26th November 2023 > > Decrypt scam.

tl;dr

An ongoing scam that is worth taking a few minutes to understand.

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Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Decrypt fraud

The news organisation Decrypt has been under an attack for weeks now from feral scumbag scammers.

The first iteration was an email offering an airdrop of Decrypt tokens, which do not exist. It was a basic fraud which asked you to input your private key to a website. Remarkably, there are some who fall for this blunt weapon attack, but I suspect the pickings are slim.

The latest version is a website that looks reasonably convincing at first sight:

Those of a greedy nature would concentrate on the $356 worth of “claimables” and might not notice that isn’t a real word. If that passed someone by, they might also not notice that the menu option top left doesn’t work, and neither does the log-in button top right (partially cut-off in my screen shot).

The final test is easy. I put a random wallet address into the claim function and got this:

Yep, the same amount of “claimables”.

If you did follow through and click on the “Claim now” button, you would be asked to connect your MetaMask wallet and then be told to authorise receipt of the tokens.

But that isn’t what would happen. You would simply be signing a message to drain your wallet of all its funds (*).

…

Two key lessons.

Always remain sceptical.

But be practical too.

Only ever interact with non-trusted websites and dApps with a burner MetaMask wallet with a minimum number of coins to pay gas fees. If the worst happens, your losses will be limited to a few dollars at most.

Remember – your crypto stash should be secured using a Ledger Nano X (or S) which should only ever interact with Coinbase or Binance for receiving and sending coins, or dApps that have the Ledger seal of approval for staking purposes. That way, your funds cannot be scammed away.

…

I had another one of these feral scumbags on the phone the other day.

The conversation started with his commentary about how my bank had stopped lots of fraudulent transactions to my benefit. Nice, but honestly, I would be mightily surprised to be called about every scam that these criminals try to perpetrate.

With my suspicions aroused, I kept him talking for a long time.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, I was then asked to open my banking app to stop the latest fraud which was to spend £487.39 at Selfridges.

The chap (I stick to the old-fashioned idea that one’s combination of chromosomes are determined just shortly after conception, and not randomly assigned at birth, an entirely different discussion to the one about gender. Cancel me if you wish) told me that the bank cannot refund me the money for this transaction until AFTER I had approved it.

When I called him a feral scumbag whose father (there’s that old chromosome prejudice of mine on display again) would not recognise him, he started calling me all sorts of unpleasant names, names I cannot repeat in a family friendly publication such as the CCC. He wasted a lot of his time on me.

A small victory, but nonetheless a good victory, for those of us who are proper citizens.

…

(*) I took the first step out of journalistic curiosity and rejected the second request. Oddly, my Fire extension did not give a warning about the scam, an issue I am following up on with the creators of Fire. I will let you know what they say, but this is not an excuse for being without Fire, as no defence is ever perfect. If you don’t have it, GIN (Get it Now!):

https://www.joinfire.xyz/