Bitcoin Forum

I know that TON is one of the most talked about crypto project in this crypto space right now and this have also attcated a lot of bad actors too, now TON wallets are receiving many NFTs for free and some do look almost legit, enough to confuse a newbie that it is real, I am here to warm you guys to stay away from free NFTs.

If you don't pay for it, you shouldn't claim any ownership.

Fake NFTs and Tokens can live in your wallet for years without comprising your crypto wallet until you deceid to touch them.

A lesson you should learn from this is do not claim ownership of something that's not yours, in this crypto space nothing is for free.


Follow this procedure.

1. DONT TOUCH
2. DONT CLAIM
3. DONT EVEN ATTEMPT 1 & 2 RULES ABOVE.

I think it would be better to specify the type of risk in dealing with these NFTs in order for the advice to be accurate. Just a simple warning may not be enough if the user is not aware of the true type of danger.

According to my assessment, the harm is not in dealing with any of the assets on a private address (which you own its private key), or using any of the platforms on which it will be promoted that those assets can be used. Those who create and send these NFTs have a complete plan to benefit from all of this, and unfortunately, most users do not have sufficient experience to properly handle their addresses in a secure manner.

The most important advice, in my opinion, is to ignore everything that arrives at your crypto address for free. Also avoid linking the wallet to any unknown platforms, no matter how the opportunity looks promising.

I don't know what people are looking after NFTS, many of the ones that were hype months back, where are they right now? Probably worthless and can't do anything, even the one's you see around is because of the trend, Ton is now the new hot cake in town and because of this mini games of taping, there are lot of newbies who don't know anything about crypto and since Telegram has always been the easiest way to scam people, this is the time a lot of victims will lose money.

If you go to some of the mini games on X platform, under their comments, there are people that impersonate the real project by hidden under comments with plenty likes and engagement just to prove they are real but they will redirect you to another website that will ask you to connect your wallet, once you do and authorized a single transaction with them, that's all for your wallet because everything will be sweep under some seconds.

Going on with the example of the success of NOTcoin from TON. Many were feeling that they were late for the claim or still trying to do something and research if there's still a way to participate.

That's why the latter is on the danger when they can't accept that the launch and distribution was already done and they can't do anything with it anymore.

While out of nowhere, a scammer sees that opportunity and spreading some wrong information that there might be a batch 2 or so and all they have to do is to fill in the form or sheet that they send to those gullible people and the magic of scamming starts from there.

If its free its worth claiming for mate. Its just that you should study first the project you are claiming for. Even its not a ton project or any other projects, free nft is good and likely to cla by everyone why you shouldnt? Only those who are joining on scam projects would be scare to get a free nft. I see that you warn others about free. Why would you claim something you knew you didnt join right? Thats something shady and must avoid. But if you able to get some for free then thats good for you. Its just a matter of due diligence.

Bounty hunters dislike your recommendations because their job is hunting money by claiming things with no or little efforts.

A more correct recommendation are

- Use new wallets for bounty tasks, claiming whatever.
- Never use your main wallets to do things in the first recommendation.
- It's better if you can have one device for bounty hunting but I know this point is difficult to achieve with many people. Anyway if they can, they should do this recommendation.

OcTradism is on point, as always. The OP wonders why so many people are willing to risk their hodlings for a NFT that's not worth a dime, but many people, specially those interested in altcoins and, even more specially, bounty hunters, are all day looking for this kind of micro-payments in order to grow their portfolio at the end of the month.

For these people, the correct advice should be "stay safe" rather than "don't claim freebies", because they won't follow the latter.

I don't think that this is entirely true. We can't make our conclusion on the entire crypto system based on what happened with a particular project. It's just like airdrop, we've seen countless numbers of airdrop were participant waste all there time and energy to engage in them and at the end they don't get anything from the campaign but that's not enough reason to discourage people from getting into airdrops. In the midst of the board ones we still have some good project that one can still involved in but the key here should always be to go about them with caution.

I totally agree with you. For those that have been into bounties for a while, it's a mix of failed and succesfully projects but you can't write them off entirely. The best security measures to be taken would be to use an entirely different wallet and device if you have the means while keeping your main wallet entirely offline or not related to your bounty stuff.

It could even be that your mobile device could serve to take care of those kind of project while your desktop device would be in charge of your main wallet. Whichever way that's convininece for you is totally okay as long as you're being security conscious and you're not loosing or endangering your coin in the process.

Nah, you can just claim those free NFT's. I mean it's free, so why not claim or mint it? There's always a number one rule when it comes to these kinds of things, and many YouTube influencers also said it, and that is "TO ALWAYS USE A BURNER WALLET".

Burner wallet meaning wallets that you will only use for that particular mint of an NFT. No more, no less. Don't use your main wallet to mint free NFT's because like you said, your wallet can get compromised. There's no problem claiming or minting it especially for free, but always take note of the risks, and don't ever, ever use your main wallet for these things.

Its obvious that people want to earn something big without doing anything or by giving little contribution to earn a lot, this is the way of life many are so positioned to take and go for in cryptocurrency, i know this on set on TON network will spark on many scammers from introducing their own shitty coins or tokens and make offers as well for airdrops for people to claim, we have to be watchful on accepting free offers.

Nothing is free any project that you don't understand the road map, it's best advisable to ask questions and make thorough findings or better leave them. Airdrops are free but not entirely because you've to stick to anticipating with the tasks inother to pass and gain eligibility to accumulate them in your wallets. I know how hard crypto can be if one is planning to start with nothing but with the right resources, one needs to start having good path to bring in promising projects to one's ends.

I never thought of NFTs as potentially profitable investments even when it was “trending” but now that almost no one is talking about it people are becoming more and more desperate to try and profit with their NFTs. But seriously, if you get scammed from NFTs that’s beyond unintelligent.
I agree that telegram is a very popular platform for scammers. Though some projects seem legit and if we check properly these projects can even be rewarding. We just need to be very careful and know our way around signs of red or green flags.

It should be the common sense for people to not interact with something so fishy when it comes to dapps, NFT, or even any smart contract there is, these scammers are taking advantage the fact that some newbies are too lack of information to know that just blindly interacting with malicious smart contract could drain them their money.
these fake shady free NFT are just generally only one of many ways that people can be deceived into approving some smart contract of their ERC20 tokens, there are even cases where you interact with shady platform advertising themselves as a swap platform but ended up draining people of money so its a problem.

usually its the people that lack of knowledge that falls victim, even though the NFT trend isn't a thing anymore but many project are still utilizing the technology of NFT as sort of identifier, right now NFT isn't frequently being used for sell and buying digital arts, instead it works like a club pass, like ladys and so on where you might be eligible for an airdrop. this also the reason why many scammers also trying to use NFT as a way to scam people.
you know some people just so eager to get some precious NFT they often just recklessly claiming whatever NFT there is.
even sometime some scammer are just trying to impersonate the popular NFT by creating their own and listing it in market place deceiving people into buying the fake NFT and if you see the volume, whether artificially created or not, there seems to be some people that get deceived.

It is not about Telegram in general, it is about wallets which have balance. These scammers will tryto lure the wallet owners to try to sell their scam NFT or tokens which will be valued a few dollars. Doing so somehy exposes the wallets private key as these tokens or NFT are not listed on prominent exchanges. Such scams do happen when you have tokens or coins of a particular blockchain n the wallet.

The way people attack people today is that some chains have changed, with TON it is also impossible to avoid this situation where imposters have performed analytical activities on bananas that come with things. are emerging to combine malicious tokens/nft/links... to attack users. But I think for newbies, always consult with people who have experience about what's appearing in wallets, there have been many cases of hijacking and loss of a lot of crypto assets in this space. The lesson of being alert to everything is always noticeable and sometimes it seems that everything goes so easily that we can ignore some risks of death.

I am bit surprised to know if people still deal or consider NFT as legit? I think the era of NFT has come to an end and you need to be specific about the kind of risk it carri s when you touch these NFTs which you didn't pay for but it's in your wallet, because your post is open ended as one cannot conclude about the kind of risk involved if we hold those NFT which we got for free.

The only scam with NFT I can think of at the moment is the whole concept of NFT but money laundering was behind those exorbitant amount paid by some people to buy an NFT.

Safety first as they say, always empty your wallets that you're going to use for claiming. Don't say about don't claim because as octradism said, every bounty hunter and airdrop people have to claim all of the possible rewards that they have. They know the procedure and they have to be careful with everything that they're claiming. Whilst the newbies, they're likely the ones that are going to fail and fall for such scams by these fake airdrop copycats.

Other than that, people should revoke their wallet after they connect their wallet to Web3 sites and they should avoid to claim anything that free regardless it's airdrop or giveaway. The best is to learn computer security in the first place, people forget if installing pirated software, clicking unknown link or watching porn will raise the chance to get hacked. If you can't yet afford to subscribe the official software, you should use free and open source software.

Can you be specific on how the scam works. How come do you need to claim ownership if the NFT is already on your wallet? NFT is just a non fungible token which means it’s already in your possession once it was transferred to your wallet.

This is what makes me confused on what will be the potential method of scammers when the NFT is already on your wallet?

I knew this is possible in crypto airdrops since the scam happened when you try to exchange it on DEX but I’m not sure what is the method for NFT in able to scam.

And strangely I don't feel like I participated in anything regarding NFT on the TON network but I see some NFTs in my TON wallet. I don't know if this is some kind of free airdrop? but for sure if you find something suspicious then you should avoid it.

Generally one should not wander to different web pages on the web. Because there is always criminal activity going on here. You can become a victim of someone at any time. A fake wallet scam tricks users into believing they are using a legitimate digital wallet to store their assets. Fake wallets ask users to enter their private keys information that should never be shared and then scammers use those private keys to steal users crypto holdings.

in this case, I personally will ignore the NFT for the sake of wallet security. I try to avoid tokens, or NFTs that suddenly appear in our personal wallet, especially since the wallet has never been used for any event.

Thanks for the information and I just hope that many people would be this useful and stay very careful when they see something like this.
I have been seeing many adverts about claiming Not tokens about 60k NOT for doing no task. Anytime I see this, I just laughed because I know it's a scam. For those that might not be aware about this before now, we all have to stay away from such kind of advert because it is quite dangerous and could make us to lose all our funds with in a second.

Perhaps I'm very pleased to see threads of this nature having the security of people in mind, because this days all I see are just shitcoins promotion threads and topics.

Well, personally I don't do free things because I believe they are more prone to dangers than what one buys with their own money. in the crypto space right especially with the success of Notcoin being launched a lot of newbies and non crypto person have joined the community having the belief that there will be another Notcoin that can turn them to millionaires as their influencers do advertise, so claiming free NFTs would seem like a big opportunity for them whereas the risk of having ones wallet being compromised is very high.

Apparently, I will add to this by advising people not to take part in whatever that seems too good to be true, don't expect to get a free NFT and in few months it turns out to make millions which is insane.

Clicking on links is high risky for your assets as some malwares, crypto spies can be embedded in this links and once clicked it begins it's job without ones notice. Everyone's security is in their hands.

Sometimes you don’t even have to actually input anything for them to try and hack onto your system. Always be one step ahead of everyone.

Learn immediately how to differentiate a real website from a fishy suspicious one. Don’t be too lenient and always be on your toes: alert and vigilant. Sometimes clicking a link has a lot of malware which could infiltrate your devices and even track your activities.

Of course he has a right to know so he is surfing the web pages. But you have to be careful as fraudsters will constantly try to trap you. Everything from your wallet is at risk when you join a fake project and join your wallet there. Don't click on a link without knowing the details or because you are creating an opportunity for him by clicking there. Where scammers impersonate legitimate organizations to steal personal information, verify their authenticity before you provide them with any information.

Free offers you say. Ever since there was a huge pay from the NOT coin were people were tapping their screens for that shitcoin, many people have come to believe that they can make some free bucks through any project that seems similar to NOT coin. Although i wont blame them much because they had seen evidence which has blinded their mindset not to even look out for possible scam again, anything that comes to their mind right now is totally legit.

I think it's a good advice but its more of in a code words where a fresher or a newbie will not be able to understand that what type of warnings are being given in these details.

Even though I'm not clear what you exactly want to say so please if you can elaborate about the words so that we can be more aware of these scams. It will be very kind of you if you can add to this.

It is best for us to ignore untrusted tokens. Scam tokens contain links that can compromise all the assets in our wallet. Interacting with the links provided by these tokens can give scammers access to our wallet. TON has been very popular lately and is being shilled everywhere. Scammers may be aware of this active situation and may be targeting the TON network...

Some wallets allow us to create a blacklist. We can blacklist tokens that we think are suspicious. No matter how careful we are, they develop new methods every day and pose a danger to everyone. We have to be very careful against scammers...

My golden rule is that I never touch coins I haven't purchased. I know that if I try to connect my wallet to sell free coins, I will either get hacked or lose what I already have in my wallet. The simple logic is, how can we receive something for free that we haven't bought? Just ignore such offers to avoid becoming a victim of a scam.

         -   Even though I don't really understand what you want to convey to us here, mate, I am still somehow grateful for you reminding me of this. I don't like NFT either. So, I think it is unlikely that I will fall victim to what you are saying.

Second, I haven't used TON blockhain either, but I buy it somehow on the centralized exchange platform, not on the DEX platform. But I hope you can clarify a little more about what you are talking about here.

Most free NFTs are just scams as you said and if you allow them to access and provide the passphrase on your wallet then they will surely wipe out all of your available assets. And, that is why it is really to be good to be true getting free NFTs.

I would say that some of them are legit and provide NFTs but it is really hard to trust them.

Same here but the crazy thing is, they are. And as usual, that made me leave a bit of regrets because another golden opportunity has once pass in my two hands, just like that.

It's the human nature trying things that are hardly existing anymore but I think some can still be successful with this approach, no wonder why others have attempted the same thing. I am not siding Telegram here but I think it's offensive calling them a scammers den or a scammers paradise. Just take a look at us, we are still benefiting on it because we use them for instant messaging and crypto transactions and we have no problems with these scammers because of our long-term experiences in this field.

Maybe you need to use evidence to show the problem so that your advice can be validated correctly with many examples maybe people will believe more, we know that hunters always want to get free airdrops just by carrying out the tasks assigned, and not a few also get a decent payment from free capital.

To anticipate this, don't use your main telegram account, you only need to use your telegram account alts to access like this, if there is a sale value on the NFT or token, we can get lucky but if not it won't be a problem and you don't lose anything if you only use your account alts.

Isn't it the same thing that happen to most of the other blockchains? once a blockchain gain some hype the next thing bad project will shift their attention to the chain to exploit gullible users.
Lately the Ton blockchain has been making a lot of waves lately and we are seeing many different tap projects suddenly coming up in the chain, telegram users has grown so much in recent times. So i won't be surprise to see people getting scammed through all the many tap projects and free nft projects.
People really need to be very careful.

You are absolutely right and people who fall most in this kind of thing are newbie, because of what they have heard about crypto that people get rich overnight they believe that any slight opportunity is worth diving to not knowing what is involve and the reason why they dive into this stuff it's because people don't too talk about their bad experience in crypto rather they keep telling people and sharing update on how they have make money in crypto though some of those advert are legit but it's very hard to see those one that are legit.

Yes, of course. In order to maintain asset security, I always avoid tokens or NFTs that suddenly appear in our personal wallet. because I think this is a kind of fraud on the one hand, these NFTs also have high value but have no exchange, this seems ridiculous.

Not only TON wallet but also on BSC wallet I receive different types of fake tokens. They do not swap without their specific website. And when we go to swap on their own website, the assets are transferred from our own wallet. So these fake tokens or NFTs can never be claimed or swapped.

It's true that those of us who are involved in the crypto world have to avoid things that are detrimental, this can be done by studying and analyzing the ins and outs of the coins we want to invest in, otherwise we will be trapped in momentary fame.

Op I am not disputing your fact but if someone is offering free NFT to boost his website or handle then it might legit  because he might like to do that to attract more customers to the site and all what I will say is that if something like exist and your want to know if they are legit then as your receive the token then you test it to know if the token sent to you is legit. And all what you have to do is to use new wallet to receive them. A wallet that you have not used to receive any coins or token. And once you receive it, test it at once.

Someone that is very good in the cryptocurrency will test the service to know things.

We can choose to always avoid the next victim of scam if we are consistently following up with eh security tips and advise given on cryptocurrency, many are too lenient and looses as well concerning receiving offers from any promotional attempt, we cannot know it all and we must not also be too forward in going for less with the lack of caution on every cryptocurrency investment we are having ahead of us, we may want to make money but instead end up loosing it.

If you do really just make use of your common sense then anything which is really that asking for some confirmation or any sign message or request from your wallet then you would definitely be that be able to point
out that it would really be needing up on paying something, neither some certain amount or even just trying to waste up your fee which do really sucks. Just simply bare up into your mind that if you
arent that buying or expecting something then there's some nft or coins that it is on your wallet then better to avoid it if  you dont like to have that potential problem or wasting up some money.
There are really just that people who are really just that too curious on things on which at the moment that they would really be seeing something and due to that kind of question in mind at
the same time trying to look for something which does have value will really be having that common approach on which trying out to verify things if it does have value and could really be sell
for some easy money, without even trying to look back whether they are expecting something or bought something. There's no indeed free into this world and with that idea alone then
you could already tell.

We must acknowledge that we cannot realistically get to know every single scam that exist and accept that scammers are probably smarter than us, but at the same time this realization will make it way harder to get scammed, as if we were to receive an unknown coin or NFT in one of the addresses we control, we can avoid becoming a victim simply by not making any attempt to claim those coins and ignore them completely, unfortunately many newbies do not know this and try to get advantage of their good fortune, and that is when they get scammed.

One really need to be careful with everything thing they do, scammers are mostly after the bitcoiners, every scammers knows the worth of Bitcoin that's why they are really after the bitcoiners. Most importantly, we should avoid things that has to do with Links because that's the most easiest way scammers uses to scammers and we should also be careful the kind of things we listen to concerning Bitcoin.

Miracles do happen sometimes mate. I'm sure you already saw or heard that someone gets a free stuff before, right? Either free delivery, free money in their bank accounts, etc... and there is a reason for it but some are genuine and not done by the criminals to get more advantage of those who received it.

We can still wonder once it happens to us and it's always better to ensure our safety first of course. In crypto, the ones I can only doubt are the tokens and maybe some NFT's but if it's about the normal cryptos, I know if the coin I got is legit or not. I have nothing to lose because I don't own any existing coins in my crypto wallet anyway, lol.

I'm not a fan of NFTs and have never even owned one, either from buying or free.
It's hard to deny that freebies always attract a lot of people, especially in the crypto world, because sometimes the results can be so big that even though they know there are risks involved, many are more tempted by the results they might get, and there are those who make this a job because they can earn more than their salary in the real world
Remain careful with all forms of scam, if you are not sure then asking on this forum can be a way to avoid scams, but you have to ask first, not claim, and after becoming a victim, then ask.