Normally these messages come through Discord and you just ignore them, like any other junk email or message telling you to come claim your free money.
I don't know why I let this one trigger me.
Perhaps it's because in a lot of respects cryto legitimately is too good to be true. It looks like a scam even though it's totally legit.
Remember when the Uniswap airdrop was obviously a scam because holy shit getting gifted $2500 from a random stranger... that's literally impossible. That can't be true. It's a scam. Yet it wasn't a scam and it actually happened.
So there are going to be legit crypto projects that look like scams but are totally legit, and it pretty aggravating that all these exploitive scams are going to muddy the waters and the noobs won't know what's legit what what's not.
The easiest way to see if a "scam" is legit.
https://www.aetrustscore.com/listing.php?website=bitcmoney.com
Ya gotta love when the scammer pops in to give himself a good review and he tells you how the scam works so you don't even have to check for yourself.
... all I had to do was pay 0.01 Bitcoin"
LOL
Die in a fire friend, seriously DIAF.
Now that I mention it, I fell for a scam recently which is probably why I'm so triggered right now. Let me show you.
So I was looking at my main Ethereum hot wallet on https://etherscan.io/ when I noticed my account was worth over $9000. Holy shit! How is that possible!?! It should be worth less than $100 because I recently cleared it out.
Turns out it was an airdrop from an ERC-20 project called Minereum. I don't remember signing up for this airdrop, but whatever it's worth a shot right? Good chance it's totally fake but this is crypto and crypto is batshit nuts, so you never know.
I checked my wallet just now, and it looks like Etherscan fixed it. My wallet is now worth $16. Much better.
In any case, this Minereum token was airdropped to me 246 days ago according to Etherscan, so maybe I've just lucked out hard and this shitcoin is mooning and I need to cash out immediately.
I checked the liquidity and the markets and this coin is trading for over 30 cents a coin and I've been airdropped 32k tokens... pretty sweet deal. So I jumped on Uniswap, literally the only market with any liquidity, and gave them permission to trade my tokens for me.
This cost me like $1.50 in transaction fees, and when I tried to dump my tokens there was an error. Also the liquidity was so low that dumping even 10k coins on the market would result in massive slippage (like 50% token value loss).
What was going on here.
https://www.minereum.com/
The first self-mining smart-contract.
Hey devs at Minerium!
Kill yourselves!
Thank you!
Come again!
Okay so apparently anyone can claim the airdrop (which I don't remember doing), and you can claim it with infinite ETH wallets... huge red flag obviously.
In order to unlock tokens and mine stuff you have to send ETH to the smart contract... so that's how the scam works just in case you're all wondering. It's pretty fucked up that Etherscan allowed those tokens to have any value, but whatever. People make mistakes.
Conclusion
So yeah I got scammed and lost $1.50, but more importantly I lost 30 minutes of my time and I went on a roller coaster of emotional bullshit which is the worst part.
Crypto looks like a scam because it's too good to be true. Sometimes it is and sometimes it's not. If anyone asks you for anything in order to join their community... fuck them they are a scammer. Much love to Uniswap for their bitchen airdrop.
When you have a unicorn asset like Bitcoin that is doubling in value every year, that also must be a scam right? Well, it's not, and it has been doubling every year for the last 7 years, and will likely continue on into the future. The curve is at $13k right now, so we are a bit bubbled, but time is the great equalizer.
It's not about timing the market.
It's about time in the market.