning that one can lost their funds
Through airdrop
Without providing your private keys.

In all, no matter how we talk about greed
We humans
We always want more
Just add caution while at it.

Quote from: Joeyp on September 29, 2023, 08:57:15 PM

In the airdrop scam everything is very simple, no need to send private keys. You have scammer webpage with very nice token airdrop and several wallets, from which you can choose your wallet. For example, you connect to your Metamask wallet, confirm, and all your main network coins are transfered to the scammer address. Of course from airdrop you receive nothing.

Some people have the mindset of making free money from crypto currency, that's why they end up participating in airdrops, but they don't know most airdrops are just a waste of time, and scammers are making use of airdrops to scam people. Sometimes you might just end up receiving a random coin in your wallet. If you try to send out or sell the coin, scammers might end up having access to your wallet address. Some scammers will create a website where they will ask people to connect their wallet and claim an airdrop. If you do that, scammers will automatically have access to your wallet, and if you have any coins in your wallet, they might end up moving them from your wallet.

You might be looking for free money, and you will end up being scammed, so I will say it's just better to avoid airdrops. Don't come to the crypto space thinking you will be able to make free money, scammers are everywhere setting traps for people, hoping they will fall into them. If you need money, then you will have to work for it.

Quote from: Hatchy on September 29, 2023, 08:21:33 PM

Remember, nothing in life comes truly for free. If you stumble on offers that seem too good to be true, proceed with caution or, better yet, stay away altogether. We're here to share knowledge, protect one another, and avoid stories that break our hearts. Let's all be smart in these times. Cryptocurrency can be a rewarding journey, but only if we navigate it wisely.[/left] ;D

There is one single way or lets call it method that you can apply to avoid Faucet and airdrop scams; and this is by making a new wallet for testnet faucets or airdrop events. And with Metamask wallet; it is easy to achieve this. Study my breakdown.

1. Download Metamask
2. Create first wallet and get the seed (securely kept), you can name this wallet main wallet.
3. Create second wallet, name it testnet wallet and use it for testnet events to claim faucets and conduct other tests
4. Create third wallet, name it airdrop wallet, these wallets can be used if you fill different airdrop forms or you participate in telegram bot airdrops etc.

NOTE: Dedicate metamask for such activities, you can get trust wallet or safepal as your Main Wallet to store funds, or you can get hard wallets!

You don't need to worry so much about the private keys; with your seed phrase, you can get back your multiple wallets. Or, you can store private keys for each wallet.
Keep it simple always!

Back in the day, airdrops and faucets had real projects. But nowadays, most of them are shitcoins or don't have any actual value. We are just spreading their projects and giving them our information for free. I see a lot of airdrops that require transactions to be completed. They would charge for each transaction. Just imagine if one person did 10 airdrops and got charged $1. What would 1000 users have earned them? It is a way for them to make money. And there are many who would do 50 airdrop faucets a day; they would do any airdrops they found.

I stopped doing airdrops and faucets long ago. They tell you to connect your wallet. Approve transaction. That way, your wallet gets exposed to a wallet hack. Who knows what malicious translation you approved? 100 out of 10, there is a chance of a malicious transaction. And before you realize it, your funds are already gone.

Of course, if you are so desperate for airdrops and faucets, you can create an airdrop-dedicated wallet where no funds are kept. That way, there is no chance of losing anything.

Quote from: Hatchy on September 29, 2023, 08:21:33 PM

most of these faucet and airdrop sites are created by scammers with the sole intention of hacking your wallets and stealing your hard earned funds.

Faucets are not good enough nowadays and you waste time by claiming Bitcoin faucets.

Airdrops from altcoins will require you to complete some tasks and mostly they are on-chain transactions. You will have to buy their native tokens to pay on-chain transaction fees and it means you have to spend initial capital first. If their projects fail or just scam, you will not receive airdrop distribution.

You can do their Test program on Test net, no initial capital like on-chain transactions on main net but you will have to spend time to complete task on test net too.

I mean faucets and airdrops are already been used as methods of scamming investors are long time ago and before starting to invest in cryptocurrency make sure you already know what you are doing and already have a lot of knowledge before even starting your cryptocurrency journey We need to remember that it is still a very risky investment considering that scammers and hackers in this space, probably cryptocurrency is where we could see a huge percentage of hackers and scammers because of the potential profit, and for sure these people are earning a huge amount of money since they continue to develop a new method on how they are going to trick investors, but probably most of the victims are newbies because they still dont know what things work here. So make sure to always be careful and protect yourself from this hacker, ignore this kind of faucet or airdrop if the deal is just too good to be true it's probably a scam since it's the most common method of scammers to encourage you to invest or give your information to them, also you are already here In the forum probably the best cryptocurrency forum where you can learn everything your gonna need to know, there are a lot of experienced members here so make sure to learn from others' mistakes.

For faucets, I don't find any problem if someone is into it because you'll just have to put your receiving address and that's it. There's no need for you to access your wallet through it and just drop by there when you're just going to claim those small sats that you're taking from them. And for the airdrops, they're the ones that are more vulnerable or likely to scam or hack participants. I don't also like to do victim blaming but that's what it is. He should have been careful with that and I think it's just all about the thought of having free money and willing to do anything for it. We're already aware of these things but it's just sad that we're still seeing people that have experience in the market becomes a victim of this. Just do not connect your wallet or do not log in using your wallet when an unknown website asks you to do that.

Quote from: DYING_S0UL on September 30, 2023, 03:16:01 AM

Back in the day, airdrops and faucets had real projects.

The strange thing is that people hope that those times can return. Even more, those who once profited from airdrops today know that this is impossible. Hopes come from newcomers who have watched old YouTube videos trying their luck, periodically losing their money. No matter what you write here, as long as there are scammers, there will be those who will consume everything they create. As they say, if there is a demand, those who are willing to be deceived will always be those who take advantage of it. And the stories that there is nothing free on the Internet will be heard by those who get burned. Give people the freedom to make mistakes. This becomes a motto.

Quote from: The Cryptovator on September 29, 2023, 08:46:03 PM

Scammers are taking advantage of our stupidity. Mostly greedy and new crypto users are falling into the airdrop trap. They are submitting their private keys for tokens, which is worthless. Many threads have been raised to protect forum users from such scams. But still, we are hearing about airdrop scams. We have to keep in mind that nothing is free in the world.

I understood that the faucets and airdrop of a thing is about mindset of the newbies. Many newbies still have the believe that they can make millions of dollars in the cryptocurrency industry even without spending a dime. This is the reason why they are busy chasing airdrop and they do not hesitate to connect their wallets in the quest to completing the task that is given them.
If newbies understand that nothing is actually free in the real sense they will limit the way they flood in airdrop and faucets earning opportunities.

Quote from: Kara3 on September 29, 2023, 08:36:08 PM

It is worth creating awareness about it, chase airdrops and faucet is quite cool but when doing so, is very important you have a special wallet for it, not a wallet that contains your assets, I chase airdrops, but I have a special wallet for it, I do so because the rate at which scammers are hovering around in the cryptocurrency industry is much, you just have to be safe, since the wallet is empty, you have nothing to lose if they aren't legit.

For Faucet scam awareness maybe its not really worth to create a awareness since there's few people spend some time on that sites, since many know that its not really worth it and the possible payments they can only get for participating is just a few cents. But for airdrops? I think all warning posted is so important since this is famous activities used by scammers and now some of those scammers used the wallet connecting to their platform scheme and this is how they stole the money of their victims.

This is good refresher since I still see so many people doing some risky behavior on joining airdrops so hopefully they can read a bad incident happen to other user and learn from the mistake they have don so that there's no money from their end will get affected.

Quote from: Hatchy on September 29, 2023, 08:21:33 PM

Just a few days ago, I came across a heartbreaking post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5468203.msg62905807#msg62905807)from a forum member who lost his entire stash because he connected his wallet to an airdrop site that turned out to be a scam

When the name of cryptocurrency comes there must be the name of scams because many scams take place in the cryptocurrency world. I saw the post of that person and I feel very sad for him as he lost all of his funds. But if we think that a small mistake can cause such a big loss then why people do not take lessons from this? Regularly scams are reported and people lose their funds but after losing their funds they again repeat the same mistake. Why do they put their funds at risk for such a small amount of tokens? However, there are not many airdrops that are scams and I know some people that grab some amounts from these airdrops but not all are athentics. This is the best way for the scammers to thug people and snatch their whole hard work. User should know why people give them money without any profits, There is no one who care about them and for that, you should keep one thing in mind you have to take care of yourselves.

Quote from: mk4 on September 30, 2023, 04:35:49 AM

Also, watch out with scams in general: https://chainsec.io/scams

Scammers and Phishers: Rugbulls and airdrop scams (https://support.metamask.io/hc/en-us/articles/4407169552667-Scammers-and-Phishers-Rugpulls-and-airdrop-scams)
Airdrop scams explained (https://www.binance.com/en/feed/post/970168)
8 ways to check if it's a token scam (https://dappradar.com/blog/8-ways-to-check-if-its-a-token-scam)

Check honeypot scam tokens
https://honeypot.is/
https://honeypot.is/ethereum
https://github.com/dappradar/tokens-blacklist

I expect this to keep happening because each and every day, crypto keeps getting popular and we will keep seeing newbies in crypto space, those mistakes that people like us have made in the past we still be repeated by newbies and there is nothing to make it stop.

This is why some beginners believe that crypto is scam, as there are too many unsafe steps anyone can easily take in the crypto space.

Airdrops and Fauctes are not even making money anymore I don't know why people are going this route in 2023, it's over for Airdrops and giveaways, you will possibly end up getting scammed if you follow this route.

Zealy is the only legit airdrop website that still pays right now but the payment isn't even worth your time, the last airdrop I joined was SuiSwap off this website, and after all the daily points gathering they gave everyone 1000 tokens and the value is 0.0002$, how is this profitable? The only thing still left that's worth your time is testnet activities and also not all will pay their testers.

Quote from: youdacapt on September 29, 2023, 10:44:17 PM

Quote from: Hatchy on September 29, 2023, 08:21:33 PM

It is, indeed, a good practice to use different addresses for different activities, not only because if there is any problem you don't have all the eggs in the same basket, but because this way nobody knows your exact balance, which is valuable financial personal information that can be only tracked if blockchain is involved (because nobody knows how much money you have when you pay for something with cash, card or wire transfer, but they do when you pay with crypto). So, for increased security, I'd recommend to use a different address not only per activity, but even per transaction, when possible.

I think you have confused the concept of faucets with Airdrop, you do not need to link your wallet to get any profits from faucets, and even in the case of Airdrop you can link a wallet with zero transactions.

In the case of faucets, you may be scammed by making you watch a lot of ads and then not be able to withdraw your profits, or the links you visit to watch ads may contain malware or mining viruses running in the background.

Airdrop You may need to link your wallet, and here you do not need any currencies to that wallet, so you can link an empty wallet.
In any case, the opportunity to achieve a good income from these methods is almost impossible, so look for other options.

Quote from: The Cryptovator on September 29, 2023, 08:46:03 PM

Scammers are taking advantage of our stupidity. Mostly greedy and new crypto users are falling into the airdrop trap. They are submitting their private keys for tokens, which are worthless. Many threads have been raised to protect forum users from such scams. But still, we are hearing about airdrop scams. We have to keep in mind that nothing is free in the world.

I was having a reflection on the boards i have not visited in a long time in this forum and that is the bounty section, i dont think i ever visit that board again after the first time i visited a long time ago, and from the spam fiest that is happening there i dont think any serious person will take anything coming out of that place serious.

I have never taken part in any airdrop of bounty before and i don't have the intention to do so in the coming future because I am already aware of the risk and vulnerability that I can encounter from engaging in any of the offers in that board.

Faucet and Airdrop is free money scheme that will be very attractive especially for newbies, and it's indeed one of the easiest way to lure new comers and people who are hesitate to use their money to understand and experience owning Bitcoin, but they really want to have Bitcoin, and most of those people will be easily lured and then end up stealing their data.

For newbie or anyone who are still hunting for airdrops and faucets, I wouldn't say that all of them are worthless scam, but finding an actually worth of your time will be like trying to find needle in a haystack. You will need to do an extremely long time research.

I think I came across that particular thread you are mentioning here where a senior member on this platform was begging for help to recover his lifetime savings he had accrued over the years and converted into Crypto. The hack was as a result of him connecting and approving access to an airdrop site he met online and virtually he lost his funds to hackers and came here crying of committing suicide. Although it is a sad experience but wisdom is profitable to direct. How does it sounds you using your main and major wallet with huge amount of funds for su cc h a dirty Play. It's unreasonable and stupendous.

I would advise that members here both old and new avoid such airdrops and faucets. Of you must take part in such, then you should create a new wallet for that exercise and do not make the mistake of trying to link it to your major wallet.

Bitcoin Forum

Other => Beginners & Help => Topic started by: Hatchy on September 29, 2023, 08:21:33 PM