📢 Airdrop Phishing Scams:😱😱😱
✍️Airdrop scams are tricks that use fake websites, emails, and social media accounts to fool people into claiming a fake airdrop. This usually involves convincing users to connect their wallets to harmful smart contracts or share their private keys to claim the 'airdrop'. Once they do this, their wallet is emptied of all its contents.
🔥Key Takeaways:
In crypto, airdrops are marketing programs that incentivize cryptocurrency enthusiasts to support a project or reward them for their past contributions to the project or related projects.
Foul players exploit the excitement of cryptocurrency investors to benefit from airdrops in order to trick them into granting wallet access through airdrop scams.
• As airdrops get more lucrative, airdrop scams also get more rampant and sophisticated, from fake profiles to fake websites and phishing emails.
🔥What Are Airdrop Scams?
Airdrop scams revolve around fake airdrops that don't exist and aren't approved by the protocol's team. However, they go beyond just this. Airdrop scams are also efforts by fraudsters to take advantage of investors' eagerness to join reward programs, putting them at risk of having their wallets emptied.
In these scams, a fraudster pretends to be a genuine protocol or influencer, promoting a fake airdrop website that asks users to connect their wallets. These sites often look legitimate, mimicking the real site's design. They may also ask for a user's private key or seed phrase. Once users connect their wallets to claim the 'airdrop', they receive an error message, and the scammer empties their wallets.
🔥How Do Airdrop Scams Work?
As mentioned above, airdrop scams pretend to be real sites to trick investors into lowering their guard and giving wallet access (or even sharing their seed phrase).
Besides promoting a fake site on social media, investors may also come across airdrop scams when they find new tokens in their wallet that they didn't buy. When they check a block explorer like BscScan to see how they got the tokens, they see an error message that tries to send them to another site to 'claim' the tokens before they can access them.
🔥Examples of Airdrop Scams:
Let's look at some common airdrop scam methods and what they involve.
Fake Profile Marketing Airdrop:
Celestia recently held an earndrop program, which led to many fake profiles offering users a last chance to get the TIA airdrop. In the screenshot below, a scammer made a fake profile that looks similar to the real one (though the handles are different: calestiatoken vs. CelestiaOrg).
🔥To promote the account, they announced a 10 million TIA token airdrop to 1,200 users who retweet the post and share their ETH wallet address. By this, the account gains viewership and an overall growth in relevance. It is also potentially the first step in an airdrop token claim scam, where the 1,200 accounts will receive a certain amount of tokens, but in order to retrieve them, they’ll have to connect their wallet to a site.
🔥Impersonation of Popular Accounts
In this scam, the fraudster mimics a well-known account and tries to deceive unsuspecting investors by promoting fake airdrops.
🔥The screenshot above shows a fake account and the original account. The difference is noticeable only if you closely examine the handle (OilimqioCrypto vs. OlimpioCrypto). Additionally, the fake account's profile picture is framed with a circle, while the real account's profile picture is framed with a hexagon.
The fake account also posts a tweet with a link that looks similar to the original account's website. Notice the difference between earndrop.io (the real site) and eansrdrop.io (the fake site). Unlike the real website, where registered users paste their wallet addresses to find unclaimed airdrops, the fake site immediately asks for a wallet connection. According to Olimpio, once the wallet is connected, the fake site scans all chains and detects tokens.
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