My Personal Crypto Encyclopedia About Crypto Security, Rugpulls, Hacks, Frauds & Scams

Consantly writing about scammy projects, dodgy crypto players and done my best to collated the basic guide on “how to avoid scams”! Stay vigilant and always DYOR!

I hope 2024 and the next years will be free of drama like the 2020 bancrypcy and huge crypto eartquakes! No Luna, no FTX, no rugpulls please!

• To avoid losing money, the number 1 rule is ... don't be stupid. No one gets rich overnight.
• Treat everything with caution and go through the whitepapers. This may save you from a later disappointment. The important details are mentioned in the whitepapers, such as the strategy, goals and roadmap.
• The Deus Ex! Who is behind the project? If the coin is backed by visible people, the chance for scam exits and loopholes is smaller. This doesn't mean that fake profile can't be created to back certain projects.
• Verification is mandatory before investments, especially if you don't want to lose a large amount of money.
• Only invest money that you can afford to lose
• Does the sale process looks legit? A quick and forced sale is the first sign of something fishy. If the ICO is to good to be true... it's not true.

This year started horribly for me … as my wallet was drained of $35,000! Well.... 2024 didn't started as good as I wanted! Just dropping some tl;dr now and will write a full post-mortem article whenever I will feel better!

PVM got "hacked" not once but twice, and lost his big bag of crypto! Got drained of $POOL, $OP, $ACX and all my USDC!

First time it happened after I completed three ACX to USDC swaps on Velodrome, with the third one failing. Didn't considered that suspicious but few hours later I seen that all the remaining $ACX and $OP got drained! Boom... $8,000 worth of crypto gone!

Was 19th of December and opened a ticket on Velodrome, which got answered not that fast. Took them two weeks to tell me is "less likely to be after the interaction with Velo.

Done a handful of transactions and got drained again! Boom... all my USDC gone along with the $POOL. Nearly $19,000 of stable and 3000 $POOL tokens lost on the 2nd of January!

Happy new year! Time to touch some grass and keep telling myself that loosing $30,000 is not that bad! Life goes on!

Scammers never rest! Yes, it's the ugly true. We had a great chat on Telegram about how they had to up their game and constantly create new staff and new methods to trick people. Even if you do your fair part and avoid school boy errors, you can still become a victim, as the hacks on DeFi projects and protocols are on the rise.

Have a look at what major scams and hacks happened in the last months and you will see that you can never take to many safety measures. Twitter accounts getting hacked, Kucoin attacked, OKEx staff fraud, DeFi projects doing exit scams, police ignoring frauds and lots of vulnerability exploits, stealing money from Akropolis, Harvest Finance, Origin USD, Pickle Finance, and many more!

The Luna crash was massive, same with Sam’s FTX nightmare! What about the USDC depeg? That could have been the end for crypto sector!

I started collecting and saving my interaction with scammers and dodgy people, and I will include in this category those who steal intellectual property and commit copyright infringements.

This one is so funny! The guys are such low level crooks, copy pasting the whole article, and using even my referral links, thumbnails and pictures. This Brave Browser article was stolen with a spelling mistake in the image, one which I noticed later on.

Who had a good banter with me about the downfall of Atomic Wallet? If you did… you will remember the post and how many people joined the debate. Mike23 made it his!

Lets move on to emails, where inheritances from the Nigerian Uncle is more common than rain in England.

This time my help was required from a damsel in distress. Suzzy from Cote D'Ivoire needs my help to move $6.5 million cause her country is not save, and they hate cocoa factories. I will be compensated with 15% of the amount. The hope of survival depends on me!

As an author, I receive monthly payments for the paperback books or kindle books I sell. Somehow this guys got my details, so someone breached the data privacy, and asked me to update my bank details. In a helpful manner, they even provided a quick link to make my job easier.

Social media is no stranger to scammers, as Facebook is full of unique offers for crypto investors. The smarter ones are now approaching people on Telegram and Discord.

I don't know about you, but I personally hate to be approached by strangers. You can see Johnny Boy trying to help me win some fair money on this roulette website, being ready to prove me how genuine this is. I don't trust people who disrespects my home planet of Tatooine.

Discord is another shady place, where dodgy people are looking for their next victim, sharing super offers, crypto investment opportunities or just communities where we can build/grow together.

This guy has a great casino offer, with lots of free spins but no pretzels. I love pretzels. And man.... why are you shouting your name?

Carrie has an invite for me, a nice community where we build together. Together with who? It's a second invite from her, maybe because I ignored the first offer.

I know this carrie is not real because I often chat with the real one on LiveJasmine. Use a capital letter in your name to look less fake.

This click bait made me read the headline, cause you have to admit it, if this guy become rich, we all have a chance. I just assumed the rest of the article is full of bullshit and lies so I moved on.

Now this kind of stuff is promoted content. Such a pathetic method used to attract noobs to click. You prefer Asian girls or how to make $5 Bitcoin in a fortune?

had over 2 Bitcoin five years ago and now I have 0.03 so maybe I will click the link. If you go for clickbait and greed… you will certanly lose money!

The globalisation of technology is to blame for this one as well. Everyone can now own a device with Internet. This is the real reason why spammers and scammers are going... to the moon. This guy is suggesting random people to invest in a random thing! Jump on guys!

The 2020 reality is that the Internet of things is over saturated with dodgy people trying to scam others. Without any exaggeration, I am invited in 4-5 Telegram trading groups, I am getting about a handful of direct messages regarding crypto opportunities on each platform I am using.

The email scams are getting better and better, and more difficult to recognise. Stay alert, think twice before opening amazing offers and make sure you double check every crypto transaction you plan to do.