The ransom email
You open your mailbox and you find a strange email, from an unknown sender, calling you by name and threatening to make public videos or photos stolen from your webcam, of you in particular and spicy acts or situations. Some emails even have weird allusions to your most hidden perversions or your weird sexual tastes. Don’t panic. It’s just a scam.
In the email, the sender threatens to put this hot material online and send it to all your contacts, letting you know that he has infected your PC and that he has stolen your email address book data. In 48 hours you will have to pay a sum in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, to an address in the email.
Behind these emails there are scammers. in almost all cases your pc has not been infected nor has it been hacked. They simply send emails using databases stolen from the big providers and try to fish in the pile, given the very high amount of visits on the various porn sites in the world.
You may find attachments in these emails, obviously do not download or install anything but simply trash them.
Ponzi scheme
The Ponzi scheme derives its name from its founder, Carlo Ponzi, an Italian immigrant to the United States who, between the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century, invented this type of fraud, probably the biggest contribution made by Italy to the world of fraud. Ponzi is in the hall of fame of world scammers.
The Ponzi scheme is based on the promise of earnings in an investment that has well above average earnings in a very tight time frame. In effect, this investment is returned with the negotiated sum of earnings, making the public believe that the investment system really works. Word spreads and by word of mouth other “investors” are pushed to invest. To push even more to raise money, those who bring other people receive bonuses, cash prizes and higher earning percentages. Money continues to be distributed in cascades to the first who entered the investment, fomenting the perception of the functioning of the investment system.
The scheme is interrupted only when the first in the chain runs away with the bag, or if the refund requests exceed the new payments entrance.
This system is based solely on greed and the desire to make easy money quickly. The financial ignorance of the people, combined with the thirst for money, makes this scam working.
in fact, the product to sell is perfect but it does not exist and the only real push is to become a promoter to bring in as many people as possible to increase their personal earnings with bonuses for adding new followers
We must try not to be greedy and to understand that quick and easy money does not exist. If they offer you a similar system, where the product is empty and you have to bring in acquaintances, you now know that it is a Ponzi scheme. Always do analysis on the company and the products offered
Guaranteed annuities are a different type of scam scheme, which are based on guaranteed returns with an impossible percentage in a very short time
For example, we have had experience with platforms that promised 10 percent revenue per day by simply downloading a small program or sending ethereums to some address.
The most blatant promised to double their capital in a month
These are absolutely fraudulent figures that have no way of existing.
The False ICOs pump and dump group
The scams also can happen during an ICO with the creation of a scam coins
Let’s recap what an ICO is.
ICO or Initial Coin Offering, is the initial offer of new tokens generally on the Ethereum platform. When a certain sum of Ethereum is sent to a defined address, the smart contract inherent in that address will send us the number of tokens defined for each ethereum sent to the sending address.
So participating in an ICO for an average user is very simple. It is just a matter of sending ethereum and seeing the corresponding tokens appear on the wallet.
The sending address of the ethereums is made clear on the official website of the crypto project, with all the information to read up on, the road map and the white paper.
As you can imagine, however, there are many weaknesses in this structure. Here are some examples that actually happened in the real world.
First of all, it happened that a hacker changed the ethereum address marked on the official website of the company that made the ICO. So the funds sent did not end up in the start-up wallet, but in the hacker’s wallet. These ethereums have been lost forever, because as you remember, there is no way to cancel transactions on the blockchain.
Another scam method applied was to create a clone site, identical in all aspect to the official site but with a different web address. The site had the only difference in the ethereum sending address, this referred to a wallet owned by the scammers. Also in this case, the ethereum sent were lost. An example above all, the fake scam sites that pretended to be the Telegram ICO.
Third method, the similar name. It happened that a Blockchain project was copied into the idea and a website was created with similar graphics but with a slightly different but very similar name. In this case, the careless investor would have confused the two projects and therefore would have sent the ethereums to the pirate site.
Another scam method using ICOs was the creation of ICOs for the sole purpose of putting scam tokens on the market that were used exclusively to create the pump and dump phenomenon on exchanges.
The situation is the following. The scam start-up presents you with a fantastic project that solves a small technological problem and promises a short-term development in other markets. The project appears solid and with interesting long term vision. This makes the ICO and the Ethereum collection a success. However, the team-owned tokens are not locked, so the team is free to sell on the market. Generally hype is created about the project and pushes for a sharp rise in the price on exchanges. This is the pump phase. As the price rises, the team without being noticed sells their tokens until they run out. At this point the dump phase takes place, where the project is abandoned and the price on the market collapses, the tokens without real use and value remain in the hands of the scammed investors and the creators of the start-up run away with the funds.
Learn more about scam in Part 3 here.