Bitcoin Forum

Some basic scam I will describe for newbie to avoid big loss. We can avoid it before attacked.

1) Wallet hacking:
Basically we used some crypto wallet to store our crypto coin. Example: blockchain, coinbase, coinpayment and MyEtherwallet. We can got scam by visiting phishing site. Once you enter your details on phishing site, they will access your wallet and stole your coin.
To avoid phishing site, we can bookmark that orginal website and we should use 2FA for each site. Don't use same password your all wallet. So that we can avoid this kind of scam.

2) ICO scam:
Now a days it's very difficult to avoid scam ICO. ICO become now as smart scam. They are easily make us fool. To avoid ICO scam you should research strongly about their project. Any existing project there? How quality their whitepaper? How strong team? Team are existing or fake ? Check their social media profile. How strong their community and advertising strategy? Amount of total supply etc. Even we can't avoid ICO scam, but we can minimize.

3) Ponzi scheme:
Some of ICO or token offer various profit. Like lending and revenue sharing from their project. For me it's a silent scam. They scam slowly. For example : Bitconnect is one of them. I think better this kind of project.

4) Chose crypto exchange:
Many people got scam for exchange his coin. Specially from local exchange. Verify difficult to identify legit local exchange. So be careful and research when you use local exchange. In the other hand some international exchange make silent scam. For example: Yobit and hitbtc. They have many bad reputation on this forum too. You can use simply search button to find them here. You have to choice best exchange for trade. Example bittrex and polonix.

5) During trade:
It's the latest scam. We have no way to find out the sxmcammers. I called them big while. Because they can dump or pump any coin for a moment. Some time we can see suddenly dump or pump any coin. They have strong team. They start buy then trend become up. Once we start buy they simply sale their hold coin and market become down. Then we are worried and sale our coin even in loss.

6) Fake give away offer:
May be you will received spam mail or you can see any tweet or tweeter reply with give away offer from scammer. Actually they use a name from reputation company or exchange to make fool us. Avoid this kind of massage once you see. Don't click their any link.


I will edit post if I found more new scam system.

Also:

• Pump/signal group: This is a classic pump-and-dump scam where the group members are the intended victims.
• Fork recovery site: They say they will recover fork coins in your wallet (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Private, etc.) but they really just steal your bitcoins.
• Pay to withdraw earnings: If you must pay money to withdraw earnings from a gambling site, a faucet, an airdrop, or a bounty, you are being scammed.
• Cloud mining: Nearly every cloud mining site is a scam. The few that are "legit" are money-losers.

You absolutely pointed right thing. It's always happening around us. Scammer are finding new way to scam us. We need to be careful about save our hard work money. Because scammers are very smart more then us.

All advices in this thread are very useful, but there is one problem - most people are greedy. When they see "good" offer, they forget everything and all they see is $ or BTC. So, my advice is - don't be greedy and you will have less chances to be scammed.

great post, great information, and great advices for those who are new in this field and don't have enough knowledge about crypto...so my advice is to all before investing your mony any of project you should be very much careful and research very well about them for protecting your mony...good luck

Cryptocurrency is at the Wild West stage, and there are hackers/scammers/dodgy dudes all over the place trying to get their hands on your 'hard earned' money. Regulation, although not popular with many in the cryptosphere, should help combat this - although not eliminate it completely. Wherever there is big money to be made, the vultures will follow. It's not like any of these problems are exclusive to crypto, they exist in some form across the board. A saying that normally helps in the fiat world is 'If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is'. Problem with that when translated into crypto is that there is still plenty of genuine profit to be made, and if you avoided every project that promised the world, then you'd probably miss out on some huge profits. As mentioned above, do plenty of research, use cold wallets, keep your personal details to yourself and bottom line - don't get mugged.

As a rule any thing that look so good to be true must be thoroughly investigated before giving away your cash into it. For instant a ponzi scheme that promises a huge percentage which is unrealistic must be frown upon. 

One of the major security risks that I see with ICOs, and altcoins is that they require downloading some sort of software for their project. For example, for an altcoin this might be mining software. This could potentially have malware, and Bitcoin/account stealing software in it. Yet, people are willing to download it because of the promise of free coins or the prospect of huge profits.

I would recommend that whenever downloading software from an altcoin you either only download open source software which can be verified or only run it in a virtual machine.

Pump and dumps aren't scams but they are unethical. I believe they are even illegal in some countries(?). Solid article, though.

You should probably add:

HYIP schemes or websites giving returns that is too good to be true. You should mention about those airdrops too, they have known to be used for scamming in the past.

This is popular mistake of most of newbie, especially with gambling, faucet, captcha and paid to click sites. Pay to enable withdraw is a typically scam type, never deal with it.

This is great information and all the objects that scammers can hack into your personal wallet and steal your coins, ICO have been a measure way scammers and through ponzi  and trade. We have to be very carful now because scammers and hacker are out with what ever means.

That type of scam can happen in a gambling site where they give a coupon/promo code said you'll get $100 when used and ask you to deposit btc before you can withdraw. It also happen in a scam faucet where you feel happy and very lucky because you earn enough satoshi in their faucet but when you want to withdraw you'll need to deposit a minimum of $5 to receive your btc and more. Yes, it's true that it is the popular mistake that newbie experience. The question is, why does the site need you to deposit your money when the site said earn "FREE" btc per hour in faucet?, Free means you only get something without in return but in this case they ask you to deposit before you can withdraw the btc.

another new one that is growing at an alarming rate is "address cracking" meaning the attempt to find the private of an address. most of them are of course people who have not yet understood how cryptography works and how big a space they are in but there are cases where they have a code on GitHub that does that "search" but also has some backdoors and even malwares that does other things in the user's computer like searching for his bitcoin wallets and stealing them while the user foolishly runs the application hoping to find something that he is not going to find until the end of the universe.

Couple of days ago, I have seen 2 or 3 cases where victims claimed they sent BTC to their address but later they discovered the address was not the same as they copied and pasted.
It's a type of malware which changes copy/paste address and replace with the hackers address.

Example-  Beware from the malware (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5113729.msg49894839#msg49894839)

I think email address hacking and scamming should also be looked out for. Since most that we are required to provide an email address for one thing or the other on line so you can never tell how district some of the host are with your details so being wary of potential email address fraudsters is also advisable