The two additional hard forks of Ethereum Nowa (ETN) and Ethereum Classic Vision (ETCV) have come under scrutiny after reports emerged that both are taking the private keys of users trying to redeem the additional coins. They then use the private keys to empty out the wallets of those seeking to participate in the airdrops. The ETCV hard fork was meant to take place yesterday, 11th January whereas the ETN hard fork was scheduled for today, January 12th.
Several Warning Signs and Words of Caution
In the case of Ethereum Nowa, there were stern words of caution on the BitcoinTalk forum warning that the fork was fraudulent and had a fake team. The photos of the team members had allegedly been sourced from Shutterstock. The project’s website is also suspicious in that it requests users who want the airdrop, to send some ETH to a specific address and then export their private keys to a new ETN wallet.
When you look up the address provided by the ETN project on Etherscan, you are greeted by a message warning users not to send anything to the address. It states:
Don’t send anything here. Scam fork/airdrop.
Ethereum World News had earlier on in the month cautioned that unless additional ETH hard forks were supported by major exchanges such as Binance and OKEx, there was a high chance of them not being legitimate.
Both Binance and OKEx had asked developers seeking to carry out an airdrop on the Ethereum blockchain, to contact them directly. Based on the fact that neither of the two exchanges has provided additional information regarding additional Ethereum hard forks, it can be assumed that the ETN and ETCV airdrops are not to be trusted.
Also to note is that visitors attempting to access the Ethereum Classic Vision website, get the following warning from the MetaMask plugin on their web browser.
This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.
What are your thoughts on the Ethereum Nowa (ETN) and Ethereum Classic Vision (ETCV) hard forks being identified as scams?