Scammers Never Sleep! How to Safely Contribute
By: Ubcoin. Cryptocurrency Reimagined
Tags: Ubcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum, Ubcoin Media, Bitcoin

Scammers are modern pirates and create trouble for all ICOs! Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to deal with scammers because of the anonymity of the cryptoworld participants and the resourcefulness of scam-schemes.

There are scammers who try to attract investors’ money. They come up with an alleged project (however, the truth is, their plans end there and there’s no doubt the project will be implemented), they create a website, WP, find fake advisers, collect money and disappear. About how not to fall for their bait, Therefore, we wrote the article Tips for contribitors, which described in detail about the important aspects novice ITO contributors should observe.

Another kind of fraudulent threat is hacking, when investors’ money is stolen during the real ICO from the purses of the project and/or investors.

Each project before and during the ICO/ITO warns its contributors about security measures, but scammers can be very smart and resourceful, and come up with more and more ways to steal money. The Ubcoin team is diligent in securing the money of its contributors. We created this article to inform you how to safely contribute.

1 — Hacking wallets and exchanges — the most dangerous and devastating kind of scam. Quite recently, on April 24, 2018, the leader among the electronic purses MyEtherWallet was forced to announce the phishing crack of its DNS servers. (https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/988818214950858754). Сompany representatives told that several DNS servers, replaced by hackers, redirected users to a phishing site where the funds from their wallets disappeared after inputting the personal key. As a precaution against scam, MyEtherWallet recommended its customers run an offline copy of their wallet, make sure they have a MyEtherWallet SSL certificate and use hardware wallets. Subsequently, MEW said that only users of the DNS server Google Public were hacked. “We strongly recommend switching to Cloudfare.” — MEW also posted on Twitter.

By the way, this is not the first attempt on MEW. In December 2017 a paid application MyEtherWallet appeared in the AppStore and for a week it was included in the top 10 financial applications. However, Team MEW said that this fake application has no relation or connection with them!

Repetitive hacking of exchanges is the same type of scam. Starting with Mt. Gox in 2014, hackers regularly try (and they sometimes get it) to steal tokens from different exchanges, finding a weak spot in each of them. In January 2018 from accounts in Coincheck 500 million NEM (about $ 400 million) were lost. Scammers can potentially do this to wallets connected to the Internet. This was exactly the mistake of Coincheck, who did not transfer the clients’ coins to “cold” offline wallets.

A few words need to be said about hardware wallets. These offline stores allow you to keep private keys without access to the Internet, which reduces the possibility of hacking them, even on unprotected computers. For better security, you can make a backup copy of your keys and store them in a safe place in case of a breakdown of the computer and other unforeseen situations.

2 — Hacking the site during the ICO and replacing the real wallet of the project with a fake one. Unlike the first case, money is lost by the ICO project and its investors.

Usually the scammers wait for the moment X (the beginning of the fundraising of ETHs), break the site, change the address of the wallet and wait until the project team notices it, hoping to pump out as much as possible of the investors’ funds. There are many such examples, and often these ICOs end in failure. Although, there are exceptions.

Quite an ordinary story occurred in July 2017 during the ICO with CoinDash, when the hacker changed the address and stole 37,000 ETH. Miracles began in a couple of months on September 19, 2017, when the CoinDash wallet received 10,000 ETH from the unknown addressee, and on February 23, 2018 another 20,000 ETH. The irony was that the rate of ETH since the ICO CoinDash grew more than 2 times and the scammer returned an amount much more than he abducted! We can call him Crypto Robin Hood, but unfortunately, there are no other stories about a scam with a happy ending known to the Ubcoin team!

After ICO, The DAO, one of the largest projects, raised $ 150 million. (https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide/) Scammers stole about $ 50 million in Ethereum, taking advantage of the vulnerability in the code of The DAO. Developers of crypto currency, incl. Vitaliy Buterin, took a complex and controversial decision that split Ethereum into 2 competing currencies (Ethereum Classic and Ethereum) and made a hard fork of the blockchain to return the funds to the rightful owners. This event brought serious reputational losses to the creator of Ethereum and the currency as a whole. For today Ethereum capitalization is growing and is on the 2nd place right after Bitcoin (https://ttrcoin.com/coins/), but taking into account all these disagreements and imperfections of the code, the team needs to constantly work with Ethereum, so that competitors do not get ahead.

3 — Hunting for potential ICO investors in social messengers. Another type of scam is attempts to lure participants from official project groups into fake ones.Scammers often lure interested persons to join their phishing sites. Scammers pose as “sheriffs” and “administrators”, send personal messages about the old chat being broken or dangerous and suggests switching to a new, safer one. They can send personal message numbers of purses and assure that this is the right wallet for investment. They can offer additional bonuses (additional discounts with ICO or coins), if the investor will follow the link sent by the “sheriff”. Another option is test access to the program or a personal profile for a new investor also with bonuses or additional information about the course of the ICO. If the user follows this link under any of the prepositions — see point 1!

Ubcoin team reminds its contributors and members of the group in Telegram that we NEVER write or ask for personal information, all information is laid out for everyone on our website and in the official groups in social messengers. If you got a message from “admin”- check whether he is really an admin in the Telegram chat and ask your real admins about the chat. A little time spent on these simple actions can save your money from scammers!

4 — Clones of the site with the replacement of 1–2 symbols in the address line. This is an easy way for a scammer to catch unsuspecting people, unfortunately, often quite effectives. Usually this method is used with contextual advertising, which sends users to the fake ICO site, and because of the similar interface and the inconspicuous difference in the spelling of the address, a person quietly enters their data, keys and transfers funds. Here, only constant vigilance and computer security alerts about entering an unconfirmed site can help.

The Ubcoin team (https://ubcoin.io/) has repeatedly tracked and continues to track the scammers hiding on clone sites that are different from the present one. Below is a list of phishing sites that contributors need to beware aware of:

⛔ Ubcoin .be

⛔ Ubcoin .nl

⛔ Ubcoinmarket .cf

⛔ Ubcoinmarket .gq

⛔ Ubcoin .be

⛔ Ubcio .nl

⛔ Ubcico .nl

⛔ Ubcoinmarket .ga

⛔ Ubcoin .ga

⛔ Ubcoin .ml

⛔ Ubcoin .me

⛔ Ubclibe .com

⛔ Ubcoin .in

⛔ Ubcoim .io

These are our official sites, which solely belong to the Ubcoin team:

✅ REAL — Ubcoin.io !

✅ REAL — official Ubcoin Chinese websites: ubcoin.asia, ubco.in, ub-coin.online

We track fraudsters and suppress their attempts, but we advise our contributors to pay close attention to the site and arm their computers with additional protection. We hope that we were able to give you valuable advice and save your crypto money! Be careful and do not succumb to the scammers’ tricks!

Ubcoin token sale continues, the stage 4 discount is 13% — you can buy tokens on https://ubcoin.io