How Fraudsters Are Targeting the Gullible

Cryptocurrency fraudsters have developed a new tactic in the blockchain space where the would-be users of crime are the victims. The scam that was mainly identified on YouTube, are comments that are created to attract users with seed phrases to wallets holding thousand-dollars of cryptocurrencies.

How Crypto Scams Are Exploiting Seed Phrases to Lure Victims

The process looks simple to do but is actually anything but simple. These hackers regard themselves as skilled traders posing as beginners trying to find a way to trade from wallets with high volumes of stablecoins such as USDT in the Tron blockchain. They even expose the seed phrase of the wallet so that all the undesirables get lured into getting a hold of the wallet.

Inside the store, the “lucky” thief finds a wallet with up to $8, 000. But to withdraw the funds a small amount of Tron (TRX) is payable as gas fees which are charged in the network. When the thief wants to send TRX to the wallet, all their tokens are diverted to another wallet owned by the scammers.

Understanding the TRX Gas Fee Trap: A New Fraud Tactic

This is yet another sophisticated trap connected with the use of multi-signature wallets for which several approvals are needed for outgoing transactions. The gullible thief simply tries to withdraw the money and the poor guy ends up making the scammers even richer.

Kaspersky, a cybersecurity firm; said the operation was a sting operation aimed at immoral people and not ‘crypto users.’ 

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Tips to Stay Safe

Though individually this may result in relatively small losses per incident, but the overall operation shows that the crypto scams are becoming increasingly more complex, using mechanics inherent in the blockchain combined with psychological tricks to encourage and reward unethical behaviour.

Cybersecurity specialists advise crypto users who are interested in digital assets to refrain from usiing unknown seed phrases and generally have no interaction with wallets belonging to strangers.