Bitcoin Forum

I am in many airdrops group in telegram. In one of the group I saw one person sent his private key in the group. I thought to check that private key and it turns out that it contains $178k worth of ICX tokens. It has no ETH to pay for gas fees, so I too think of sending some ETH to cover for GAS and withdrawing those ICX tokens. But then I thought of it for a second that it's too good to be true and started searching on google. And I find out that it's another kind of scam currently running. As soon as you transfer the ETH, it will get transferred to another address, way before you could try to withdraw those ICX tokens.

Bascially these steps :
1. Guy posts his MEW private key in a chat.
2. $100+k worth of tokens (ICX, MNE, etc) in it, no ETH for gas.
3. Many people in the chat send gas to take it.
4. Smart contract. Auto-sends theETH to another address; keeping tokens in the same account.

These scammers are getting cunning by each passing day.

More about this you can read here - https://bitfalls.com/2018/04/13/creative-new-scam-honeypot-private-key/
For technical part of how it's done and why you'll never able to withdraw tokens, read this - https://hackernoon.com/the-sneakiest-ethereum-scam-ever-6dc138061235


Be safe guys, and remember if it's too good to be true, it probably is. Stay away from these dreams. Always think twice :)

Sneaky indeed. However, if one uses their common sense then it's quite obvious that nobody sane would ever post an address that is full of tokens into a public environment, without knowing that they would be able to profit from it and recoup all of their starting balances.

A similar scam is done on the XCP network, where an amount of counterparty tokens are in an address, and there is no btc to pay the mining fees. But if you send the BTC, it'll get instantly withdrawn.

It's a cunning scam for sure, and it can definitely affect some newbies who have no experience with cryptos in general.

Thanks for educating the community about this, OP.

I think more than newbies, little bit of experienced persons will fall for this as they have enough experience to deal with private keys and try to take advantage of it. I'll be lying if I say that I didn't try to take all those tokens out :D, but seeing no ethereum and seeing the transactions happened in it alerted me. Then only I decided to do some search for it and find out about it. Wasn't aware of the XCP network scam you've mentioned.

You were trying to steal tokens and then you complain that its a scam?

Thieves deserved to get scammed.

Thank you for the heads up.

These more complex scams can really get newbies. This has already been done on the forum, with a well known scammer (can't remember his name) posting a honeypot private key and told people to send coins to the address as transaction fees in order to withdraw tokens within it.

Obviously, this is never going to work. The scammer has everything planned out and whatever you send to the address is lost.


I don't think OP tried to steal anything. he said he did his research and found that it's a scam.

One doesn't needs to know about this except one who always try to steal coins/tokens from the address that they don't own (not in the case of newbies)

Another example is ganache's address. A good way to give a lesson to those trying stealing coins.

See smartness in an odd form... Thanks for sharing this info