OK so if you've been around in crytoland for a while you've undoubtedly seen these Twitter ETH giveaway scam posts doing the rounds. You know the ones I'm talking about, they have become ubiquitous in Twitter. The scammers latch onto a post from a legit Twitter account, then they post replies saying "To celebrate X Y or Z, we are giving away XXXXXX ETHs"
I've seen these so often and the returns they promise are so outlandish and simply ridiculous that I wondered if people actually do fall for them? Ridiculous as it may seem, clearly the fact that scammer persist with this scam must mean they are making returns from doing it. And so I dug a little deeper into one of the examples I came across today so see what the deal was.
This is one that can came across today. There were not one but two giving scam postings in the same Tweet stream.
Here's the most prominent one:
Fake Tweets, fake replies
That's quite a big promise. I mean let's pause and consider it for a moment, "Send between 0.5-10 ETH and get 100 ETH back" how amazing is that?!?!?
I know, I know... this is the world of crypto where huge returns like 1000x CAN and DO happen (but not usual overnight, not even in cryptoland!!!!) and where we get return on investments that stock markets and ETFs and hedge funds can only wet dream about, but come on, these promised returns are ridiculous even by crypto standards - even puts Bitconnect to shame :-)
How much is 100 ETH worth today? $525,000 is the answer. Simply by sending over 0.5 ETH (~$375) so the scam post says. In fact, this one found on the PIVX Twitter stream even says that you can send over ETH as may times as you like and earn "up to 100eth per transaction" in return. Again, think about the reality of this promise. By doing several transactions, you could make millions through this scheme. I mean come on.
ETH giveaway page is faked too
In the legit looking post, we get a link to a fake page too. In the case of the one above, you get to a page that looks like this:
Let's take a closer look at the page. There's an QR code and the ETH address (0x1b8ee5cB5520ea3d12F64a8973c2A4F0cbcB1564) to send your hard earned ETH to. Looks normal enough. Below that is a progress bar showing how many ETHs had been send to this address and how many ETHs are left in the giveaway.
Even more interestingly, below that is a table of the most recent transactions to this ETH address. The table is constantly updated with details of new payments. You can see for yourself all the payments in and out of this address. I can see a payment for 1.010 ETH and for that, the sender got back 11 ETH - wow!!! That's amazing.
I have to admit, the scammers are doing a pretty good job of this. They have gone to a lot of trouble to setup and run these scams with elaborate fake posts and pages with ETH blockchain explorers on them. The fake transactions even updates periodically. If I didn't know better I probably would have been convinced by this page and all the other comments in the Twitter stream.
You can fake but you can't hide in a public blockchain
At least you can't hide what you are up to as far as movement of funds are concerned. So the transparency of the ETH blockchain is the scammers own undoing. The ETH blockchain is a fully transparent public blockchain that anybody can query and look up. So with that, I can take the scammer's fake ETH wallet address and look up the details in a proper legitimate ETH blockchain explorer like Etherscan.io.
There I find the real picture of what's happening with their ETH wallet which paints a very different picture from the one shown in the scam wallet page. Different and much smaller transactions, although some are still large enough for the losses to be painful. And lo and behold, there's only money going in and hardly anything coming out and certainly not to the wallets where the funds came from.
Here you can see that at the time of writing, 15 transactions had been sent to this scam wallet with a total of 18 ETH to a value of $13,584. That's not bad returns for not a lot of work by the scammers. They probably have built template for these scam pages and much of the infrastructure is likely to be be automated or at least semi-automated meaning there's little effort required to mount a new campaign.
With these return on investment and little chance of redress, no wonder this scam continues to persist.
Twitter celebs, join the "Not giving away ETH" movement
So it is no wonder why, one of the most popular Twitter titles that well known Crypto Celebs wear on their Twitter accounts contains the text "Not giving away ETH" Vitalik Buterin's Twitter account clearly wears this badge with pride.
By the looks of things, this simple trick seems to work pretty well too. I took a quick look around Vitalik's Twitter stream and it's kept the scammers away for the most part. This is probably why more and more legitimate accounts are wearing this "No giveaway" badge with pride.
If it's too good to be true...
You know the story, if it sounds too good to be true, then 99.999% of the time, it probably isn't - even in cryptoland.
This type of thing is clearly one of many potential landmines that crypto newbies need to be made aware of. Examples of this need these scams need to be shutdown quickly as soon as they pop up.
Moderators/owners of Twitter accounts need to monitor for these types of Tweets and report them using the built in system so they can be dealt with or blocked.
Thanks for reading and please share to help raise awareness
Alright folks, that's it for now. If this post even helps to save a single person from falling for these scams, then that's a great achievement.
Please share this post if you found it useful or interesting.
You're most welcome comment and share you opinions and experiences with these scams... as long as you are not giving away ETH, because I know you are not that crazy!
Yeah is crazy i cant belive people still "buy" this.. i guess this transacctions are made by themselfs so when a newb checks thinks "ok... people is doing it"...
but good job keeping people in allert!
Thanks for the kind comment @beiker
That's the thing, all the transactions on the scam page are fake - it's just a bit of JavaScript and CSS magic. All the links for transactions and wallets point back to the scam page itself.
The transactions in the real scam address looks pretty real to me. If the scammers were really smart, they would set up several real ETH accounts and then send and receive ETH with the scam wallet so that they show up on a real blockchain explorer as transactions. Maybe they might do this in version 2.0 of the scam :-)
Earnings (as reported on Etherscan) by the scammers have gone up to 19 ETH (>$15K) now. People are obviously still falling for this.