Ethereum Scammers Are Milking "Naive" Cryptocurrency Users

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With the present state of cryptocurrencies combined with the emotional and psychological state it has plunged people into, anything is now believable. Right from “bitcoin would trade at $100,000” to “oh hey dogecoin is the coin of the future”. What surprises most is the fact that, people’s desperation is making them even more vulnerable than ever and yet others are not learning from these mistakes thus people get duped every single day. It is being reported that scammers are making huge figures in with US dollars as they are luring ethereum users to send money into their accounts.

This Was Way Simpler Than You Thought

These scammers are doing this by first of all creating counterfeit accounts of actual celebrities on social media, Twitter specifically, and then repeatedly tweeting the same messages of interesting “giveaways” promising you great returns.

People were asked to send quite small amounts of ethereum into certain advertised accounts and that afterwards they were going to be given back the same amounts and even more from the same accounts. What was more alarming were the messages that were tweeted; they all followed the same pattern save with different ethereum and fake Twitter accounts. Some of them followed this pattern

“We are donating 200 Ethereum to the ETH community! First 50 transactions with 0.2 ETH sent to the address below will receive 2.0 ETH in the address the 0.2 ETH came from.”

Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin … And The List Goes On

Most of these operations by the scammers used replicas of the twitter accounts of popular celebrities and influential people in the world. Majority of these activities were traced back to about two weeks ago. Here is a list of some of the names of the impersonating accounts.

Warren Buffet: @WarrenBuffert

CoinMarketCap: @coinmarketcap3

John McAfee: @officialnmcafee, @officialnmcafee

Coinbase: @coindase

Eric Choe: @CryptoChoe_

Elon Musk: @eonmusk, @elonnmuusk, @eIonmsuk

Vitalik Buterin: @VitallikButern, @VitallikButern

OmiseGo: @Omiise_Go

Nano Cryptocurrency: @nanocurrency

It is understood that the minds behinds these malicious schemes were able to get away with roughly 7.69 Ethereum, about $6,270 at the time of this writing. However, should we consider other factors like all missed ethereum wallets from now deactivated twitter accounts, the amount could have been higher.

Last 24 Hours Recorded The Most Active Transactions

For the two weeks this campaign had been active, it really didn’t make so much. However, within the hours of the night of February 6 into 7, it managed to rake in between 6.0 to 6.2 Ethereum of the total 7.69 Ethereum it made in total. Most of these funds came from the twitter faux accounts of Musk, Buterin, and McAfee. It is believed that Elon’s successful launch of his SpaceX rocket drew lots of attention to anything about him this week, something scammers capitalised on for their benefit.

This isn’t the first time we have heard of people being duped to send cryptocurrencies to false accounts that were advertised on social media platforms or websites. What really surprises every single time is how people still fall for such scams even when most of these social media accounts of the “celebrities” are not verified.

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