Topic: Always be careful of airdrop tokens (Read 172 times)

I never implied ALL airdrops are a scam, there's very successful ones. As the title says "always be careful with airdrop tokens", is not about bashing airdrops, is about being careful because there's lots of scammers that are using this technique and is working as effective as it's working for good projects.

so most of the Airdrops are aimed at gathering a lot of people.
but it seems to me the main problem of modern Airdrops is collecting personal information of a person.
Now there are a lot of fraudulent projects that want to capture your personal data.
You need to be very careful not to give your personal information to such companies

There are lots of scam airdrops out there. So many of them make forms to either get your personal information or to get your coins from donations. Airdrops normally are supposed to be free and why will they then ask for donation. Only a newbie that is after fast token will fall victim of such. I used to be a fan to airdrop and imagine just because of that, my mail box is flooded with spammed mails and mails with shady links.

Technically speaking, a airdrop can't be a scam, because by definition, a airdrop is free coins/token given to you. So coins for free.

But yes, some projects are shady and others are not. And sometimes you can't even know if it's a scam or not. That's unfortunate, but it's like in real business... You can invest in bulshit projects and they will go bankrupt quickly.

Community might be important because most of the times it is responsible for coins and tokens prices at the end of the day. But you have to keep in mind that you should not base your opinion to what others think or believe. I haven't been around that ICO but I know older one and story of benebit, it is easy to build community with airdrops and bounty campaign, exactly what these guys have done and at the end when one guy from reddit figure it out to be a scam you couldn't find any information online about them. Key point is to make sure devs are real and that they are the ones who claim they are, because some projects even fake their advisors and developers and it works pretty well.

Although you're right about weeding out the bad ones, I can not agree with you completely. Mostly tokens with airdrops aren't worthy, you're right but putting a red flag on a project just because it has an airdrop is not fair. Airdrop is an easy and cheap way to create a userbase for your token and there are also many good projects with airdrops, a recent example would be Havven, now, would you take Havven as a bad project? I wouldn't, and just because they have an airdrop, I'm not gonna think different about them...

This is true, some projects are set up to gather users, others evaluate trends and lose members' time!

It's always worth reminding and advising people to really think and analyse the airdrop token or coin they are being part of. Always do your due diligence to research the project, team, contract address, concept, wallet etc. Only us here in the forum can really stop a scam from spreading by raising our standards of what a decent project should look nowadays. But it seems that mostly low rank accounts participate in shady projects, either by being bots or just desperate to get airdropped free money, but the consequences can be severe and is it really worth it to be exposed for merely $5 in airdropped tokens?

One recent example of a deceiving project is ATLR Token. They faked pretty much the entire project so your filters won't raise any red flags at all just at a first glance. The website has a security certificate, a beautiful design, a pretty solid core concept of the project, a solid team "behind". Everything looks somewhat decent until you start noticing the subtle red flags.

The member that posted the ann is a newbie.
The ann design is not related to the website design.
Their only social media was twitter, (recently created account) and a telegram group for only notifications.
The contract address and donation address were not making sense.
The airdrop form was poorly written with text like: "we're going to the moon guys!"

If you didn't know about the actual project they copied and pasted their website layout (Nucleus Vision) how are you suppose to know the project is a scam if the project itself looks promising. That's why the community is so important because we can help each other. But if you jump right away to just comment in the thread to receive your airdrop tokens without caring the repercussions of your actions, the consequences affect all of us.

Of course by now they realised that the scam was unsuccessful to their goals (even tho they did raised like 0.80 eth) they shut down the website, abandoned the thread and the account that posted is never to be seen, but the damage has already been done.  
They collected over 4,000 email addresses and twitter handles in the airdrop form, so now they can figure out who to target their scams more specifically. People gave away their data for nothing. This happened to me once because I used to just want to participate in as many airdrops as I could, until I didn't realise that I gave my data in one of those forms to hackers. Got spammed in my email with phising links, attempts to access my account, etc.

So lets just work as a community and filter the scam out from the forum, which has clogged it so much recently and it's only getting worse.