Kraken warns about scams using fake identities as member of their team

[btc_angela]

Kraken issues warning to community communities about some bad actors posing as part of their token team to scam crypto investors.



https://twitter.com/krakenfx/status/1317148302702411777

Alert: Token Teams Are Being Targeted By Fake Kraken Employees

Kraken has identified an active scam targeting the cryptocurrency community in which malicious actors are using fake identities to pose as members of our token listing team.

Cryptocurrency teams that use LinkedIn and Telegram should be on high alert, as these efforts appear to be targeting users of these social networks.

https://blog.kraken.com/post/6576/alert-token-teams-are-being-targeted-by-fake-kraken-employees/

So this criminals are using LinkedIn and Telegram to lure potential victims, so be on the watch out. So if you received from either those two social platforms with Kraken as subject or supposedly emails coming from Kraken, please ignore and delete it immediately.

[Darker45]

This is not new. Telegram is full of fake personalities offering listing to coins and tokens, even the shittiest of them. The team and the developers themselves should be wise enough to know that the offer is fake since theirs is a shitcoin and it is contrary to logic that a reputable exchange as Kraken would make the first move for their listing, and through social media such as Telegram. That itself is questionable.

Just less than two weeks ago, there was also someone posting about a supposed Livecoin staff also offering exchange listing through Telegram to a certain token. The team fell for it and lost some money. The accusation was that a staff of the exchange was the culprit. But I guess they fell to the same modus operandi.

[Yogee]

..... So if you received from either those two social platforms with Kraken as subject or supposedly emails coming from Kraken, please ignore and delete it immediately.

I'm not a developer or part of any team selling tokens and I don't think beginners in cryptocurrency would be too. What are the chances that we would get email from fake Kraken employees and offer us Token listing?

My point is the topic doesn't belong in Beginners & Help.

[akirasendo17]

until now this is what scammers do, pretend to be a member of a certain team

Their tactics and scheme you should be aware of:

1. Send a personal message through email or telegram
    note: members of certain projects never send a personal message, remember that a legit company will reply via their official page or support
2. Offer a low cost deal or pretends will help you with issues pertaining to the company
3. send an email with a fake email
    note: always check the header of the email to be sure or just never click anything they sent
4. always ask if they have a group and make sure you are talking with the real admin.

This are some of what these people do, scammers always finds a way so be very careful

[Bitcoin_bullish]

I don't know if this is related but there was an incident with Kraken earlier in the year.

There had been a leak of private information of Kraken customers after a server used by a firm called Etana Custody was hacked back in April. Etana is a company that Kraken and other exchanges as Binance use to outsource some of the management of the fiat accounts.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/users-funds-are-safe-following-reported-etana-custody-breach

While funds are reportedly safe, the firm notes that users’ personally identifying information including names, email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers may have been compromised.

I remember that this incident wasn't discussed at all back in that day.
The leak was probably sold to scammers, so maybe they will try to reach some people, and sometimes some weird phone calls can happen from foreign countries or IP numbers. Even if Kraken didn't have your phone numbers these can be found so be careful.

[Baofeng]

Thanks for this, it's just validated what I share here last August, Lazarus Group campaign targeting crypto thru LinkedIn, same attack vector but different ways to attract potential victims.

[hulla]

This has been the strategy used by crypto scammer whenever an exchange site implemented innovative features which may divert the attention of many crypto trader/investors to an exchange, it happens to Binance after the crypto community was aware of the benefits of exchange SAFU and I believe the reason Kraken was used now is because the Bank Charter approval they won.

[jossiel]

It's like every single legit exchange have copy cats.

They tend to play the real exchange's staff and will offer help for those traders/users that have withdrawal issues. And with this modus, they are targeting bigger fish that would want to list their tokens on Kraken.

They are leveling up their targets.

Thanks for this op.

[Yaunfitda]

And since their token listing team is listed on LinkedIn, it's easy to used their names and then targets crypto users, yes, they are leveling up and really evolving on using every means, sort of social engineer.

@akirasendo17 have laid down the potential steps on this criminals, specially using sort of *kraken* in their email spoofing and this is really dangerous for noobs or just starting their journey here and this might look very legit in their eyes.

[OcTradism]

Scammers use fake identities to impersonate real people and scam investors. Investors don't do double check will be scammed. Real crypto developers will know how and where they can find forms to send listing requests and I don't think they will easily to be scammed by the impersonators.

For investors, the most common scam types they touch on is invest into scam projects, scam tokens. Scam projects try to make their scam tokens as most similar as real tokens as possible and if investors don't do double checks on token ticker and smart contract address, they will spend money for scam token.

[jseverson]

To clarify, this specifically targets teams who create tokens and somehow scams them regarding listing their projects. Regular folk shouldn't be affected. Still though, there is a lesson to be learned from this. From Kraken's blogpost, if you didn't want to open it:

To protect yourself and your business against Punycode phishing: we recommend adding filters to check the header on inbound emails for “xn--“. Our security team advises you quarantine these messages by default, review them regularly and add exceptions for any legitimate domains you communicate with.