You all know what scams are and most of the time you know how to by pass them so why is there so many ? because it works!
There are so many ways to fool us that I might not be able to give you all the scenarios for scamming. Instead I'd like to present you with some thoughts and advices about your next scam experience and how to keep on avoiding them.
There is so much scams around the web that it's almost easier to talk about reliable source websites than scams ones. The number is growing everyday, sometimes with a lot of thought put in there to fool your vigilance. Educate yourselves, my fellow white sheep before the wolves pull you away from the safe prairie and rip you off.
STEEMIT
Steemit is not 100% safe place it's like anywhere else. Steemit has seen different scams happening. You can ask @steemcleaners about that. Beware of users advertising schemes of getting free crypto. To give you a picture imagine 1 out of 10000 is legit. Free money is an old trick for scams.
On steemit if you are ever reading one of those posts be careful.
Don't assume that the steemians posting them are necessarily trying to scam you either. Steemians could have joined a great offer and want to share it on steemit usually with a referral link that would give them free money to spread the word, those sheep become the vehicle of the scam, always give something for free with your bullshit it helps spreading the word . It's very common that scams are spread through honest people who want to share a good tip, I came across one of them recently and I've been warning the author about it, she didn't realize that it was a scam :
Get $500 for registration & take survey
She has now changed the title and erased the link. But this is it sheep, you are a target in the crypto world
They want your money, little and big wolves, they will trick you, giving you the moon to get you to transfer crypto into their wallets. Remember that on steemit you can get redirected to a scam website even by honest users.
Links in posts
Links are not always legit and malicious ones trick you with a small modification of the link, let me explain:
If you copy paste a link from another post from the address bar of your browser, and paste it on steemit to write a post you end up with a long string of words like this :
https://steemit.com/ireland/@blacksheepblog/why-i-love-ireland
Wel.. ok It's not a very long but I needed to find a way to throw a little self advertisement in this article ;-)
Anyway this link can now look like this with a html markdown :
To go further I could now change the link and keep the text you see like this:
Now my example, it's quite an obvious one but in real situations it can be harder to detect because scammers are all about looking like the original, you have to educate yourself about counterfeit signs in DNS names. What's a DNS ? google it.
clone websites
You can clone steemit. Clones sites use the same blockchain and they are setup quite easy if you know what you are doing. Clones can be dangerous because you would think you are on the legit steemit website but you are not. I can clone this site for my personal use on my local machine but I could also make people use my clone and eventually get their keys. I'm using a steemit clone right now to write this article called busy.org it's a trusted clone of course and has a nice feel that the main website is lacking, I find.
Yes if you think steemit is our safe prairie, there are ways to get scammed in this crypto world. If you are on steemit you own crypto and if you own crypto you are a target for all sort of malicious activity against your assets, you probably know that right?
You can easily download a website and setup a server to host it that it looks like the same as the original. The address will be different and depends on how much you look at those details, you could get fooled very quickly just by the feel and not the fact.
I don't even talk about rogue access point,compromised wifi access with WEP, I'll keep that for another article on computer security.
Online Wallets
Quoinpro is considered as a scam. They claim to give you free bitcoin and altcoin everyday! how much exactly ? peanuts of course just enough for you to sign up. Stay away from it as it only wants to collect your email address to sale it to their real clients. You are not a client you are a target for them.
Online wallets like quoinpro are just everywhere if you don't pay attention. As a thumb of rule for any website that you would like to sign up without knowing if it's legit or not don't give your main email address. You make more satoshis on bittrex in 10 min than 1 month on quoinpro free peanut program, they can't even spell "coin" properly....
Mining
If you want to mine, the best is to do it with official miners programs. But if you really want to mine and make profit don't believe anyone that tells you you can without proper hardware (ASIC) because mining is now a big business and you won't go anywhere without the proper gears and have a basic knowledge of the algorithms used in the process.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Software#Mining_apps list of mining programs bitcoin.
https://minergate.com/ online mining for laptop & phones is it legit ? I haven't concluded yet.
With a proper graphic card and patience you can have higher value peanuts but still peanuts, however don't expect much peanuts if your computer is not on 24/7 with GPU on full blast, thx to @spiritualmax's post signature for the link, have you cashed out anything from them ?
To mine altcoins, go to the official coin website you want to mine and look at their mining solution for your operating system first. They will guide you to find the best mining tool for the coin. Always check official manuals before anything else. you know RTFM is not for programmers only and it makes it less painful with a cup of organic coffee.
For mining programs or any programs when you look online it's always good to check for open source alternatives. Open source softwares are clean and you can trust them. Github is a great niche to find open source programs. I invite you to browse github as it gives the best platform for open source devs to share their work, thank you Linus Torvalds once more.
There is also The cloud mining, I honestly don't know much about it, I don't touch it or go near it and you should do the same.What I do know, is what a cloud is and what mining is, however I believe that cloud mining is another way for you to pay a mining company to use their hardware and give you peanuts for it while they eat most of the cake and keep the peanut butter.
Cloud mining is for young investors that don't know anything about mining, are too lazy to setup a rig, who don't have enough money to buy antminers. Cloud mining should be avoided if you don't know for sure what you are doing and if you do then you don't do cloud mining I guess.
Recently, I have seen sheep talking about that Eobot here on steemit. Eobot is one of those cloud mining websites claiming again easy money, I would recommend to stay away from it. You can't be sure it's profitable, without doing the proper math, and if you do the proper math you will realize again that they give you peanuts that you can't even touch in a 36 month time line, when this will become profitable any way. You can mine steem so don't try to jump on the train thinking that you gonna build your SP with it because you are going to have to pay first.
Scams are upgrading too, web 3.0 comes with scam 3.0 so to look like legit and offer a variety of solutions to make money, they are adjusting their trap making you believe that you are getting crypto by filling up your fictional wallet with digits. This is done on purpose and part of the plan for you to think that you are getting something. I can add didgits to anything, it's all made up, it's all bullshit folks.
ICO
I'm not saying ICOs are scams. not at all. There are plenty of ICOs legit and with real teams of dedicated peeps with great projects in there hands. You could end up making good money with them but you need to know what you are doing, that's why in a previous article about surviving 2018 for dummies I was telling newbies to stay away from them because when you don't have enough experience in the crypto world and you don't know who is doing what, ICOs can be a great trick for scammers to steal your beloved crypto assets.
I can create a ICO website and an ICO token with not very much web development skill and in some extent good enough for you to be charmed. I can put fake numbers for funds already collected, Fake names etc.. I can fake it all for you to believe that you are not alone in this, that a lot of people have joined the ICO already etc... Always backup your decisions about ICOs. ICOs game is research first. use steemit search and put the name of the ICO you are looking at to see what other peeps are saying. don't jump quickly into a decision even if the ICO finish in 1 hour and your FOMO kicks in. Be prepared before investing, you can join a mailing list but use an alternative email and see how they are selling it to you, a lot of ICOs mailling list are very pushy on getting you on board, they have better marketing managers than blockchain developers.
Will you buy this ICO now that I gave you a bit more input in it ?
this is a take the piss, I have to admit it's well made!
Email addresses
Most of you know how to recognize a dodgy email in your inbox, but that's not what I want to talk about. You should have a basic policy of having multiple emails.
Your main email should only be used for official websites. You can use one main email for steemit/binance/blocktrade/bittrex etc... when it's a well known website trusted it's fine. Have a different passwords to access your email account and your exchanges accounts.
look at http://www.protonmail.com for setting up emails, they seem to do a good job and support PGP.
You have to understand that SMTP the protocol behind emails is not encrypting anything. So far emails are kept in SMTP servers in clear text. Yes you use https, but that's only for the transport of your email not the storage on servers.
I invite you to look at mailvlope chrome/firefox addon to encrypt your emails, it works with Gmail.
For text files that hold your private keys, let's face it you can't keep that in clear text. There is a great open source program called EncryptPad:
EncryptPad is an application for viewing and editing symmetrically encrypted text.it uses the most widely chosen quality file format OpenPGP RFC 4880. Unlike other OpenPGP software which main purpose is asymmetric encryption, the primary focus of EncryptPad is symmetric encryption.
Linux, APPLE, Windows.
2018 in a crypto world you have to have a PGP key and you have to learn more about encryption email and text files, you have no excuse now.
Now for anything else online related to crypto you should have an alternative email. Don't use your primary email on website that you not trusting 100%. Emails are a source of info about you and are stored in clear text in databases. We can track you down with it, with help of social media like facebook. We can try to get in contact with you even through social media and send you links to a chat box or a websites that would eventually lead malicious people to get your IP address. and if you are not using a VPN or a proxy or TOR you become a real target for a malicious person even more than when we have only your email because now they can use little programs called exploits to get access to your computer.
Why do you think the whales on steemit are so quite ? well.... almost all of them.....
Why do you think it's so hard to get to talk to them ? because they own a huge amount of crypto and any leak could compromise their identity and IP addresses. They need to know who they are talking to. If they get in to something dodgy at any point they are screwed. The hardest thing is not to become a whale, it's to stay a whale. So my little sheep if like me you would like to keep your crypto assets away from phishing bad boys: STFU about your crypto activity online.
Conclusion
There are many ways to get scammed. your identity is precious. Be careful on what you are joining even on facebook, crypto groups can be full of peeps looking for targets don't join an open group thinking you'll get the best indicators for trading coins, stay away from them or otherwise use a new identity with a new email address a new facebook profile etc...I personally don't use facebook which is the best choice to keep me away from all this shit.
Keep your mouth shut is a good advice, whales do it so should you. Aways use official websites but remember that even they can get hacked, move your funds to open source desktop wallets or cold storage, don't let the exchanges websites hold all your assets. Make sure you learn PGP and email/text files encryption that can save you a lot of money.
https://www.scambitcoin.com/ is a good source of scams that are going on in the crypto world educate yourself sheep steemians and see you soon !
Leave a comment below and do what needs to be done to help me grow on steemit! cheers everyone stay safe and shteem on !
@blacksheepblog