Scammers’ latest phishing tricks
Look out for these phishing scams and protect yourself when investing in ICO’s.
ICO’s have opened to the general public as investments in blockchain ventures. However, the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies (as well as the eye watering amounts of money raised) has led to phishing attacks by cyber criminals. In a report by Chainalsis, would-be cryptocurrency investors have been conned out of a combined $225 million in 2017 alone!
According to the anti-money laundering software for Bitcoin, close to 30,000 individuals have lost on average of $7,500 each and there is a one in 10 chance of investors being redirected to a fake ICO website.
Telegram is one of the hottest applications in use today. It’s hard to pinpoint an ICO which doesn’t have a Telegram channel these days. And because of its popularity, Telegram has become a breeding ground for scams of all kinds.
FOMO of ICOs drives scams
The reason individuals might fall for scams like these may lie in the time-sensitive nature of ICO’s. The limited opportunity within token sale events means investors tend to rush into early access trades, making them easy targets for phishing attacks.
In the build-up to our main token sale, we would like to inform our community members of red flags to look out for.
Cryptocurrency scams make a debut in Canada
Another form of cryptocurrency fraud involves scammers approaching taxpayers and demanding tax payments in Bitcoin, which has been reported in Canada, and has quickly become one of the most common fraud schemes in the country. According to Canada’s Better Business Bureau (BBB), 50 complaints, inquiries or referrals related to ICO or cryptocurrency have been received since November 2017 and is now one of the top five money scams in the country for the first time ever.
Something smells phishy
A new form of phishing has emerged, those sneaky scammers are up to no good again.
They’ve been extra sneaky with URLs of sites masking them with non Latin characters. Whilst it looks the same as the actual URL (e.g. Binance.com), those tiny dots are not dust on your computer screen, they are the marks of scammers at it again.
Attempted phishing attacks on the Omnitude community
During our pre-sale, scammers joined our official Telegram chat (https://telegram.me/Omnitudechat) posing as our CEO Chris Painter, Greg Painter and Ben Bennett. These cyber criminals sent out several PM’s to our community members in an attempt to fool pre-sale participants by redirecting them to a mirrored web page, where they were asked to hand over their payment credentials — unbeknownst to them they were funding a cyber-criminal network instead of investing in our platform.
They used our logo and their names appeared correctly. However their handles closely mimicked our real handles (they used handles @GreggPainter, @ChrisPpainter for instance).
Our top tips to keep you safe
- Be vigilant — Keeping your eye open for anything out of place is always a great start, don’t ever take anything for granted. Question everything!
- Use a plugin, there are some helpful plugins about that help highlight possible nasty sites like the one above — https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cryptonite-by-metacert/keghdcpemohlojlglbiegihkljkgnige
- One way you can check out a site that you are unsure of is to enter the site URL in Whois.com. Many of the sites are registered with “namecheap.com” with privacy protection on. This is not automatically a guarantee of a scam, but it’s a red flag that indicates you should may want to do some further due diligence.
- Another way to protect yourself is to install the EtherAddressLookup plug-in for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/etheraddresslookup/pdknmigbbbhmllnmgdfalmedcmcefdfn?hl=en-GB) — basically, if it is from any URL other than the official company website — don’t go near it!
- Check out a list of the latest scams here — https://etherscamdb.info/scams to check and keep up to date with what’s going on.
- Ask questions. Don’t invest in something you don’t understand. Talk to a registered advisor, know where your money’s going and how it’s going to be used and know who you’re dealing with.
Remember…
We will never ever PM you asking you to deposit to any address and all contributions are made via our token sale platform which will be to your dedicated address. Please report any suspicious PM’s to any of our admins on Telegram.
Our trusted admin’s usernames on Telegram are as listed: @nikki_hall, @balgan, @afrikabyrne, @Omnitude_Mark, @chrispainter, @BenOmnitude, @GregPainter, @kaiserharris, @belshall
I hope this helps you, and as always stay vigilant Omni-dudes!
