Difference between revisions of "Direct message scams"
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Never sign anything with your wallet where you are not sure what it is. | Never sign anything with your wallet where you are not sure what it is. | ||
[[Category:Scam]] |
Revision as of 20:52, 28 April 2022
Direct message (DM) scam, one of the most common types of crypto scams, where attacker tries to socially engineer a victim to send them funds, extract information like wallet seed phrase/private key or install malware. Common on any social network or messaging platform, but mostly affected is Discord at the time of writing.
Types of direct message scams
Name | Description |
---|---|
Crypto Giveaway/Lottery | Victim receives a message about a win in a crypto lottery or a giveaway but in order to receive it they have to pay or send a small amount of crypto to a scammer first |
NFT Giveaway | Victim receives a message with an invite to a fake server of a popular NFT collection promising a giveaway |
Celebrity impersonation | Scammer pretends to be an influencer or someone from the staff of the crypto protocol using same name and picture as a real person and asks for help to transfer funds to an exchange or something similar |
Support impersonation | User of the protocol comes to a group chat/discord server asking for some technical help. Scammer is monitoring the chat and DMs the victim offering to help. In most cases asks to provide a seed phrase or a private key |
Protocol upgrade | Victim receives a message about a protocol upgrade from a scammer pretending to be a notifications bot, who then directs the victim to install some kind of malware |
A "friendly" person | Scammer is pretending to be friendly asking questions about crypto or NFTs but then drops a link to some website which either asks user to input their private key or asks to sign a message with their wallet which then results in a drain of funds |
Mitigation
Most of DM scams heavily rely on social engineering, so are easily avoidable with a bit of common sense. If something looks sketchy it is a scam. There are no lotteries and no giveaways in crypto that would be announced by a direct message.
Nobody who is legit under no circumstances would ever ask you to provide a private key, seed phrase or any kind of personal info ever.
Never sign anything with your wallet where you are not sure what it is.