Avoid these top trending crypto scams in 2022 

avoid these top trending crypto scams in 2022

 you could be falling for a crypto scam and you wouldn't even know it they have become ever more brazen and elaborate and have stolen billions from unsuspecting victims, I going to tell you about some of the most prolific crypto scams out there scams that could be waiting for you just around the corner,  I think crypto is rad and on this channel, we think it's anything but a fad coins tokens news reviews and let me market moves too it's all covered here just for you.

  if that sounds like your cup of tea then tap that subscribe button if you please ping that bell as well that too would be mighty swell okay it's now time to tell you about some of the nasty scams trying to put you under their spell I want to start with perhaps one of the most common scams out there the giveaway that's because these are so damn prolific that they permeate nearly every corner of the internet and these are also particularly relevant right now given that these are the scams that appear to be central to the conversation around bot spam on Twitter not only are they incredibly pervasive but trying to stop them is like trying to kill a hydra with unlimited heads so let's start with the basics then what is a giveaway scam well as the name suggests it's a scam where free crypto is being given away the main mo here is that if you send a  certain person online a small amount of crypto they will send you double triple or 10x your investment.

  now at their core, these are akin to well someone anonymous on the internet offering to send you something for free the scam is of course not new to crypto these used to do the rounds as the famous Nigerian prince emails that people got back in the early days of the internet the main mo there was that someone wanted to send you a lot of money but needed you to first send them a wire to confirm the bank account same play different day when it comes to how these giveaway scams operate you'll usually be told to go to some link that will show you a  website or landing page detailing the steps of the giveaway there'll be fake transactions that you can see going through as they try to convince you that people are indeed getting paid now most of these scams usually have a  timer on them as a pressure tactic to make you think that you have to act quickly.

 what this means is that people tend to make decisions at the moment without considering the potential outcome as mentioned these scams are pervasive on Twitter but they're also well-known features of other social media platforms like youtube and Instagram etc in the case of youtube scams they're usually simple live streams where you'll have a famous person or group of people who'll be participating in a talk now this is all stolen footage with the instructions about how to enter the competition displayed around it for those who have never come across these scams before they can be deceiving that's because they have thousands of people who appear to be present in the live streams however these are of course all bots that are controlled by the same scam operator as to how these channels can get.

 so many subscribers or the verified  status well that's because they are  hacked channels  hackers commandeer these channels delete  their content and run the live streams  in their place  beyond this though the scams sometimes  actually buy ad space on the social  media platform they're using now I've  seen these scam ads being run on youtube  and Instagram and this is also part of  the reason why we decided to forego ads  on this channel we don't want to risk  anyone falling for one of these scams  but the best way to eliminate these and  all other scams is for people to stop  falling for them now I've said it many  times before the reason that they're so  prolific is because they are profitable  no matter how many spam filters the  platforms attempt to throw on these the  operators will still try to make them  work  so it's incredibly important to  understand no one on the internet is  going to give you something for free  on to our next scam though and these can  be just as damaging  yes the rug pull.

 now as the name  suggests a rug pull is when someone else  pulls the rug from under you  back in the heydays of icos back in 2017  these used to be called exit scams  whatever the name the mo is the same  they rob you of your funds disappear and  leave you holding the bag  now while back in 2017 the vehicle for  this sort of fraud was an initial coin  offering or ico today rug pulls are  quite prevalent in the nft and defy  spaces  in the case of nfts the creators will  usually get someone to create pretty bog  standard images issue them in a mint  promise some exciting road map or pay  some influencer to shill them and you'd  be surprised at some of the celebrities  who've been shilling these types of nfts  recently  once the mint is completed and the  people have their nfts the project  creators delete all websites socials and  digital communications they pull the rug  and leave you on your behind  these rug pulls don't have to happen all  at once of course sometimes you have  what is called a slow rug  in this case the project developer  slowly extricates themselves from the  project over a number of weeks or months  their goal is for the buyers to  eventually lose interest and abandon  their hopes of moons and lambos.

  now the slow rug is actually a lot more  common than the quicker one and can  sometimes be harder to zone in on  that's because you can't be 100 certain  that the intent was to defraud  so how do you avoid an nft rug pull well  you'll need to be a lot more discerning  in the types of nfts that you buy or the  mints that you participate in  now i'll be straight up here and tell  you that over 95 of all nfts are going  to zero sorry to burst your bubble  however there are around five percent  that could be highly valuable in the  future and if you want to try and find  those you have to be particularly  discerning in your criteria  this is something that i've covered in  much greater detail in my video on  finding the right nfts and that's linked  to in the top right  okay so that was nfts but you also have  the rug pools that are going on in the  defy space now these are a bit different  from an ico or nft in that instead of  sending a protocol money you have to  supply liquidity to the protocol.

  this liquidity is usually used in a  decentralized exchange and you can get pretty attractive returns from supplying said liquidity during this time the creators will hype the project so that there's a lot of demand and hence liquidity in the pool this is done using the same paid shill methods that are used for the rug pull nfts as more investors buy the hyped cryptocurrency they progressively exchange it for cryptos such as stablecoins and ether now when the project is live for a few hours or days liquidity pools can run into tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars this is when the rogue developers then strike and extract all the liquidity from the pool leaving investors holding the bag for these tokens the devs are sometimes able to do this because they're not locked the liquidity in the pool they still control the smart contracts and hence what can be done with the funds in the pool now these are actually quite common.

 according to a report from chain analysis last year we saw a total of 2.8  billion dollars stolen in these types of fraud you can see just how many there were and the total value lost in comparison to  2020 over here so how do you avoid a d5 rug pull well this all comes back to broader due diligence you're going to want to make sure that you're not locking your funds up in some random protocol don't let those deceptively high pays to fool you you'll also want to make sure that the authors of the smart contract don't still have control over it this is something that would allow them to extract the liquidity and run off with your funds beyond that though the due diligence that you should be doing for a  d5 project should not be any different from that you'd be doing on any other crypto project.

 one of the best ways to  avoid potential scams is of course to  make sure that you're not investing in  any  coins and if you're looking for  a guide that can help you with that well  look no further than down in the  description  okay that's rug pulls on to our next  scam and this one can sometimes be quite  hard to spot  that's the infamous phishing scam now  these are not exclusively related to  crypto and have existed before to grab  important details from users details  like passwords and other credentials to  access important  services they first started popping up  in the crypto space when they were used  by hackers to get access to people's  exchange account details and steal their  funds from there  however given how secure these exchanges  have become recently the phishing  schemes have evolved to start targeting  users directly through their  cryptocurrency wallets  perhaps one of the most damaging of  these is when they're able to  successfully fish your private keys  now this could happen because the  scammers have exfiltrated the keys from  your device.

 but it's more likely when  you have voluntarily given over your  private keys and one of the most common  ways of doing this is for the hacker to  fool you into handing over your mnemonic  seed words  these are usually used to recover your  wallets and they are never requested  unless you're resetting your wallet  now there are a number of ways in which  this can be done perhaps one of the most  common is when you'll visit a website of  some sort where it'll ask you to insert  your seed phrase in order to access it  this is of course a scam as you should  never need to insert your seed phrase to  send funds from a wallet  please guys if you ever land on any  website that asks you for your seed  navigate away asap  i'll also say that leaving your seed  phrase on your pc in an electronic form  is a bad idea  you may even be doing this without  knowing it as some ios metamask users  learnt recently  now another method of fishing your funds  involves the attacker actually giving  you their seed word in this instance  you're usually being duped into going to  a fraudulent website when trying to  download a new wallet.

 when you go  through the process on this fraudulent  site the attacker will give you a seed  which you think is yours but is in fact  theirs you'll then use this seed to set  up a new wallet which unbeknownst to you  is under the scammers control the moment  that you have sent funds to the wallet  the scammer makes off with them now  sometimes these fake wallet phishing  schemes are able to also buy ad space on  google so that their links are presented  before those of the real wallet  themselves  not cool ,A security  report that breaks down how it was done  on the phantom wallet last year but of  course this relates to any wallet that  requires a download so here's a quick  rule of thumb never click on the ads  that's because it's easy for a scammer  to buy some ad space on keywords  it's a lot harder for them to  organically rank above that of the  original site itself  now there's another really sinister nft  related fishing method that's become  quite popular recently this is where a  malicious dap masquerading as a  legitimate one will get you to  unknowingly approve token spends  essentially.

 when you connect your wallet to these daps and authorize them to spend on your behalf that's exactly what they do except not in the way that you want it now this has happened to a surprising number of nft holders for example last year this ape collector lost access to  16 high-value nuts or roughly 2.2  million dollars when he approved a  phishing contract this also happened more nuts recently when it was disclosed that the official board ape Instagram account was hacked and a phishing link was posted the hackers were trying to take advantage of the hype around virtual land sales and required the users to connect their wallets to claim of course this would have given the hacker token spend approvals that would have allowed them to make off with the contents now there are plenty of other examples of phishing attacks which are sadly too numerous to mention.

  so how do you avoid them well first you have to be very careful which apps you're giving authorization to you need to make sure that before you sign any transaction you are on the official website of the dap and not a  malicious one it's also wise to make sure that you've not approved some dodgy smart contracts in the past now you can easily check this thanks to tools like this one on etherscan basically it shows you all the smart contracts that you've given approvals to and when you can then also decide to quickly revoke access to those that you don't know and protect yourself in the future I'll leave a link to it in the description for you fine folks to come back to later anywho on to our next scam to watch out for and that is the impersonation scam this is when a scammer will try to get you to part with your crypto by impersonating.

 someone else and this is a personal bug bearer of mine as I have thousands of impersonators out there trying to rip off my followers the reason why these scams can be quite successful is that they try to take advantage of someone else's reputation a  reputation that inspires trust in others these impersonators are everywhere and on nearly every social platform, for example, these scumbags will reply to my tweets asking someone to do them or they'll reach out directly to the person that commented with a dm now I hate to be rude but the chances of me dming you are rather slim I have over  670 000 followers on Twitter and if I  was to interact with every one of them daily well I wouldn't get anything else done anyways these scammers are a real problem because some people do fall for them I have received several emails in the past from people saying that I have scammed them and that they will be contacting the cops now this is even more frustrating.

 if you're being scammed or not now these scams also exist in other forms on other platforms on Instagram and TikTok you have accounts that reply to the comments with a number asking people to WhatsApp them when you do this the scammer will usually say that I have some sort of investment scheme or the like where you can double your money in a week believe me when I say I wish I  had that ability now of course when you send them the money they tell you that they have successfully generated your profit however there's a catch you have to send them a withdrawal fee or pay them their cut of the profits first I'm sure you can imagine what happens once you do that these scammers are also extremely prolific in telegram for example.

some people of all bots of course either offer VIP  trading signals or a trading package that goes down similar paths to the WhatsApp scam now the number of people we get emailing in and telling us that they have been scammed by someone on telegram posing as me is incredible sometimes these people are fleeced for over 40k  then again as is the case with our twitter the telegram channel is verified blue tick shtick if it's not there it's not ours but even if there was a person out there who you were 100 convinced.

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