With This Web3 Tool, NFT Players Will No Longer Suffer from Scams
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If you’re a hardcore NFT player, there must be various NFT airdrops in your wallet, including some coming from no where. However, once you interact with some of them, the assets in your wallet will probably be emptied – This is one of the popular NFT scams.
Due to the craze about NFTs nowadays, a variety of scams has sprung up. With fake projects (websites), fake announcements, fake airdrops, fake prize-winning notices, fake transactions, etc., all kinds of traps have emerged and always get their way to fool the users.
No doubt users can reduce the probability of being tricked by improving their vigilance. But is there a product in the Web3 marketplace that helps users identify projects, warn them of risks, and keep them away from scams ultimately?
NFT Scams Going Rampant
As interests in NFT assets among crypto players generally increased over the last year, the number of different NFT scams has exploded correspondingly, with almost every NFT player encountering some kind of scam at one point or another.
A degree of watchfulness is always required to avoid being scammed whether you are a new player or an NFT expert. Below is a list of five major NFT scams in current market to help you keep vigilant.
Fake projects (websites). Like situation with tokens, the NFT market is full of copycat projects.
With the popularity of BAYC in the midsummer of 2021, various copycat projects under the banner of “Ape” mushroomed, shouting slogans like “the next blue chip NFT” to induce users into buying their NFTs. However, once users finished minting, these projects usually ended up deleting official social accounts, shutting down websites and making off with money within a few days, with all the promises and plans made before turning into a dead letter — commonly known as “rug pull” in the industry. Throughout the whole process, the price of these NFTs peaked when listed and eventually went to zero.
Fake prize-winning notices. If you are always active in the Discord communities, you’ve probably received fake “prize-winning notices” from scammers who impersonate members of the official Discord community and send phishing links. For example, a user says that his Discord account receives dozens of DMs almost every day, with user name and profile picture of these fake accounts the same as those of the real Stepn project, and informing the user of winning the priority to mint NFTs. What’s more, the scammers’ websites always look highly similar to the official domain name only with minor differences, users may be easily misled. If clicking on a fake website and connecting to their own digital wallets with any carelessness, users may lose their assets as a result.
Fake Prize-Winning Notice
Actually, almost every project has listed channels about scams and emphasized that officials will never DM community members. The easiest method to avoid such scams for users is to ignore them or turn DM service off — which may cost users a lot of opportunities to communicate with community members, so some of them won’t turn it off.
Fake announcements. Another type of technical hackers in Discord may hack into some project managers’ accounts and post fake announcements, which usually featuring giving users benefits such as minting NFTs with low cost within a limited period together with various fake websites. This kind of scam mainly takes advantage of users’ psychology of blindly obeying and greed, and lowers their vigilance so as to get its way.
Such incidents occurred frequently on Discord over the past month or so as follows:
On May 12, NFT trading platform Rarible’s Discord was hacked and phishing links were distributing among community then;
On May 11, NFT project Hacktivist’s Discord was hacked and attackers made an announcement to spread fake mint links;
On May 9, NFT project GraBoys’s Discord was hacked. Attackers spread fake mint links to stole users’ NFTs;
On May 9, NFT project SeaHorseArmy’s Discord was hacked. Attackers spread fake mint links;
On May 6, top NFT marketplace OpenSea’s Discord was hacked. Hackers used bot accounts to distribute fake links in the channel;
Fake transactions. Some scammers lives on fake transactions on Discord. At first, they will provide a fake address which is not under their control, usually containing BAYC or other high-value NFTs in order to attract users. Then they offer to sell these NFTs at an OTC discount, asking users to transfer money to the target address provided. While such kind of scam is not well-designed, there are still plenty of users coveting petty gains getting duped.
In addition, there is another kind of popular fake NFT transaction on OpenSea. The scammer first lists an NFT at a price much lower than the floor price and then cancels the order immediately, setting a much higher new price instead. By taking advantage of OpenSea’ delay on price display, the scammers trick many users to buy cheap NFTs at a high price without confirming the final price.
Fake airdrops. Almost every NFT player’s wallet has received airdrops coming from nowhere. When listing to sell these NFTs on OpenSea, users need to interact with the NFTs and pay a fee for approving. At this point, the smart contracts set in advance by the scammers will be triggered, causing the private keys of users’ accounts together with high-value assets in the accounts to be stolen.
Last September, Twitter user AJ (@babbler_dabbler) tweeted that his wallet had been stolen, losing $41,300 worth of NFTs including Damien Hirst’s The Currency NFT. The cause of this unfortunate incident was that the user clicked on an NFT airdrop of unknown origin, resulting in the leakage of private keys.
MOJOR Helps to Reduce Scam Risks by Identifying Projects
Both Web3 players and project organizers are suffering from the above scams which are common in today’s NFT market.
But it doesn’t mean the problem can’t be solved and there’s nothing we can do about it. Improving self-vigilance is always the vital and crucial part. Besides, technology can also help reduce the risk of being deluded for users, which is exactly what MOJOR, the Web3 community platform, is trying to solve.
MOJOR is a NFT-based Web3 community platform, focusing on Web3 infrastructure and services, bridging the gap between traditional Internet (Web2) and Web3, and building a Web3-owned community platform, so as to solve community problems seamlessly and efficiently and improve the governance efficiency of community managers.
Taking fake transactions as an example: As MOJOR users log in with wallet addresses, they can click on another user’s account interface to check the DIDs information to figure out whether the other side is a real NFT holder. Furthermore, users can trade via NFTswap, one of MOJOR’s internal bots, without being redirected to a third-party NFT trading platform like OpenSea , thus avoiding temporary price changes situation (Note: NFTswap currently does not charge transaction fees, users only need to pay on-chain gas fees to complete the transactions).
In terms of fake projects, MOJOR gives a score based on a comprehensive analysis of information about project organizers. Specifically, from the perspective of social dynamics, Twitter accounts of copycat projects usually have below characteristics: short-term registration time, low interaction, a small number of followers (with many artificial followers) and no influencers following. All the information will be identified by MOJOR and users will receive risk alerts when clicking on the project information page.
As to fake prize-winning notices, the system will automatically prompt the risk when an account receives a fake DM link in MOJOR, and users can click on the account’s details page to directly check whether the address is the official one of the project organizer. In specific, community organizers can send official POAP to the mods or administrators, and if a user finds the address in DMs without POAP authentication, it can be regarded as an impostor and the scam will be immediately detected to avoid losses.
For fake airdrops, MOJOR will identify fake NFTs in users’ addresses and send alerts accordingly. And there is almost no possibility as to fake announcements, for projects also log in through the wallet addresses without passwords leakage, so as to greatly reduce the risk for accounts being hacked.
Through subjective improvement on awareness of prevention, along with objective technical protection, the living space for the NFT scams will gradually narrow down in the future.
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