The most common scams with cryptocurrencies: how to protect yourself to avoid them

On By Garmin Philip

The world of cryptocurrencies has continued to expand despite its market volatility. More and more people decide to invest in digital assets, which in turn gives more possibilities for scams to emerge that try to take advantage of the ignorance of more than one.

Falling into the traps of these scammers is easier than you think. The enormous number of hoaxes that exist in the networks, the great media pull that cryptocurrencies have experienced or their volatility in the market, favor those who want to take advantage of others.

Then we leave you the most common scams that have been detected in recent years.

Pyramid scams. The Ponzi Scheme

This is a type of investment scam where victims are tricked into to invest in a non-existent project or in a get-rich-quick scheme, in which the only one who gets rich is the scammer himself.

Brought to cryptocurrencies, investors and the general public are attracted by claiming that there is cutting-edge technology and with the idea that we have of cryptocurrencies equals wealth, people fall for it.

Pump and Dump. Inflar el valor

With this system, the scammer encourages you to invest by buying a specific cryptocurrency, normally little known, stating that its price is going to skyrocket soon.

With the entry of more demand, the value is inflated (pump) and the scammer takes the opportunity to sell (dump), with a great profit, without anything having really happened to justify the rise.

In the end we have a rich scammer and investors with money invested in a worthless coin.

Phishing. Impersonation

Phishing is one of the most popular forms of deception to scam. It is the impersonation of the identity of an investor.

In the case applied to cryptocurrencies, a fake card provider, a bank or a state administration requests, for example, a payment in cryptocurrencies to settle a problem or cover a penalty, usually saying that it must be made urgently so that action is taken without thinking.

Fake celebrity reviews

This scam is similar to the previous one since we are talking about to supplant the identity in this case of someone famous.

Among the examples, fake Elon Musk handing out cryptocurrencies on Twitter or YouTube broadcasts of alleged live performances claiming that a cryptocurrency is going to skyrocket.

Applications and Bags

Another practice is to create applications that they supplant the official ones like Coinbase or Binance. Those who download these apps run the risk of personal and banking damage theft since to access these applications you normally need to provide a large amount of private data.

Email campaigns or messages on social networks are also used promising access to virtual money stored in cryptocurrency exchanges for which a small fee must first be paid.

As we can see, the virality of a new system related to money brings with it scams of all kinds. Information is of vital importance to avoid these cases. Unfortunately, we live in a time when not everything we see on the Internet is true and unfortunately many things we read we believe without checking its truth.



Reference-computerhoy.com