Random token in your wallet with value? It may be a gas fee scam trap

[The Cryptovator]

I heard about a new type of scam, at least new to me. I am not sure if you are already familiar with this type of scam; I haven't noticed something similar on the forum. So I think it should share with the community in advance to avoid such scams.

First of all, a scammer will deploy a mintable token with a maximum 100% tax, including transfer tax in the main chain. Like if you transfer tokens in Binance Smart Chain, then you have to pay the $25 equivalent in BNB as transfer fees. This means when you are going to sell, that transfer tax will be applied. However, the scammer will organise a token sale somewhere in a decentralised launchpad. Then they will accumulate all the tokens from the launchpad. If someone bought during that time, never mind.

After the sale they will target some address where they have decent funds. Then it will add big liquidity on the Dex and enable trading. Then they will send tokens into targeted addresses, and they will trade them as well to generate volume. So when the token receiver sees he received a decent amount of tokens that are worth some dollars, then he might check where trading is and try to sell. During the sale he might notice the transfer fees, but he would think it's worth like $20K, never mind about the $25 equivalent BNB. After the sale he will get nothing since the scammer implemented a 100% tax.

If anyone isn't aware of how to check the tax of a token, then usually they will fall into that scam. So be aware if you receive something like these tokens that show a lot of value. You have to think first: why have you received that token when you haven't done anything? Consider it a red flag when you receive tokens that show value on the chain. Check the tax; it's not hard, and you may check on the appropriate explorer. Otherwise, you should learn.

End of the day, you lost your transfer tax and gas fees as well. Though amount small but scammer targets millions addresses.

[bitmover]

I heard about a new type of scam, at least new to me. I am not sure if you are already familiar with this type of scam; I haven't noticed something similar on the forum. So I think it should share with the community in advance to avoid such scams.

First of all, a scammer will deploy a mintable token with a maximum 100% tax, including transfer tax in the main chain. Like if you transfer tokens in Binance Smart Chain, then you have to pay the $25 equivalent in BNB as transfer fees. This means when you are going to sell, that transfer tax will be applied. However, the scammer will organise a token sale somewhere in a decentralised launchpad. Then they will accumulate all the tokens from the launchpad. If someone bought during that time, never mind.

After the sale they will target some address where they have decent funds. Then it will add big liquidity on the Dex and enable trading. Then they will send tokens into targeted addresses, and they will trade them as well to generate volume. So when the token receiver sees he received a decent amount of tokens that are worth some dollars, then he might check where trading is and try to sell. During the sale he might notice the transfer fees, but he would think it's worth like $20K, never mind about the $25 equivalent BNB. After the sale he will get nothing since the scammer implemented a 100% tax.

If anyone isn't aware of how to check the tax of a token, then usually they will fall into that scam. So be aware if you receive something like these tokens that show a lot of value. You have to think first: why have you received that token when you haven't done anything? Consider it a red flag when you receive tokens that show value on the chain. Check the tax; it's not hard, and you may check on the appropriate explorer. Otherwise, you should learn.

End of the day, you lost your transfer tax and gas fees as well. Though amount small but scammer targets millions addresses.

There are many tokens which just appear in my wallet which their name is a URL, such memescam.io, something like that. Which is clearly a phishing URL, and probably some people do access those URL and might even lose funds interacting with those websites.

There is no more free money in crypto. Those days are gone....

[Nwada001]

I was a victim of this back in 2022 or 2020; I can't recall correctly. What they did back then was just that there was no a transfer tax added to the token, but there was a high slippage set on PancakeSwap, where you need to have a specific amount of fee before you can swap. I first spent the fee gathering the token into 1 wallet, then I tried to swap it into BNB or the next pair, and I was told it could not go through. I had to increase the slippage up to 30% or more, and my fee of more than $5 was deducted the first time, and the transaction after a few minutes showed as unsuccessful. I had to try it a few more times until I ran out of gas. Only then did I remember to run a search and notice a few people were complaining on Reddit and Twitter, now known as X.

[Z_MBFM]

Various unknown coins sometimes come to the wallet. These are phishing. If you delve into them and try to transfer them or click on the links in them, your wallet may be hacked. Various hacker groups are doing these things in different ways. This is not a new phenomenon. It has been happening for a long time. When I scan my wallet, I see that there are many coins that I have never bought or worked for any of their projects from which I can get those coins. So I would advise you to just avoid them. These could be phishing or they could be scam projects that try to increase the number of holders of their coins by sending their coins to different random wallets.

[Zaguru12]

There are many tokens which just appear in my wallet which their name is a URL, such memescam.io, something like that. Which is clearly a phishing URL, and probably some people do access those URL and might even lose funds interacting with those websites.

There is no more free money in crypto. Those days are gone....

I think it’s all in the same category of what OP has said I can can categorically say that anyone who had actually has all this altcoin wallet or multi coin wallet and uses them regularly must have been a victim of this in the past, I have similar experience like Nwada001 but mine was actually with NFT, how naive I was I will say.

I was a victim of this back in 2022 or 2020; I can't recall correctly. What they did back then was just that there was no a transfer tax added to the token, but there was a high slippage set on PancakeSwap, where you need to have a specific amount of fee before you can swap. I first spent the fee gathering the token into 1 wallet, then I tried to swap it into BNB or the next pair, and I was told it could not go through. I had to increase the slippage up to 30% or more, and my fee of more than $5 was deducted the first time, and the transaction after a few minutes showed as unsuccessful. I had to try it a few more times until I ran out of gas. Only then did I remember to run a search and notice a few people were complaining on Reddit and Twitter, now known as X.

This was a popular scam back then, I think what OP just describes right now is advancement of this scam which is the scammer doesn’t have to wait for you to actually do it repeatedly as what he gathers is from the gas fee. I think this new scam takes everything at a go because of 100% tax embedded.

[Amphenomenon]

I was a victim of this back in 2022 or 2020; I can't recall correctly. What they did back then was just that there was no a transfer tax added to the token, but there was a high slippage set on PancakeSwap, where you need to have a specific amount of fee before you can swap. I first spent the fee gathering the token into 1 wallet, then I tried to swap it into BNB or the next pair, and I was told it could not go through. I had to increase the slippage up to 30% or more, and my fee of more than $5 was deducted the first time, and the transaction after a few minutes showed as unsuccessful. I had to try it a few more times until I ran out of gas. Only then did I remember to run a search and notice a few people were complaining on Reddit and Twitter, now known as X.

This was a popular scam back then, I think what OP just describes right now is advancement of this scam which is the scammer doesn’t have to wait for you to actually do it repeatedly as what he gathers is from the gas fee. I think this new scam takes everything at a go because of 100% tax embedded.

All these are honey pot scams but updated after all scammers ard innovators and so one have to always be cautious of everything.
Anything too good to be true is not, we shouldn't forget that.

I will try to do more research on this and also how to check tax rate on tokens, as scammers improve we also have to be ahead, this is a way to stay safe and not get your funds stolen or lost.

[Coyster]

I am more familiar with dust attacks and address poisoning scams. Though i believe this scam also falls under the same category, as the scammers unsolicitedly send funds into your address with the intention of scamming you based on the particular modus operandi in use.

The easy solution to this is when you receive random amounts in your account, take it that it's either someone trying to scam you or attack your privacy (as in dust attacks), and then act accordingly. I don't know how many of these altcoin wallets work because i hardly use them, but if it is bitcoin, you can use coin control to easily address this attack.

[Hyphen(-)]

End of the day, you lost your transfer tax and gas fees as well. Though amount small but scammer targets millions addresses.

I do see it in my BSC wallets when I use BSCscan to check the wallet, I will see a lot of coins in the wallet that I know nothing about, some of them are valueless, while some do have some value, but when you attempt swapping them for stable coin or BNB or maybe ETH if it is in Etherum chain, they usually demand high slippage which will request for high fee and the coins will end up becoming useless since you will waste gas’s fee and have no relevant value to sell. When I noticed that, I stopped paying attention to the coins, but I do always wonder how they get into my wallets?

[Sticky Bomb]

If anyone isn't aware of how to check the tax of a token, then usually they will fall into that scam. So be aware if you receive something like these tokens that show a lot of value. You have to think first: why have you received that token when you haven't done anything? Consider it a red flag when you receive tokens that show value on the chain. Check the tax; it's not hard, and you may check on the appropriate explorer. Otherwise, you should learn.

End of the day, you lost your transfer tax and gas fees as well. Though amount small but scammer targets millions addresses.

Similar things happened to us in 2024 during the upsurge of telegram tapping games, we obtained requested TON gas fees to even send the tokens to our TON wallet, but it couldn't even go through and we kept seeing unsuccessful until our gas fee finished, we tried more than once before it was obvious to us that we have been scammed and we stopped. They were busy collecting our gas fee and never depositing our tokens to the wallet.

I'm very much interested in knowing how to check the tax value of tokens, do you have some useful explorers when we can check it to share? I would really appreciate that.

[BitMaxz]

Scammers are always coming up with new ways to scam people. I have many tokens on my addresses for BNB and Ethereum, almost all of which I believe are a trap; they spend pennies and then randomly send these useless tokens to make money. My friend was already a victim of this tactic; he was attempting to exchange those random tokens to the DEX exchange, and the fee ate up all of his BNB funds simply by transferring this random token.
That is why we must avoid attracting tokens that we believe to be of high value because sending them will result in the loss of all of our ETH or BNB.

My question is, how did they find my address if I hadn't posted it anywhere? It appears that some free airdrops that I recently joined are sharing or selling my address to scammers.

[hosemary]

My question is, how did they find my address if I hadn't posted it anywhere? It appears that some free airdrops that I recently joined are sharing or selling my address to scammers.

To send you those tokens, they don't need you to post your address somewhere or someone to share it with them.
As you know the blockchain is public and all used addresses are available. So, all they need to do is pick random addresses from the blockchain.

[AVE5]

End of the day, you lost your transfer tax and gas fees as well. Though amount small but scammer targets millions addresses.

Oh, so the token is basically where the scam is projected while the extortion of the scammer comes from the gas and transaction fees?
That is a very well clean strategy to catch targets of which most people would will fall victim to this scheme must be those who think they could earn from where they did not invest on. Maybe while they may think they are smart, they wouldn't know who's behind the scenes is smarter. Probably may realize themselves after being victimized for their greeds or expectations to acquire the token when they did not work their ass out for it.
Thanks for sharing as I'm just learning this recently.

[BitMaxz]

My question is, how did they find my address if I hadn't posted it anywhere? It appears that some free airdrops that I recently joined are sharing or selling my address to scammers.

To send you those tokens, they don't need you to post your address somewhere or someone to share it with them.
As you know the blockchain is public and all used addresses are available. So, all they need to do is pick random addresses from the blockchain.

Yeah, I agree, but since my last transaction was a long time ago and it must be buried by many transactions, how did they easily spot my receiving address?

They can't simply go to block explorer and see my address on the front page because the majority of the addresses displayed on the front page are usually addresses corresponding with recently created transactions. So the chances of finding my address are very slim compared to other addresses on the front page.

My address is buried; they can just pick it randomly. So, at the moment, I believe that free airdrops are also sharing my receiving address with scammers.

[rat03gopoh]

If anyone isn't aware of how to check the tax of a token, then usually they will fall into that scam.

This is quite new to me.
You mean, are transaction tax charges hidden in such a way that they won't display properly in the wallet or exchanger UI?

Fortunately, I mostly use a disposable web3 wallet and have never had funds sitting there for more than 3 months.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.

[YellowSwap]

I think this is new, I've never read about this before, but it is similar to one old trick years ago.

I was sadly once a victim, anyone remember 4shared? One old cloud storage platform like that, many old Bitcoin miners stored their recovery seed in this cloud storage.

Few are real and most are scams, because some people started uploading bad ones on the platform, so a friend talked me into this that free wallets are in 4shared, stupid me went on there and downloaded zip file, extracted it and I had a recovery seed.

It has some tokens, valuable ones so I need ETH to move them out, tried it and the ETH kept sending out to another wallet, then I quit it, it doesn't worth much but at least I knew about scams this way.

[The Cryptovator]

Scammers are always coming up with new ways to scam people. I have many tokens on my addresses for BNB and Ethereum, almost all of which I believe are a trap; they spend pennies and then randomly send these useless tokens to make money. My friend was already a victim of this tactic; he was attempting to exchange those random tokens to the DEX exchange, and the fee ate up all of his BNB funds simply by transferring this random token.
That is why we must avoid attracting tokens that we believe to be of high value because sending them will result in the loss of all of our ETH or BNB.

You know very well how scammers are smart, but a lot of newbies don't know and they might fall into this trap. Even I have received tokens into my hardware wallet that shown value and the value was decent amount. I never tried to sale or touch them. After few days I noticed these token price become zero.

My question is, how did they find my address if I hadn't posted it anywhere? It appears that some free airdrops that I recently joined are sharing or selling my address to scammers.

It's not hard for scammers, you are care about your privacy but most of the people aren't. For example if you check Dex launchpad then easily you may notice who contributed how much. Easily you may scrap address from there and send tokens. Those participate into launchpad means they have funds into their wallet or whoever trade into Dex they have funds as well. It's not hard to find them you know.

[Catenaccio]

I heard about a new type of scam, at least new to me. I am not sure if you are already familiar with this type of scam; I haven't noticed something similar on the forum. So I think it should share with the community in advance to avoid such scams.

It's honeypot scam and there are many guides about this scam, but people only need to be careful to avoid this scam. They must avoid to be too greedy, too careless, then they will be well.

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