Crypto Scams to Avoid - 10 Tricks Scammers Use - YouTube

if you're new to the world of crypto i'm gonna  say it's pretty complicated just seven months ago  

i set up my very first metamask wallet and then  deposited some ethereum contrast that today i'm  

actually writing smart contracts but back then  i knew absolutely nothing about how many scams  

there were out there in fact i lost a decent  amount of money probably somewhere around five  

thousand dollars due to certain scams that i fell  prey to the cool thing about the blockchain is  

is that the information is available to everyone  so technically i could even share the transactions  

with you where i lost the money welcome to  whiteboard crypto the number one youtube channel  

for crypto education and here we explain topics of  the cryptocurrency world using analogies stories  

and examples so that you can easily understand  them in this video we're going to explain some of  

the most common crypto scams including one that's  so new you probably haven't even heard of it yet  

and of course how to avoid them so let's dig  into the top 10 worst scams inside the world  

wide web 3 that you might encounter number one  is any website asking for your private keys  

do you remember the first time you set up a crypto  wallet you probably didn't know if you were even  

doing things correctly and everything was really  complicated well at least it was for me scammers  

take advantage of this all the time the trick  is very simple they ask you for your personal  

information specifically for something called your  private key now it's really sad to me how many  

scammers out there take advantage of someone's  lack of knowledge and then try to get you to tell  

them your seed phrase by doing this they are  actually getting access to all of your crypto  

funds some of these scammers might say things like  hey i want to send you some money what's your key  

or even something like hey you just won one  whole ethereum tell us your seed phrase so we  

can deposit the funds in your account they'll  try every trick possible to fool newbies into  

giving them access to their funds when it comes  to crypto you actually get two keys a private key  

that you should never ever share and a public key  that is kind of like your email address this one  

you intentionally share many people confuse these  which leads them to getting scammed you can learn  

more about both of these by watching our video on  asymmetric encryption which is a complicated topic  

that we break down so simple your grandpa could  understand the next scam we have is number two  

asking to invest for you as a trusted creator so  the second trick is something that might be used  

to if you've looked down in the comments  sections below of some of my videos or if  

you're in any crypto discord or telegram servers  scammers will create a bot that seems official or  

try to impersonate a project specifically a team  member and then they will dm you so that they look  

official and they do this in hopes of scamming  you in some way one of the most common scams  

is the way that they ask for a hundred dollars and  then they'll turn it into two thousand dollars for  

you and give it back they're basically claiming  to invest your money for you now this happens  

all the time on my channel in fact i even messaged  one of these scammers to see how the scam worked  

and i want to say it very clearly right  now never reach out to someone you met in  

the comment sections on youtube especially if  they look like me i promise you it is not me  

once you reach out to one of these fake accounts  a scammer will send you a dm moments later saying  

that they're a project team member and that they  can assist you they often change their username  

or their profile picture to impersonate a real  team member on discord or youtube for the case of  

discord you can do something really simple you can  check the actual discord handle and check if it  

matches the information of the impersonated team  member for example mine is practical psychology  

9608 and no one can copy that discord handle for  youtube it could be something as simple as just  

clicking on the account and seeing that they have  zero subscribers or no videos uploaded remember no  

legit project team member will ever give you a  whatsapp telephone number and we will never ask  

to invest your money for you scam number three  is burning a percentage of a token or sending it  

to a dev wallet now another scam well at least  it's kind of a scam is that token developers  

will implement something that is called a burn  feature they will say every time this token is  

traded a portion of the trade is burned forever so  an example of this is that if you were to send 100  

tokens to your friend five tokens would be burned  forever or at least sent to an account that nobody  

has access to this makes you believe that one day  there won't be very many of these tokens out there  

and if you buy now and then just hold the value of  your tokens should automatically increase well let  

me tell you something if my dog ate something that  one day turned his poop orange that might be the  

entire day in his whole life where his poop was  orange but just because it's scarce and it only  

happened once doesn't mean it has value nobody's  gonna want my dog's orange colored poop for it to  

have value other people have to want that orange  poop for it to have value keep this in mind with  

tokens that have a deflationary feature especially  if that's all that they offer scam number four  

is something that i saw actually a few days ago  here's the setup someone contacts you and says  

something like this hey i live in china and they  just made crypto illegal so i want to get rid of  

my wallet so i don't get in trouble here's my seed  phrase you can donate the money or do whatever you  

want with it and maybe have some for yourself  then after that message they will actually send  

you a real seed phrase to an actual account with  actual money in it the one that i personally saw  

had three thousand dollars worth of tether but  here's the trick to get the tether out you must  

first have some ethereum in the account to pay the  gas fee so if you're kind of smart you'll think hm  

i'll just send it to my own account to do that  you have to deposit like 50 of ethereum so you  

can actually transact the money out of the  account well it happens to be that the fee  

to transact a token is like fifty dollars while  the fee that send ethereum is like ten dollars so  

you deposit fifty dollars and then immediately the  scammer sends the money to their account profiting  

forty dollars when i say immediately i mean really  fast like within ten seconds they have a computer  

running a program that checks if there's funds  in that account and then automatically sends it  

to their ethereum account so there is absolutely  no way for you to get the three thousand dollars  

out of there now the sad part of this is the  blockchain is available for everyone to see so  

you can literally look at the account on etherscan  and see that 30 people were scammed around 2  

800 in total and if we get enough comments below  maybe i'll explain it in more detail but in short  

if someone gives you their seed phrase and the  wallet has money in it do not deposit money for  

any reason whatever money you deposit in there  consider gone i'm also going to say technically  

if they were in china and they didn't want to be  connected to the account they wouldn't have to  

give it to someone ethereum accounts don't work  like that it's just bad logic scam number five  

is a smart contract bug so another trick that  scammers use which you may not even be aware of  

is a bug where people can buy a token but then  they can't sell it now i know what you're thinking  

how is this possible well there are actually three  ways of doing this first when the developers are  

creating the token they simply disable the  approve function in the erc20 token contract  

basically meaning decentralized exchanges cannot  get your approval for putting the token to be  

sold the second way is to add a rebase function  into the token contract so at the moment you try  

to sell the token you'll lose 99 of it third  they could easily write a few lines of code  

that prevents the token from being sold to a dex  only bought or supplied this means a lot of money  

coming into the project and none is going out  making it a perfect situation for scammers to run  

away with all their money technically they could  make it so when you sold your token the money you  

would have received goes to the developers also  now to sum this up i'm not saying you should  

learn how to read smart contract code but i will  say before making any buy over a thousand dollars  

you should find a friend who can number six is  fishing on fake websites the next technique is  

something you really need to be careful of  and keep an eye out whenever you discover a  

new project or you browse using a new device or a  computer some scammers will create a website that  

is an exact copy of a specific crypto project  that you actually want to invest in and they'll  

do it with the same user interface and the same  information on it the only things different from  

this fake website to the real one are two things  number one the domain because scammers can't  

use the same domain as a real website they will  actually create a new one that is almost the same  

as the real one for example scammers could create  a fake whiteboard crypto website switching it from  

the dot com to the dot org dot net dot phi dot x  y z or any other top level domain they could also  

add an s to the end like whiteboardcryptos.com or  to move the e whitboardcrypto.com anyways the idea  

here is that they change this little detail so  people don't realize they're on the wrong website  

the second thing they change is the smart  contracts and this is the scammy part the  

scammers could change the smart contracts code so  that if you were to interact with it they could  

get access to your funds in your wallet leading  you to losing all your money in fact they can  

make this contract do literally anything which  is why it's really important to only connect to  

applications that you trust personally something i  do to make sure i always click on the right links  

is to go to trusted websites like coin gecko or  coin market cap you can also check the official  

project's twitter account to find the right links  and then bookmark those links so you always use  

the correct one scam number seven is fake icos  so you know how kickstarter projects or really  

any crowdfunding projects get the money they show  their product that's yet to be manufactured and  

then people fund the project in exchange for a  great deal maybe they'll get two products for  

the price of one or maybe a special edition  version in crypto we have something similar  

and it's called an ico or initial coin offering  and it works as a way to gather a lot of money  

from investors so that they can start the project  well fake icos are a really easy way for scammers  

to present a project to investors with absolutely  no intention of actually creating it and then just  

run away with their investors money how it usually  works is that scammers present a really nice  

innovative revolutionary project to the investors  they then ask for money to kick off their project  

and lure inexperienced investors in with  a juicy roi like a hundred percent or  

a thousand percent and this leads to the  investors giving their money but then the  

scammers just run away with it and because many  projects in the crypto space are not regulated  

unfortunately the scammers pretty much get away  with it a good thing to do before investing in a  

crypto project is to look for legit white papers  a project's timeline or good tokenomics to back  

your investment don't just look at the great  user interface or the juicy roi we actually  

have a video coming up on how to specifically  do research on a coin or a token so hit that  

subscribe button and turn on notifications  for that absolute monster of a helpful video  

scam number eight is called hidden whales you  know how i always say to be careful with projects  

with low liquidity or a low market cap because  they can easily be manipulated by a whale well  

a whale is anyone holding a high percentage of the  tokens out there and because of this they have the  

ability to sell all their tokens at once causing  a crash anyways since this is kind of obvious and  

since scammers are aware that people will actually  look at it before investing money into a project  

scammy projects have now found other ways to  hide the fact that they hold most of the token  

instead of having one wallet with all the money  they simply split it between multiple wallets  

for example if the total liquidity of a project  was half a million dollars and maybe the team  

was holding fifty thousand dollars which would be  ten percent of the entire project they would then  

split the money into ten different wallets each  wallet holding five thousand dollars this way  

they make it look like a safer and legit project  now i do wanna say here you can easily check the  

early transactions of a project's initial tokens  but it is a lot more work required by you and  

i've noticed that a lot of projects have started  doing this because people won't do any more work  

other than just look at the token holders page on  etherscan they'll simply look at it and say that  

there's no single whale wallets and then they'll  invest here's a tip you can check the blockchain  

you can actually spend an hour just looking  around and seeing where the early money is going  

it's very easy it's very simple it just takes  some time maybe i'll make a video on how to do  

it later but i just want you guys to be aware that  this stuff actually happens again the simplest way  

to make sure devs do not hold most of the token is  to simply look at the first transactions and where  

the money originally got distributed if the first  transaction is sent to a lot of multiple addresses  

this is not a good sign scam number 9 is  psychologically making you think that a  

smaller price is easier to be able to hit a higher  price now this one is technically not a scam but  

it's kind of tricky when a project launches the  tokenomics are established by the project's team  

developers get to answer the questions what is  the max supply of the token what's the initial  

price of the token and yes they can set that  and who gets the early tokens all of this stuff  

is decided in advance now something quite a few  scammy projects do is simply print a very large  

amount of tokens that way the price stays low  even if there's a lot of money behind the entire  

project between you and me owning 100 tokens at  one dollar each is the same as owning a hundred  

thousand tokens worth a tenth of a penny right  well in people's mind having more tokens with a  

low price is way more tempting psychologically  because it makes them think with a price this  

low it'll easily double or triple or 10x or maybe  even 100x in value along with this they also get  

to feel like they're owning a ton of tokens for  these investors it's cool for them to say that  

they own a billion tokens but in reality going  from a tenth of a penny to a dollar is just as  

difficult as another token going from one dollar  to a thousand dollars so this trick is really  

about making people think their gain opportunity  is higher than it is which makes people invest  

more in the token so make sure you don't invest  in a project only because the price of the token  

is low because if you do it might be a game of  limbo and you're gonna see how low it can go  

lastly number 10 gambling with your trust the last  scam is something we saw with the latest hottest  

scam the squid games token these developers  capitalized on the fact that a show called squid  

games became very popular and they rode the hype  train using the same name so that that way they  

could get a lot of attention but this is not the  trick i'm wanting to talk about to create a false  

sense of safety they actually created a fake team  yeah you heard me right they created around 10  

fake profiles with fake bios to make it seem like  the project had a great and solid team behind it  

they went so far as to add computer generated  pictures of people in fact people that did  

not even exist just to make the project seem more  legit the only thing i want to say about this one  

is that crypto scams are getting more and more  persuasive so you'll have to work a lot harder  

when making a decision on a project wrapping this  video up if you're wanting to invest in a project  

there are really only two things that i suggest  you to do the first is to go to a website called  

rugdock.io and what this website does is analyze  projects and if there's any obvious possibilities  

of exploits or scams in the contract code they'll  let you know how high of a risk it is to invest  

in it i'll put the link to this website in the  description it's very helpful the other thing  

i can suggest is that you join our discord and  our team will actually look at the project for  

you and point out any obvious risks obviously we  can't tell you if it's a good bet or not but we  

can tell you if it hits anything on this list or  if we find any new bugs you'll have to sign up to  

our newsletter to get access to that discord and  you can find that easily at whiteboardcrypto.com  

one more thing i do is research the project  a ton before investing i suggest reading the  

white papers and the tokenomics you know the  basics but there's a few more advanced things  

i do i actually created this really cool ultimate  research pdf which is a step-by-step guide that  

shows you exactly how to look into a token and  technically it's only available to whiteboard  

crypto club members but i'll be sharing some ideas  from it in a future video so definitely make sure  

you're subscribed anyways thank you guys so much  for watching we hope you enjoyed this video we  

really hope that you learned something and most  of all we hope to see you in our next video

you