Crypto is an unregulated space that's why crypto users became obvious targets of scammers. We have seen different methods used by these scammers repeatedly to scam people who were not careful enough. When a method became popular and commonly known by the community they came up with new ideas of scams. I want to share with the community some new phishing attempts and how a user can protect themselves from it.
By profession, i am a community moderator and a social media security expert. I am working on a few projects and i am responsible for the security of those project’s telegram and discord servers. Till now there have been countless phishing attempts to take control of my social media account. Most of them were using the same methods but some of them are unique and different from one another so they need to be shared individually.
New crypto phishing techniques
- Story 1: I got a message in my inbox and as a community moderator i start taking the initiative to respond to that user's message. He offered me a job right away and wanted to know if I had any interest or not. I already suspect a possible scam attempts but I still wanted to see how he would try to convince me to fall for his scam. He shared the project details with me and for being a NFT project he shared its OpenSea URL so that he could convince me it was a legit project. You can see from the screen shot below that this NFT project has a nice fake volume. At the end of the talking i told him that I was interested and how we could start working. He told me to join their discord server first so that we could proceed with our negotiation. So i went to their discord server to see if they had one. When i tried to verify my account through dyno bot it redirected me to a phishing UI of discord you can see from the screenshot below. A new user would think he needs to log into his Discord account to get access to that server but the URL in the address bar shows us this is a phishing URL that has been placed very carefully through a popular discord bot.
- Story 2: One day i got a message in my telegram account with a job offer. A guy told me that they are a team of P2E game developers and that they are looking for game testers for their upcoming game. When i asked him how he found me he gave me a reference to one of my telegram friends whom I had known for a long time. He said that he and my friend had worked on several projects before. So started to contact my friend to verify this claim In the meantime i start talking about the job he offered me. I was convinced that this guy is legit as there is no way he knows about my friend if my friend won’t tell him about me. So I kept the negotiation ongoing and at the end that guy told me to install the game they developed and start playing so that they could collect my review of the game. I downloaded that file and installed it in my virtual box as a precaution, though I wasn’t aware that this file contained malware. My precaution saved me that day and I am still waiting for my friends responses about those guys! I guess my friend's telegram got hacked and that scammer found my contact information from there.
- Story 3: One of the similar stories starts with story number 1. I am going to tell only the part that doesn’t match with story no 1. I have shared this story before with a topic you can read that topic as well. [Scammers are getting innovative.] After getting interested in their job they told me that they wanted to take an interview with me so I agreed to that and they have created a group with their so called CEO to start making a call. They start a voice call so that their identity won’t be revealed. After the interview and all the negotiations about the salary and work they told me I needed to fill out a form with all the details so that they could put that into their employee documents. When I tried to fill out the form and click submit it said there was some problem with my brower and I needed to drag that link to the bookmark bar to submit the form. There were clear instructions with images too. When i tried to drag that i have noticed there was something written in JavaScript, so i tried to figure out what it could be. In the meantime those scammers were pushing me to submit the link quickly which i didn’t. Sometimes i figured out that it was a phishing link.
- Story 4: A few days ago, in one of my communities, I saw some unusual conversations between two accounts. Those conversations weren’t like regular ones, so it turned red in my mind. After a long conversation where they were talking about the football championship suddenly they started talking about a crypto project event where one guy claimed to get $200 worth of tokens. So the other guy asked for the event URL and he shared a website where he could get that token. That was a scam site and as soon as the victim connects his wallet scammers will drain all the funds from that wallet.
Some Proactive Measures to Safeguard Yourself from similar scam attempts
1.If you are using social media like telegram and discord then always use 2FA features to add extra security to your account.
2. If you are an admin in any discord community then from your server safety setup permission turn on “ Require 2FA for moderator action”. This feature will not let your community moderator do any moderation action if their 2FA option is not activated. This is extremely helpful to protect your community in case one of your community mods account is compromised.
3. Keep your server security bot above your community moderator role so that those bot can keep track of moderator behavior and take action against any fishy action.
4. Always use a virtual box in case you need to install any application or open any URL.
5. Don’t rush for any offer or anything. Be calm and cross-check everything no matter how legit something seems to you.