In 2018 those that wish to impersonate and make money will do whatever it takes to trick users into giving their hard-earned crypto away.
See this post as an example, on the BitBay official Twitter:
Ah, look at that! BitBay´s finally grown to a million users! They´re doing another giveaway to celebrate. All we have to do is send in any value of ETH, and 10 times that amount from a pool of 1000 ETH will be sent back as a way of saying thank you.
Yeah, no.
Here´s a list of things to look out for, since even after following the first half of these steps, you can still be tricked and lose a lot of money.
1. Don´t trust giveaways. Obviously when I saw this post I was in doubt, however BitBay has done giveaways before. BitBay´s giveaways though are always in BAY, as with other blockchain giveaways. If you have to send in money first, expect to not get it back. If you have to do special posts or guess, they may be fine.
2. Inspect the post. Is the tone of the post consistent with the other posts from the author? What do other people say after this, and can they be trusted?
- There are multiple responses to this with their own amounts of retweets and likes. The retweets and likes gives an impression that others agree, however don´t be fooled.
- Responses are varied and one even has a picture showing the transaction.
- Look at the responses though, the users are dead accounts and have natural names, but unnatural account handles.
3. Inspect, but don´t send information to, the link.
- The link is bit.do/eth_bitbay -- don´t trust link shorteners. See where the link goes, too.
- In this case, the link goes to ¨eth-transact.secure.droppages.com/index.html¨, which certainly gives the impression of a trustworthy, simple to use site. At the bottom there´s even a list of (fake) transactions that show the fulfillment of the giveaway promise.
- Obviously though you should check the actual etherscan address, which shows if the person really did what they were promised to.
3. Inspect the poster. This account name had the same name, almost identical account name, and same logo as the original. However, their account handle is BitBayOfficiaI <--- note the i, not the L. Note that the account has no cover background and only 1 tweet, 1 like, no followers, and no followings.
4. If everything checks out, just ignore it and still don´t send your money. I don´t care if they promise with a cherry on top and show all of the lamborghinis in their garage, if they´re promising free money for your information, it´s a scam. Go your own way, don´t get sucked into others looking for the easy way out. Don´t get shocked by short term gains, and don´t trust anything that isn´t a smart contract where you can see the code and transactions going in and out as proof.
Quite honestly, this was a job well done by whoever conducted this operation. Fake believable twitter accounts, fake believable pages. I regretted it immediately after pressing send; I´m not getting my damn money back. I wish there was a cancel button, but the least I can do is spread awareness and never let this happen again.