We all love crypto because it’s an explosive growth industry, money maker, unregulated, transparent, and has a lot of fun and swag! But what do we receive for being transparent and innovative? Crypto criminals.
Today, very few are immune to scams and attacks in the crypto space, mostly because we live in a world where new technologies are coming day-by-day, nonstop and, even when it brings us a lot of benefits, also high risks that requires good security and understanding.
We brought today a simple but important list of how you can get easily scammed. Take a moment to read this so you can be aware of the threats and be cautious.
- IDO (Initial Dex Offering): As we have explained before, An IDO is a crypto token offering run on DEX. IDO’s are appealing to users as they enable them to buy tokens at the launch. However, IDOs carry risks of their smart contracts being exploited or containing bugs that may affect user deposits or withdrawable tokens.
Like what happened with PlexCoin (https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/sec-freezes-plexcorps-cryptocurrency-ico-fund-raising-scam/), where they promised a +1300% return in one month! Investors put large amounts of money in a FAKE cryptocurrency and then, on December 4th the SEC froze PlexCorp’s assets and brought charges against their founders.
- Rug-Pull: This is the next major cryptocurrency scam played out in the market. It is a price manipulation that creates short term bubbles, featuring dramatic increases in price, volume, and volatility. It happens when a “developer” launches a new crypto project that promises many benefits. Then, when the cryptocurrency has gained sufficient funds, the investors are stolen away of their money because the developer sold out the token and disappeared.
- Phishing scams: This is a very old way to scam people. Is simply send an email to the investors to a specially created website that asks them to enter private key information, once they got the personal info, poof! Your money is gone.
- Social media scams: There wouldn’t be a strong project without a big community behind it. Most of the cryptocurrency communities are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Discord, and most likely is going to keep growing.
That’s why a lot of scammers position themselves as crypto investors or influencers, to show you they have a lot of followers, so they are very trustworthy! The most common frauds are made by crazy airdrops or asking you to invest money with them to gain high returns. They are 100% trying to scam you, no one will ever come to your DM’s to promise you that you will earn lots of dollars in a short period of time. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
We hope this list has educated you against some of the most popular risks you can find in crypto, but as we said before, the new technologies are growing and the threats with it as well. Don’t forget you can always protect your investments with us, we offer you a list of more than 130 protocols that are now listed in our dApp and you can easily buy coverage for them: app.insurace.io
Let’s make crypto a safer place together!