The article is a little long but covers almost all the types of Scams running in the space. I advice you to go through all of it in order to gain little exposure to the dark side of this world and learn from the experience of others. These are just a few of many incidences that we face almost daily and we are compiling them at one place to help anyone that ever comes across this article.
Who hasn't faced them. Who wasn't blocked by some Instagram /Twitter promotion page or influencer after you sent ETH/BUSD/USDT to their wallet. Feeling so frustrated, tensed, angry and what not. These things are faces especially by smaller projects/artists and also by those who are comparatively newer to the space.
Then there comes the problem of rug-pull projects. There is no standardized process to understand, evaluate and identify such projects as the NFT space is still in the pre Big-Bang space.
Many of us don't know what to look for in a project and depend on information we can gather from the community and all the hype around a project but the MOST important thing in this space is RESEARCH. Here we'll list out all the ways you can be defrauded, all the ways we were tried to be scammed, red flags in a conversation/project/person, how to verify authenticity and how to proceed.
Let's start!
We have been approached by scammers a lot of times but we suffered actual monetary loss twice, once on Instagram and once on Twitter. One was from a promotional page and the other, from a "well known renowned" NFT Influencer. Other than that, we have received a lot of scam messages on Instagram, Twitter, Discord and Email which were attempts ranging from
See for yourself, what they look like.
The end result will be the same, after the payment they'll block you. What differs is, how deep they weave the net to lure you in. For promotional pages on Instagram, they'll just send you a text about rates, negotiate a bit, there rates are usually low so no one minds betting on that they might actually do it. Then there are those individual accounts which text you to promote your work on pages, they'll comment under your post, send you a DM and even follow you. Then come the influencers, They are the worst. They weave the deepest and strongest web to lure you in and make it sound so legitimate and trustworthy that you almost every time fall for it.
!! 99.99% of them are Fraud !!
The most ideal approach right now is to follow the motto : “Guilty until Proven Innocent“
The Epic NFT Influencer “NFTAddict” Caught in the Act on Twitter. Watch the Video here.
We got scammed by NftAddict_31 on twitter for 0.145 $ETH and then caught him on record red handed trying to do the same thing again for 0.5 $ETH. He has been doing it since a long time and has accomplices too.
He claims to be the owner of punk #7107 and Meka#2475.
Culprit :
He says that he is followed by @garyvee and @PostMalone. This generates a sense of authenticity as these are well respected people in the NFT world and them following him means something. In our case, He was also followed by @bigger, @JDaIey and a few more verified profiles. @bigger and @JDaIey follow us too along with other verified profiles. (We are not saying they are a part of his scam, We intend to say that He is using their name to get away with scams. These are well respected people by the community and us.) We go ahead to show the chats we had and the accounts he uses and the projects he claims he has served in path (they are verified projects on opensea.) and how he blocks us after the payment.
We use our friend's ID on twitter (Which now we own) and sent him a follow request to which he follows us back and initiates the conversation again. We make him think that we are a non native English speaker and excited about his offering and that we have a budget of 1 $ETH. He moves ahead with the same promises, words and strategies and asks us for 0.5 ETH (Remember he asked us for 0.145 ETH). He claims that he will put in the same money into buying our NFTs on minting day. That shows he didn't read about us as the profile doesn't sell NFTs it just airdrops them to anyone and everyone free of cost. HE EVEN CLAIMED HE TALKS TO GARY VEE AND HE COULD CONNECT US WITH HIM. He took our bait and when we finally confronted him, He blocked us again.
This could have been you getting scammed. This is a lot of us who got scammed and these people think they can get away with anything. Well not this time, we have him and let's show him what it means to mess with one of the strongest communities in the world right now. So that every scammer is afraid to bones before trying scam.
These are the addresses he uses : 0x9ee9a8d76CD828Ed14Cbfc5ad8b4a6789ce3419C 0x5811603405403ded128b944387e2c7244d0b3b52https://opensea.io/Jas2222And we believe he impersonates that he is : https://opensea.io/Jas225 (Who is the original owner of punks and meka)
Checkout the video
Crypto Jacking / Trojan Virus attempt via mail and Twitter. They'll disguise as a company/representative and offer you somewhere around 1000-5000 bucks. Then they'll send a file which is from dropbox/google drive/any other cloud file hosting site.
The file will be a rar file (compressed file) and contain mostly a file ending with .scr
Always ask for documents in their original form (jpeg, png, svg, pdf etc)
Spoofing attempt via discord. They are exceptionally good at conversations and convincing you they really care, they'll even send you email to verify but never on twitter or instagram because they don't have access to the official ID. They use some third party services which mask the email address and If you view it on a mobile device you’ll see only the authentic email ID but that’s spoofed. Always ask them to communicate via the official Social Network channels and not Email.
Another type of Scams are the phishing emails where the sender claims to be an authentic business and send links for updates and claims but in reality those links will either drain your wallet or hack your account. Stay aware of them.
Here's a checklist of what you should consider before moving forward with any transaction on any platform regarding NFTs.
The reason Blockchain is so popular and a revolutionary base technology is because it removes the need for trust. Trustless environment is its biggest USP. So Never trust anyone and only trust the data. These are the pre big bang stage for NFTs and other blockchain products.
I always heard about rug pull projects, saw a few on OpenSea but never experienced it live until 2 Feb 2022. This project was AstroFriends.
I joined them a day before launch and was impressed by the way the founders were interacting with the community. The community itself was great. Met a lot of lovely people there. I was immediately invested into them and the artwork + roadmap looked sick. I was impressed. I started interacting, giving feedback and advice and in no time, I was a community favorite because of the knowledge and insights I provided not just to the founders but the people too. I was directly talking to the founders after 8-10 hours. I even got on the whitelist. Then it happened.
First 🚩. 10 minutes before the Minting process, they announced that they would close the general chat channel and every other channel.
Second 🚩. Then they forgot to close one channel where I got in and started asking questions. I also noticed a discrepancy in the total number of users, WL and actual people there. Then they announced the minting page on general chat, not in the announcements or minting info channel.
Third 🚩. The minting site link, it should have been mint.astrofriends.io (sub domain) but it was, astrofriends-mint.com.
Fourth 🚩. I visited the Twitter handles and Instagram handles of founders on their website and texted them, turned out, that was also fake, the identity they gave was someone else. I talked to the man and he said he was approached by them to change his username and tweet a little about AstroFriends which he refused.
Thankfully, No one minted significantly and the project was a flop because they did a small mistake that they closed the general tab. But if they didn't, they would have been successful in scamming about 5000 people and more which is scary as hell. That's how I witnessed a rugpull project.
You have to be vigilant, careful and always attentive to detail. If something feels off, It most probably is.
Stay Safe and Stay Vigilant.
Have a safe trip in the ever evolving world of Blockchain.