The ArcBlock ICO token sale finished in minutes, but scammers still managed to grab a few victims. I observed another scammer fest in the ArcBlock ICO token sale.
The token sale process officially started on Feb 3, at 19:00 CST but in the lead up to the actual start of the sale, scammers were already moving to take advantage by sowing confusion and laying traps knowing full well that a massive crowd of 58K Telegram members eagerly waiting with ETHs at the ready.
Scam before
Shortly before the official start time of the token sale, the scammers already started to sow the seeds of confusion by posting messages on the Telegram channel like these:
Due to unforeseen circumstances... send your ETHs to this address instead...
Scam during and after
Many of these kinds of scam messages continued to be posted during and even after the sale had reached its hard cap for both Ethereum (12,500) and CyberMiles (6,000,000). The actual token sale was over in minutes, but of course people are desperate to get in and if they were unsuccessful the first time and then they see a message which sort of looks legit and offers them another chance, no wonder some people went for it.
Unfortunately, some unsuspecting folks had fallen for these scam posts and have lost some ETH in this process. The only good thing is not too much ETH have been lost to the scammers.
These three wallets are the ones used for some of the scam messages on the Arcblock Telegram channel.
You can check them to see how much ETH was sent to these addresses.
- https://etherscan.io/address/0xeD00B7435CDA2dfe32bA0D22fDf9AE302DEb5AfA
- https://etherscan.io/address/0xE43b27908650741c5ef0502fF2758DDf036c44d6
- https://etherscan.io/address/0x3Deedfb93724ae7E2d394883343A127b4ce2EE43
Bee Hive ICO Smash and Grab
This small loss of investor funds to scammers is really fortunate and is in sharp contrast to the jackpot that the scammers pulled on Bee Token ICO scam which I wrote about a few days ago, which had scammed over $200K in ETH from investors.
ICOs are a risky game, are they still worth it?
As if investing in ICOs is not already risky enough, the scammers are really adding another big layer of risk to the process.
As an investor, not only are you at risk of losing your investment due to project failure. Scam projects (Confido and many many others) may run off with funds after completing the ICO. You could lose your funds to fake ICO contribution wallet scams such as seen in the ArcBlock ICO and the Bee Token ICO and the Enigma ICO.
These fake wallet scams are pretty much happening on all ICOs especially the hyped ones. Here's a few quick tips when taking part in ICOs:
- ICO investors need to be very careful and avoid sending ETHs to any unknown addresses.
- Check and double check given ETH addresses (I know you don't have much time when competing against 1000's of other people but sometimes you are better off missing the ICO than losing a few ETHs to a scammer)
- Always read the instructions from the official sources very carefully.
- When in apps like Telegram, check for the pinned messages from the official channel admin(s) who's avatar will have the word "admin" beside them such as this one.
- Watch out for fake emails/messages claiming to be from the ICO team informing you of last minute changes.