With the Crypto market at a peak period of speculation and market positioning, it's sad to note also that Blockchain scams are becoming more and more prevalent within this period. It has been noted that due to the massive market movement possibilities and the wide range of projects doing onboarding airdrops within this period, wallet interactions are at an all time high and scammers are using this opportunity to syphon funds away from crypto wallets…

How do they do this??

Though the blockchain is decentralised and secure, when you connect a 3rd party to your wallet, you inadvertently give it access to monitor your assets and possibly confirm and execute financial transactions in and out of your wallet.

What they do is that, they create malicious dApps and software with concealed properties and permissions which you might not know but would accept anyway, then they parade this project as a verified project either doing an airdrop or having a token presale. They make it look so legit that you’d think its real and when you connect your wallet to the dApp pending the airdrop, they have access to your funds and can move them out of your wallet without your authorization…

$BONK, $PEPE and Shiba-Inu | The Meme coin menace

These are projects coming off the developer joke of 2013, which gave birth to the $Dogecoin. These are all meme coins with no use cases, no utility and no future but due to the success of the Dogecoin meme, people have capitalised on this to create projects which rug pull and make investors lose money.

Projects such as Shiba Inu (SHIBA), Pepe (PEPE), and Bonk (BONK), for example, do not seem to be blatant scams. BONK came at a time when the Solana (SOL) ecosystem was in desperate need of good cheer and appears to be enjoying quite the pump. However, investors in these coins have still lost money — PEPE, for one, shed an eye-watering 62% in one ugly week in May and has not recovered.

Then there was the spectacular rise and fall of Bald (BALD) in August: a meme coin built on Coinbase’s new layer-2 blockchain, Base. Launched on a Sunday morning, BALD had achieved a market cap of $85 million by evening. By Monday the lead developer had pulled his liquidity, sending the token’s price plunging by around 90%.

While cryptocurrency in general has an issue with whales, memecoins in particular also suffer from strong concentration. Because memes are always so cheap — usually a tiny fraction of a cent — big investors typically hold enormous bags and can move the market in a single trade. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s decision to burn $6.7 billion SHIB took out half the circulating supply. It disrupted market dynamics and raised serious questions about market manipulation.

THE NFT AIRDROP SCAM

You could open your wallet and see some tokens or an nft in your wallet and you don't have any information how it got there or whatever, this basically just tells you that your wallet has been compromised and the best thing to do at that point is not to interact with the said token and to move out your funds from that wallet.

This is a method they use where persons see some airdrop tokes with a ridiculous market value (something like a token with a balance of 6,000,000 pieces with a total market value of $78,864), please do not think that you have made it in life or that luck has shined on you, it's a big time scam.

Greed has been one of man’s major weaknesses.

PREVENTION AND CONTROL MEASURES

Always have an alternate wallet for interacting with airdrop projects and the like. Do not interact with suspicious projects with no history and no conclusive proof of authenticity.
On seeing any unsolicited token in your wallet, kindly disregard and move out your existing funds in the wallet. Do not interact with the said token.
Avoid investing in high risk options such as meme and shit coins. Please always do you research and make sure to invest in projects with a utility.

Lets all stay safe so that this season of love doesn’t turn into a season of tears ans sorrow. Be safe, Be smart, Be informed…..