Beware of Scammers, Impersonators, and Phishing Sites
In the initial stages of the Elysian Token Generation Event, with the popularity growing significantly, an increasing number of threats arise. Experienced members of the blockchain community understand that this is a common occurrence. The nature of this business brings about various issues that must be addressed in a professional manner to protect both team members and community members to ensure that operations run smoothly.
It is important that all members of the Elysian community understand and recognize these threats. As projects continue to grow, so do the amount of potential threats. We ask that our loyal community members stay aware and understand that each individual can be a target of a random attack. No admin in our Telegram channel will ever send you a private message asking for money. We firmly believe that a consciously aware community already helps Elysian function more efficiently at this stage of our project.
There are various ways in which both team members and community members can be targeted. This is an issue that has plagued the blockchain space and will not stop any time soon due to the massive influx of ICOs in the recent months, dating back to late last year at the beginning of the massive bull run. The first step to help control this problem is to inform the public of each possible threat. These issues include, but are not limited to:
- Scammers
- Team Member Impersonators
- Phishing Sites
Scammers
There are a plethora of scammers that are in almost every large Telegram group, and usually on other social media platforms as well. These people will attempt to get you to send them cryptocurrency, usually Bitcoin or Ethereum, with persuasive statements such as “if you send me 1 Ethereum, I will send you 2 Ethereum back!” Anyone familiar with the industry can spot this bluff from a mile away, but to the new, more gullible members it may appear to sound like a lucrative opportunity. These types of people are most common of the three aforementioned threats. If approached with a message by shady profiles, please be aware that these people exist in the blockchain community and their sole intention is to convince you to send them money or personal information.
Team Member Impersonators
This is a somewhat less common occurrence, but much more deceptive method of persuasion. Impersonators will create fake accounts to mimic Elysian team member accounts almost exactly. The intention of replicating team member accounts is to convince community members that they are in fact the real team members and that they should send them cryptocurrency, when in reality no team member will ever message you privately asking for money. This method can be surprisingly quite effective for impersonators because of the striking similarity to the real accounts. A sizable percentage of the blockchain community is somewhat gullible to this, especially people that are just getting into cryptocurrency. This is something that they are not used to, and consequently may act with emotion because they do not know how to handle the situation. Impersonators prey on these individuals. We kindly ask for our amazing community to watch out for team member impersonators and never give out any personal information or tokens.
Phishing Sites
Phishing sites take a slightly different approach to scamming token holders. Generally, phishing sites will have a very similar URL to the actual legitimate company website. This is designed specifically to catch people that don’t pay attention to every detail and every letter of the URL. Often, these sites will also have content and graphics that look incredibly similar to the original as well.
Always bookmark the original company website.
By doing this, you don’t even run the risk of accidentally typing the wrong letter, because humans will naturally make mistakes without even realizing it. Before you know it, you could be completely unaware that you are sending money to scammers. Here are some examples of tactics that a phishing website may use:
Original Website
Examples of Phishing Sites (DO NOT CLICK THESE LINKS)
It is important to study the difference between them to train your mind to be alert and avoid exposure to phishing sites. Notice how the differences are quite subtle, usually with just one letter being replaced by a number or the suffix changing from .io to .net or something similar. Just a little bit of research into this will already vastly improve your knowledge and awareness to these aspects of the industry. This article is meant to help achieve optimal safety for team and community members.
At Elysian we emphasize the importance of our entire community becoming educated in this department. With our Telegram group approaching 40,000 members, these threats are imminent. We ask that you follow our guidelines of responsible participation and reporting any scammers, impersonators, or any other threats to make sure that the problem is handled immediately. We will never be able to completely eliminate these threats but if we can significantly lower the amount of occurrences then ultimately the community will be much safer.
