If you are a follower of some of the popular names associated with cryptocurrencies on Twitter (one of those people with 100K+ followers) then I guess you might have seen after one of their real tweets, some other tweet where supposedly this person (the one who wrote the original message) ask people to send them a little amount of BTC (sometimes ETH) to some address in exchange for a bigger sum.
Of course, this is a scam. And I know, 99% of you (if not more) knows that. This is just some form of phishing in which the scammers try to use the name of someone famous enough (by creating an account with a similar name and the very same avatar as the original) that they know any kind of message coming from them will earn the trust of some people so they'll put their guard down and end up doing something too stupid for their own good.
This is clearly one of the oldest and most basic kind of scams in the internet, just as those "nigerian heirs" who told you that they needed your help to receive some huge inheritance that they would split with you and all you had to do was to send some "small" (compared to your share of the reward) amount of money to them. And of course those who believed this story and sent the money to their nigerian friends never heard from them again.
But this is so much simpler. And even when I know that it's not very effective, it doesn't have to be. If just a handful of people falls for this every day, then it will be profitable enough for them to keep doing it.
And that is why my friends, I ask you to be alert. Not every scam is just as evident as these (and even so, some people fall for it). But please, every time that you hear or see or read something that seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.
And I know, this is crypto and people are getting used to see some 1000% and even higher gains so people get too confident, too lazy. There are even real people with real accounts who make these giveaways to attract more followers, but even in these cases they are the ones asking for your address so they can send you money, not the other way around. If it is a giveaway, why would they ask you for money first? It doesn't make any sense.
So, I know that some of you might have read one of my past posts talking about Bitconnect, lending platforms and other kind of scams and you'll think that I'm getting tiresome with this.
But I think that if there is one thing stopping cryptocurrencies from taking off in terms of mass adoption, is the fact that still too many people think that this is some kind of a dangerous territory with too many scammers to their own safety. And they might be right. So we need to fight these practices and reduce them to it's minimum if we want cryptocurrencies to take the place they deserve in the world's economy