“When I received a notification about a new token airdrop for which I qualified, I was excited. The message was from a well-known crypto forum I frequented and it included a link to claim my tokens by connecting my wallet. I clicked on the link which took me to a page that looked professional and consistent with other airdrop websites I’d used before. The instructions were simple: connect your wallet, authorise airdrop and receive your tokens. But just before continuing, I decided to do a quick search on the project name to find out more information. That’s when I found a thread warning users about this particular airdrop. It turned out that the website was a phishing site designed to steal private keys and empty wallets. If I had connected my wallet, the crooks would have been able to access all my funds. I narrowly avoided a devastating loss, but it reminded me how sophisticated these scams can be.”

Of all the testimonials piling up on Scamcrypto.net, the rendezvous for cryptocurrency scammers, Fiona M.’s is almost the most positive: the internet user seems to have lost nothing of her small savings.

But the subject is still the same. A bunch of geeks decide to launch a new cryptocurrency. They need technological skills, a website and... a ‘prospectus.’ Unlike prospectuses for other financial products, these are rarely the responsibility of those who produce them. Next, the team has to come up with a story and promise that part of the tokens created by the technology will be returned to the ‘investors.’ Sometimes investors have to meet certain conditions, sometimes they have to already hold currencies such as Bitcoin or Ether, sometimes they have to share content and attract new investors, and sometimes they have nothing to do but wait for surprises.

Addresses to watch out for

The prospect of these ‘tokens’ increasing in value, according to the famous Ponzi scheme--the higher the demand for these tokens, the more people are prepared to spend their savings on them--is like a honey pot. All too often, ‘investors’ still don’t read the prospectus and aren’t even interested in the personalities that make up the ‘bunch of geeks’ or the fees that apply, for example, to the resale of their tokens--there are a thousand possible scenarios.

And they transfer their funds to a crypto wallet address, the length of which varies according to the blockchain. For example, Bitcoin addresses are generally between 26 and 35 characters, numbers or letters, and start with a “1,” “3” or “bc1” to indicate different formats. Ethereum uses 42-character addresses starting with “0x,” which indicates that they are in hexadecimal format. Hackers and other ill-intentioned people, as in the case of phishing, use addresses that are close to the original ones.

Before sending funds, it would be useful to be able to check whether the address that “the band of geeks” is going to give has already been used in a fraudulent context. Luxembourg-based fintech Scorechain, already one of the world’s two major players in transaction traceability, is launching a solution: . The bot is compatible with a wide range of blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, Solana, BinanceSmart Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Ripple, Tezos and Litecoin. By entering the address, users can obtain a range of information, including a danger score.

This article was originally published in .