Are you safe? Think again and be safe. [For newbies]

[tjtonmoy]

I was checking messages on my telegram yesterday when I came across this message from a guy. A screenshot is available below.

Click on Image to see in full Resolution

There are several phrase keys for wallets that as shown in the image has a lot of tokens that worth so much. Or rather, what they want for you to believe. Those are fake tokens or fake images.

This is surely from a scammer trying to scam people. I know because I faced these before. But for newbies! What would they do? Everyone has greed, some can control it and others get wind up in these situations where their greed takes over their judgement.

Let's just say you got greedy and tried to get those moneys for yourself. You will import those key into your wallet right? Wait, hold on just a minute! Never do that.

There are going to be 2 scenarios that will happen to you.

1. when you import that wallet, you will see huge amount of USDT or some tokens in that. But when you try to transfer them, you are shown that you need a small amount of fee to make that transfer. So what comes to your mind? It's such a small price to pay for a huge amount of free money, right?
This is where the thing happens. You see, that wallet is already connected to a bot. So any amount you send to that wallet will immediately get transferred to the scammer's account. You mat think that it was a mistake. So in order to make that right, you will send more in to that wallet thus loosing more. That's how these scammers operate.

2. Then comes the second scenario. In this scenario, if you import these wallets within your existing wallet, then that will also get effected. The bot will take control over your existing wallet too. And if you don't completely remove that from your PC/phone it will continue to happen no matter how many wallets you create.

Also you need to stay away from those suspicious airdrops or offers that requires for you to connect your wallet to do it. That way they can get your wallet's access too.

Not your key, not your coins. Well as true as it is, if you are not careful enough and unable to control your greed. You are most likely to fall into these traps easily.

So keep your assets safe, avoid these kinds of messages or offers. Remember there's no such thing as "free money".

Also, available in Bengali language : Here

Edit: Here are more details provided by Charles-Tim

To be precise, the one I noticed is for USDT on Tron blockchain, but people must be very sensitive to avoid this type of scam because there can be other ways too, maybe like using automated bot to send the coin to another (but an attack's) address.

As for the USDT on Tron blockchain, we have discussed this on this forum before very well when the scam was very new and common, we later found out that it is possible to use USDT on Tron blockchain in a way that the Tron wallet is having two seed phrase (or private keys)

The first seed phrase can be used for the recovery of the wallet
The second seed phrase can be used as a watch-only wallet and can not be used for spending the coin, but can be used to see the wallet balance and addresses.

Because of this, the attackers only send the watch-only wallet seed phrase to the victim and keep the seed phrase that he can use to spend the coins to himself. If the victim sees it, he can import the seed phrase or check on blockchain explorer to find out that there is huge amount of money on the wallet and he can import it. He needs tron for the fee to move to USDT from the wallet, but the wallet will have no Tron. Because of that, the victim will send Tron to the wallet inorder to spend the USDT but not able to. The Tron sent can be spent by the attacker.

I have included this here as this information is new to me too. Hope you(Charles-Tim)don't mind. If there's any issue, let me know. I will remove it.

_tjtonmoy

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[Charles-Tim]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441409.msg61826811#msg61826811

[Questat]

There are several phrase keys for wallets that as shown in the image has a lot of tokens that worth so much. Or rather, what they want for you to believe. Those are fake tokens or fake images.

This is surely from a scammer trying to scam people. I know because I faced these before. But for newbies! What would they do? Everyone has greed, some can control it and others get wind up in these situations where their greed takes over their judgement.

Let's just say you got greedy and tried to get those moneys for yourself. You will import those key into your wallet right? Wait, hold on just a minute! Never do that.

It was too easy for now on the internet and many applications to use to fake up information and even look legit. Scammers had always done this to encourage readers/viewers to invest with them and actually got some victims. Well, if you are greedy for money, you can really think it was an opportunity but unfortunately, this will also cost you from your losing your hard-earned money into the hands of scammers. In fact, it happens countless times and if this still happens to us, it is our fault already not these scammers.

[Hispo]

I have seen these kind of scams before, in particular in the form of some scammer posing as a newbie in Telegram groups asking for help and purposely exposing their seed phrase with a lot of Tether, hoping to steal people's Ether. I even saw that happening here in the forum once.

As a general recommendation to anyone: just avoid talking to random people on Telegram and do not accept "help" or provide "help" to anyone, do not download any file and disable the automatic download in settings.

[arwin100]

I have seen these kind of scams before, in particular in the form of some scammer posing as a newbie in Telegram groups asking for help and purposely exposing their seed phrase with a lot of Tether, hoping to steal people's Ether. I even saw that happening here in the forum once.

As a general recommendation to anyone: just avoid talking to random people on Telegram and do not accept "help" or provide "help" to anyone, do not download any file and disable the automatic download in settings.

Correct we need not to trust anyone online because random people can do unwanted thing to us so we need to focus on our own circle since maybe from this we can be safe and away from those scammers. If we want to expand then maybe at least we should do proper scanning and see what they are showing to us also most important thing that never download anything they share or you see online because this can create problems to us.

[sheenshane]

As a general recommendation to anyone: just avoid talking to random people on Telegram and do not accept "help" or provide "help" to anyone, do not download any file and disable the automatic download in settings.

I tend to agree with this, I heard many reports that have been scammed through Telegram.
It might be unfair to say that Telegram is exclusively a "house of scammers" but it seems scammers have also found ways to use Telegram to carry out their activities.  They may create fake accounts, join groups, or send unsolicited messages to unsuspecting users to lure them into fraudulent schemes.  So yeah, avoid dealing with stranger people on Telegram and avoid opening unsolicited messages that possibly contains files that can attackers easily gain access to your device.

[drwhobox]

I have seen these kind of scams before, in particular in the form of some scammer posing as a newbie in Telegram groups asking for help and purposely exposing their seed phrase with a lot of Tether, hoping to steal people's Ether. I even saw that happening here in the forum once.

As a general recommendation to anyone: just avoid talking to random people on Telegram and do not accept "help" or provide "help" to anyone, do not download any file and disable the automatic download in settings.

I see a lot of newbies fall into these scam traps. They can just ignore the message and report the contact/text. Telegram scammers are legends in finding newbies, and they always target newbies for their scam offerings.

Even I got some texts from these scammers, while my telegram account is almost 5 years old but I played with some of them and waste their time on me. I make them so excited pretending I am falling for their offer but later they find out I was toying with them.

[NicNacCoin]

Fraudsters can attack anyone at any time, but what happened to you can happen to me at any time. Your method is one of many methods fraudsters use specifically to get hold of wallet information. I make everyone aware that you should never share your wallet password/private key/seed Phases with anyone. Do not connect your wallet to any phishing website, remember that fraudsters can use any method to trap you.

Not your key, not your coins

This valuable information is an important slogan, it is a warning to all of you. Fraudsters can't access our wallet as long as we keep your/my wallet key. That is, our wealth will be reserved for us.

[LDL]

Hackers/Scammers are always targeting you, especially to take control of online/offline wallets, they can lure you through email, sms, phone calls and take access to your wallet. The Trezor hardware wallet uses the exact same method that hackers use to trap you/get access to wallets. They (Scammers/Hackers) will tell you about wallet maintenance through email or phone call to reconnect your wallet with private phase/back up phase of your wallet, in that case if you work according to the instructions of hackers, hackers will definitely take access to your wallet. In that case you should speak directly to the support or maintenance team.

Two well-known users of the forum have already posted public awareness about the same incident as you, you can read their posts if you wish.


@Pmalek post about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441593.msg61832716#msg61832716

@Ddmrddmr's post about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441593.msg61832851#msg61832851

[joniboini]

2. Then comes the second scenario. In this scenario, if you import these wallets within your existing wallet, then that will also get effected. The bot will take control over your existing wallet too. And if you don't completely remove that from your PC/phone it will continue to happen no matter how many wallets you create.

I'm not sure I get this, how are they controlling your other wallets if the seeds are different? Are you saying they inject a payload in the seeds/wallet file that exposes other wallets' seeds? Or, are you referring to other addresses (on other chains) managed by seeds shared by those scammers? I'm not aware of any seeds or wallet file hack who can do the former.

That being said, downloading a wallet file from some random guy on the internet is never a good idea. It can be malware, a keylogger, or something else. As long as people use their common sense they should be able to avoid this.

[HajiBagi]

I have seen these kind of scams before, in particular in the form of some scammer posing as a newbie in Telegram groups asking for help and purposely exposing their seed phrase with a lot of Tether, hoping to steal people's Ether. I even saw that happening here in the forum once.

As a general recommendation to anyone: just avoid talking to random people on Telegram and do not accept "help" or provide "help" to anyone, do not download any file and disable the automatic download in settings.

Many people got scammers from Telegram and talking and chatting with random people, and these scammers are capable of doing anything to ensure they get into your wallet and have access to what you have been working so hard to build yourself with.

The most important thing to avoid this is to stop being greedy towards anything, as greedy leads people to regret in the end, these con artists come with advice to persuade people through mention of how to get rich fast to make people feel greedy and fall into their traps.

[laurenB7742]

I have seen these kind of scams before, in particular in the form of some scammer posing as a newbie in Telegram groups asking for help and purposely exposing their seed phrase with a lot of Tether, hoping to steal people's Ether. I even saw that happening here in the forum once.

As a general recommendation to anyone: just avoid talking to random people on Telegram and do not accept "help" or provide "help" to anyone, do not download any file and disable the automatic download in settings.

I see a lot of newbies fall into these scam traps. They can just ignore the message and report the contact/text. Telegram scammers are legends in finding newbies, and they always target newbies for their scam offerings.

Even I got some texts from these scammers, while my telegram account is almost 5 years old but I played with some of them and waste their time on me. I make them so excited pretending I am falling for their offer but later they find out I was toying with them.

It can be said that this form of scam is no longer strange to us and those with experience in the market. Only newbies fall into this trap because they not only have no knowledge but also greedily want to appropriate others for their own. As for me, those who send me messages on telegram but not friends, I don't want to see what it is, I delete and block it immediately. Even if they don't send us crap, they will invite us to invest in junk projects and really waste our time talking to them.

[Cantsay]

I have experienced the first scenario before but both on telegram and Twitter. I received a message from a strange user asking me if I could help them complete a transaction that they were new to the crypto space and so don't know how to make a transaction after which they sent me the secret phrase of their wallet and when I import the wallet I saw the balance it was up to ~$250 on Tron network but there was no enough Tron to cover the transaction fee but when I ask them to add some fee to complete they refused claiming that they still don't know how to go about it but according the the wallet the last trk that was sent to the wallet was less than 2 hrs ago and all of them were being moved to the same wallet almost immediately and luckily for me some Trons were sent to the wallet while I was still logged in probably from another victim and immediately got moved to the address as before that was when I knew it was all a trap. And when I came to bitcointalk I also saw a thread about how the scam works.

[tjtonmoy]

I'm not sure I get this, how are they controlling your other wallets if the seeds are different? Are you saying they inject a payload in the seeds/wallet file that exposes other wallets' seeds? Or, are you referring to other addresses (on other chains) managed by seeds shared by those scammers? I'm not aware of any seeds or wallet file hack who can do the former.

I myself not sure about how they do it. If you import it with your existing wallet, same thing happens with all the wallet you have connected to that wallet. Some kind of attack that reveals your seeds to the scammers. It will also do the same thing on other chains, yes. And all the other wallets too. I did some airdrop back in 2021 and my wallet was hacked, so I created a new one on my phone. It was okay until I imported it along with my hacked wallet on my pc. Not sure how that works. Scammers somehow can access your extension/wallet, thus having control over all of them.

@Pmalek post about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441593.msg61832716#msg61832716

@Ddmrddmr's post about it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441593.msg61832851#msg61832851

I think those two are different from what I shared, but it's still a scam, so thanks for including this here. Don't know why the scammers are so active suddenly. Makes me think what could be the reason. Did the scammers got scammed themselves?