Avoid Getting Scammed
A guide to being safe from fraud and scams
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A guide to being safe from fraud and scams
Last updated
Was this helpful?
CONTENTS
Smart Practices to Avoid Becoming the Victim of a Scammer
Rule Number One
Rule Number Two
Rule Number Three
Words of Wisdom to Avoid Becoming a Victim (EOS focused)
Misspelled Account Names
Telegram
Social Platforms
Ignorance
Binance Smart Chain
Our brains are amazing! We can learn and logically think through any problem we encounter unless we are feeling panicked or scared. At which time our conscious brains stop being in control and our amygdala takes over. Successful scammers and fraudsters are experts in manipulating a rational mind into a fight, flight, or freeze status () They are even better at keeping someone in that state. The scammer’s goal is to keep you in a state of panic and fear as long as they possibly can. The longer you are feeling panicked the more they are likely to steal from you. In fact, you will just agree to go along with all their suggestions because they have convinced you that this is the only way to resolve your problem and they are the only ones who can help you.
You are thinking this could never happen to you. Hopefully you are correct in this. However, scammers have taken advantage of the best of the best. Remember they are experts in psychological manipulation and they have had hundreds of people upon whom to hone their skills.
Fortunately there are a few simple rules to follow.
NEVER, EVER, and I mean NEVER expose, hand over, tell, entre into an unknown/unverified website, show, screenshot, or otherwise give your private keys, recovery phrases, seeds, or passwords over to anyone. NO ONE!!
Always follow rule number one.
When something goes wrong, like if your tokens suddenly disappear from your wallet or more commonly you have sent tokens to the wrong address, or when you feel panicked, pressured, or tired – Walk away. Leave it. Do nothing. Leave it alone until your panic is in control.
Go back to it later after you have had a good sleep or a good meditation session!
Support is always available, but you must ensure you are calm and not responding to anything you yourself have not initiated.
Scammers can be found everywhere. I am not going to try to cover all varieties of scams in this wisdom guide. However, I will try to address many of the common scams experienced by members of the Effect Network community. Please let me know if you know of one I should add to this resource.
Common spelling typos are used in creating account names that are similar to Exchange accounts.
In doing this, scammers can collect a great deal of passive income from people simply not paying attention to what they are typing before pressing the send/confirm buttons.
One to be aware of is kicoindoteos – do you see the error?
The ‘i’ is right next to the ‘u’ on the keyboard.
Note that the ‘i’ was selected and not the ‘y’ because of the natural way people type on a full keyboard. Be VERY careful when you are entering account names into sending addresses.
Telegram is generally used as the main form of communication for cryptocurrency projects.
Telegram is a hotspot for scammers. Those scummy scammers lurk everywhere. Scammers have infiltrated the chats and are just waiting to pounce on the unsuspected asking any question. Just ask a question and you will have at least one, if not more, private/direct messages offering support or help, or simply just wanting to say hello and get you engaged in conversations.
Be very mindful that you are messaging an official admin. In Effect Network telegram Jehudah is our go to guy. But if you aren’t paying attention, there are many fake Jehudahs ready to step in and help out. – one way to check if you are speaking with the real Jehudah is to be in the main chat where it is most obviously him, click on his picture and begin a message from there.
Admins will never dm you first.
Do not respond to any direct messages if you have not already established a relationship first in the public forum. And at all times remember Rule Number One! Even people you get to know very comfortably in social platforms are still strangers to you. Scams take all forms. And sometimes they come after a relationship has been established. So always refer to rule number 1.
No matter how much you think you have come to know someone online – You do not know them. You could be elicited from an empathy seeking soul and trust that they really need the financial support you could give them. Surely they will pay you back when they are able to. Assume they will not. So unless you are willing to ‘gift’ an amount to someone, just don’t financially help out.
If someone dm’s you to say ‘Hi’, just delete. If someone offers to help, just delete. If someone wants your help, send them to the support channel. @EFXSupport for Effect Network support, then help them there in public view.
Once you have been around a while, you will get to know online personalities. Even then, be cautious and follow rule number one.
There is no end to the creativity of scammers.
In short – understand what your keys/phrases are. Never expose your private keys. Never enter your private key into a website, or a link, or just anything (exception is creating a wallet with an existing account in a trusted wallet, such as Anchor or Metamask) and when feeling panicked, walk away.
Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Discord and any other social platform all present with common scams that read as though you will be given double your money back of what you first give to them. There are always comments following that support the win by participants. Of course, this is all a scam to get you to send money/crypto to that address. Just don’t – do not send crypto or any other form of money to any claim of doubled reciprocity or any other too-good-to-be-true claim!
In fact – Other than exchanges, the only person you should ever send any of your crypto to is to yourself. Your own accounts. Period. And for exchanges, make sure to be entering the correct address, and for EOS remember to include the memo when sending to an exchange. The memo is your individual account on the exchange
This section I’m going to call “ignorance” to encompass those things we don’t know that we should know, but because we don’t know these things we get into trouble because we panic when something happens that doesn’t make sense to us.
Many of us have been in the situation where we have gone into Scatter only to find that Scatter has updated and things are not right or even that our tokens just suddenly disappeared from our wallet. Completely gone! Or we’ve used a wallet that stopped giving support to EOS, such as Lynx, and it got all glitchy and our tokens disappeared. Panic sets in quite quickly. We try to stay calm. But we don’t know how to fix it. Our minds tell us that our tokens have been stolen, even if logic says otherwise. We are now in such a state that we don’t even think to check our accounts on bloks.io, where we’d see all our tokens safe and sound, and we jump right into Telegram to ask the kindly admins how to resolve our problem.
In our heightened state of mind we don’t realize that the admin we are speaking with direct messaged us first, not the other way around. We think we have dm’d the admin, because we know the rule that admins never dm first. But our minds are already not thinking clear. The helpful admin is giving us all sorts of instructions and we experience a psychologically manipulated laps of judgement and trust the admin. They are so helpful, trying to dig into our problem. When suddenly our brain becomes alert and questions why we would need to put in our ETH key to solve an EOS problem after we already dealt with Scatter. SHIT!
If only at the first feeling of panic we’d shut off the computer, walked away, and went back to it after a good sleep. Just walking away gives the brain a moment to realize that there was no reason to panic.
Scammers love panic.
Now, if we had been smart about our EOS keys before and had different owner and active keys (see community guides), we could go into our safe spot in the house, get the private owner key, go into bloks.io, and change our active key that we numbingly just handed over to a scammer. Moreover, our precious EFX and NFX were staked in the DAO, so phew, these tokens are saved. The scammer only managed to get a few IQ and BOX tokens before we changed the active private key on them. Thankfully, we didn’t go as far as to entre the ETH private key.
An even smarter thing to do would be to have all our private keys on our Ledger. (Except, in my opinion, the private owner key for EOS – that is kept separate and offline, just in case the ledger gets damaged or lost.)
At no point will your DOT, NEO, ETH, or BTC keys ever be needed to help you out with EOS.
REMEMBER to keep your Ledger and/or wallet seed or recovery phrase locked away in multiple safe locations. – I have my ledger seed and my EOS private owner key written down on multiple cards. One is in my fire/water safe at home. One is in my parent’s fire/water safe in a sealed envelope with extra copies of important documents. Get the idea.
Double-check your spelling and account numbers before you send anything. Many wallets have the option to store validated and commonly used addresses for you to simply select from.
Understand the permissions for your EOS account. By default both the owner and active keys are identical, but you really should change one, so that owner and active are different. The owner key has full permission to do anything and can change the owner and active keys. The active key has most permissions, but cannot change the owner Key. It is BEST to have them different, and have the Ledger as private active key for your general use.
Also, bloks.io is a blockchain explorer, but you can log in and it is also a wallet. Be very mindful that you treat bloks.io with the respect of a wallet. Not everything there should be shown publicly when you are logged in.
As a rule, screenshots from inside your wallet should not be done. Just don’t. Most people who are able to help won’t need you to show them pictures of your account in order to help you.
There are definitely challenges to creating and managing an EOS account. Supports for EOS are improving, but your best defense against scammers is to simply get to understand how EOS accounts functions. Once you really understand how EOS accounts work, (resources, permissions, active/owner, multi-sig, key pair generation, Ledger, etc.) the complexity fades and everything works really smoothly. Getting to the point of really understanding how everything works in EOS can be rather painful, but it is doable.
While managing accounts for Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is more simplistic in comparison to EOS, it is not risk free. Understanding how these accounts work also takes some understanding.
These resources from Trust Wallet community will be better for understanding the risks on BSC than what I could create for you here. Have a good read through the following resources about staying safe.
Trust Wallet Community
MetaMask Security
When it comes to avoiding being a victim of a scam, knowledge is your weapon! Be knowing – be safe.
And always remember rule number one!
Know that your tokens/coins are recorded on the Blockchain. If your keys are kept in a safe place, such as a Ledger, then your tokens are safe. Even if they do not show in a wallet, check the blockchain explorer. For EOS that is . On occasion wallets go through updates and the custom tokens need to be re-entered. The tokens are simply not showing, they are not gone.
Take the time to learn. Understand how the wallet works. Understand how to read the blockchain explorer, .