The crypto industry is quite young, and like all other young industries, there are lots of fraudulent activities which one can fall prey of if not careful. Whilst there are quite a lot of shady activities in the crypto industry, one of the most popular is phishing. This, therefore, makes it vital to devise ways to avoid phishing if you must survive in the crypto world.
Quite unlike other scams which take place in the crypto industry, phishing is very subtle and might go unnoticed even after one has fall a victim of it. As a result of the subtle approaches that are made use of in phishing, even the best of tech-savvy people fall victim of it if careless. Let’s get to know what phishing is, how it works and how to avoid it.
What is Phishing
There might not be an accurate definition for phishing; however, it can be properly explained with instances. Imagine an instance when you are going through your inbox and you discover an update which requires you to synchronize your wallet with a network that just got hand-forked. The message goes on to require you to unlock your account with the use of your private key. Now, in response to this message, you decide to click on the link which has a typo error. You put in the required details in an attempt to get your wallet updated. With this activity, you have just successfully granted fraudsters unchecked access into your wallet. With access into your wallet, all your savings get stolen and you are left with nothing.
The above-described instance is something that a lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasts goes through frequently without having an idea of what actually happened. Well, now that you know what phishing really is, it is important to devise ways to avoid it.
How to Avoid Phishing
Phishing can come in various ways; popular among them are fake ads, slack and forums attack, fake twitter accounts, email phishing, etc.
Now, there are measures that you can take to help you avoid phishing. Some of this measures are pretty straight-forward. They include:
- Always be on the lookout for typos in URL. Original URLs never come with typos. Each time you spot a typo in a URL, that’s a red flag that you should avoid.
- Ensure that your spellings are perfect, as this can have a hand in making you a victim of phishing
- Always ensure that no one has your private key. The only time that wallet providers might ask for your private key is if your wallet is custodial-check.
- If your wallet provider does not require an email, then, any mail from your wallet provider should be considered a trick.
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