How they tried to scam us (with examples)
Here it goes once again. The hacks, the scams, the investigations.
KICKICO Team understands that the crypto space has witnessed many scams but that doesn’t mean the whole industry should be labelled a scam. On the contrary, the renewed version of KICK ECOSYSTEM provides solutions to protect its users from scams making the whole experience with cryptocurrency easy and secure. In this article, we would like to outline some real case scenarios on how members of our team were impersonated, how scammers tried to trick our users and even team members, how we keep getting fake exchanges listing invitations and more!
Shady Exchanges and their staff attempts
One of the most sophisticated form of scam that KICKICO deals with daily.
As many of our loyal users can see — KICK Coin has been busy with the listings lately. We would like to outline that our analyst team does thorough research on the exchange before signing papers.
In this type of crypto scam, the scammers act as crypto exchange support staff. Daily cases include no-name exchanges with 0 traffic asking for a listing fee of 5–10 BTC. However, for example, we chose the following case:
KICK has received a very alike invitation to list on Binance.
At first sight, the email template is just like from Binance. However, if we look closely it was sent from support@zendesk-binance.com while the real one is support@binance.zendesk.com. Scam Alert!
Take away 1: Check up the addresses closely, they can look more similar than you think.
Service Providers impersonators
Telegram became a top platform for crypto-enthusiasts, therefore it has brought a lot of attention for scam opportunities. Below we bring an example of a top Russian media and news channel DeCenter and how they were impersonated. KICKICO Team has received a message from @decenteradv regarding promotion, however, none of the steps to prove the relevance to DeCenter channel were done. Apologies the screenshots happen to be in Russian:(
Take 2: Always double-check that you are dealing with the right person, check the username, the phone number if you exchanged contacts previously. For even more security, it is better to arrange the video call.
And even our Team Members
In this scenario of crypto scam, scammers make fake Twitter, Telegram and Facebook account to impersonate the person behind it.
Many examples include hackers trying to impersonate our CEO Anti Danilevski by creating named emails and choosing telegram IDs close to what the official one is. Those funny scam people would message the employees of KICK ECOSYSTEM and ask them to do favours or help with money by giving promises to return it in the next hours.
Thankfully nobody was provoked and immediately reported the attempts.
The industry no longer has naive users so we would like to deliver the message that those attempts are funny to watch. However, we always advise our users to stay alert. Watch out and report any incidents
Conclusion:
Scammers are creative, and daily they find new ways to trick people and steal funds or get a hold of personal information such as logins and passwords or even the private keys. So, when a conversation takes a turn into a financial interaction — this is a big buzz button and a red flag to double check your vis a vis.
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