if you're new to the world of crypto i'm gonna say it's pretty complicated just seven months ago
i set up my very first metamask wallet and then deposited some ethereum contrast that today i'm
actually writing smart contracts but back then i knew absolutely nothing about how many scams
there were out there in fact i lost a decent amount of money probably somewhere around five
thousand dollars due to certain scams that i fell prey to the cool thing about the blockchain is
is that the information is available to everyone so technically i could even share the transactions
with you where i lost the money welcome to whiteboard crypto the number one youtube channel
for crypto education and here we explain topics of the cryptocurrency world using analogies stories
and examples so that you can easily understand them in this video we're going to explain some of
the most common crypto scams including one that's so new you probably haven't even heard of it yet
and of course how to avoid them so let's dig into the top 10 worst scams inside the world
wide web 3 that you might encounter number one is any website asking for your private keys
do you remember the first time you set up a crypto wallet you probably didn't know if you were even
doing things correctly and everything was really complicated well at least it was for me scammers
take advantage of this all the time the trick is very simple they ask you for your personal
information specifically for something called your private key now it's really sad to me how many
scammers out there take advantage of someone's lack of knowledge and then try to get you to tell
them your seed phrase by doing this they are actually getting access to all of your crypto
funds some of these scammers might say things like hey i want to send you some money what's your key
or even something like hey you just won one whole ethereum tell us your seed phrase so we
can deposit the funds in your account they'll try every trick possible to fool newbies into
giving them access to their funds when it comes to crypto you actually get two keys a private key
that you should never ever share and a public key that is kind of like your email address this one
you intentionally share many people confuse these which leads them to getting scammed you can learn
more about both of these by watching our video on asymmetric encryption which is a complicated topic
that we break down so simple your grandpa could understand the next scam we have is number two
asking to invest for you as a trusted creator so the second trick is something that might be used
to if you've looked down in the comments sections below of some of my videos or if
you're in any crypto discord or telegram servers scammers will create a bot that seems official or
try to impersonate a project specifically a team member and then they will dm you so that they look
official and they do this in hopes of scamming you in some way one of the most common scams
is the way that they ask for a hundred dollars and then they'll turn it into two thousand dollars for
you and give it back they're basically claiming to invest your money for you now this happens
all the time on my channel in fact i even messaged one of these scammers to see how the scam worked
and i want to say it very clearly right now never reach out to someone you met in
the comment sections on youtube especially if they look like me i promise you it is not me
once you reach out to one of these fake accounts a scammer will send you a dm moments later saying
that they're a project team member and that they can assist you they often change their username
or their profile picture to impersonate a real team member on discord or youtube for the case of
discord you can do something really simple you can check the actual discord handle and check if it
matches the information of the impersonated team member for example mine is practical psychology
9608 and no one can copy that discord handle for youtube it could be something as simple as just
clicking on the account and seeing that they have zero subscribers or no videos uploaded remember no
legit project team member will ever give you a whatsapp telephone number and we will never ask
to invest your money for you scam number three is burning a percentage of a token or sending it
to a dev wallet now another scam well at least it's kind of a scam is that token developers
will implement something that is called a burn feature they will say every time this token is
traded a portion of the trade is burned forever so an example of this is that if you were to send 100
tokens to your friend five tokens would be burned forever or at least sent to an account that nobody
has access to this makes you believe that one day there won't be very many of these tokens out there
and if you buy now and then just hold the value of your tokens should automatically increase well let
me tell you something if my dog ate something that one day turned his poop orange that might be the
entire day in his whole life where his poop was orange but just because it's scarce and it only
happened once doesn't mean it has value nobody's gonna want my dog's orange colored poop for it to
have value other people have to want that orange poop for it to have value keep this in mind with
tokens that have a deflationary feature especially if that's all that they offer scam number four
is something that i saw actually a few days ago here's the setup someone contacts you and says
something like this hey i live in china and they just made crypto illegal so i want to get rid of
my wallet so i don't get in trouble here's my seed phrase you can donate the money or do whatever you
want with it and maybe have some for yourself then after that message they will actually send
you a real seed phrase to an actual account with actual money in it the one that i personally saw
had three thousand dollars worth of tether but here's the trick to get the tether out you must
first have some ethereum in the account to pay the gas fee so if you're kind of smart you'll think hm
i'll just send it to my own account to do that you have to deposit like 50 of ethereum so you
can actually transact the money out of the account well it happens to be that the fee
to transact a token is like fifty dollars while the fee that send ethereum is like ten dollars so
you deposit fifty dollars and then immediately the scammer sends the money to their account profiting
forty dollars when i say immediately i mean really fast like within ten seconds they have a computer
running a program that checks if there's funds in that account and then automatically sends it
to their ethereum account so there is absolutely no way for you to get the three thousand dollars
out of there now the sad part of this is the blockchain is available for everyone to see so
you can literally look at the account on etherscan and see that 30 people were scammed around 2
800 in total and if we get enough comments below maybe i'll explain it in more detail but in short
if someone gives you their seed phrase and the wallet has money in it do not deposit money for
any reason whatever money you deposit in there consider gone i'm also going to say technically
if they were in china and they didn't want to be connected to the account they wouldn't have to
give it to someone ethereum accounts don't work like that it's just bad logic scam number five
is a smart contract bug so another trick that scammers use which you may not even be aware of
is a bug where people can buy a token but then they can't sell it now i know what you're thinking
how is this possible well there are actually three ways of doing this first when the developers are
creating the token they simply disable the approve function in the erc20 token contract
basically meaning decentralized exchanges cannot get your approval for putting the token to be
sold the second way is to add a rebase function into the token contract so at the moment you try
to sell the token you'll lose 99 of it third they could easily write a few lines of code
that prevents the token from being sold to a dex only bought or supplied this means a lot of money
coming into the project and none is going out making it a perfect situation for scammers to run
away with all their money technically they could make it so when you sold your token the money you
would have received goes to the developers also now to sum this up i'm not saying you should
learn how to read smart contract code but i will say before making any buy over a thousand dollars
you should find a friend who can number six is fishing on fake websites the next technique is
something you really need to be careful of and keep an eye out whenever you discover a
new project or you browse using a new device or a computer some scammers will create a website that
is an exact copy of a specific crypto project that you actually want to invest in and they'll
do it with the same user interface and the same information on it the only things different from
this fake website to the real one are two things number one the domain because scammers can't
use the same domain as a real website they will actually create a new one that is almost the same
as the real one for example scammers could create a fake whiteboard crypto website switching it from
the dot com to the dot org dot net dot phi dot x y z or any other top level domain they could also
add an s to the end like whiteboardcryptos.com or to move the e whitboardcrypto.com anyways the idea
here is that they change this little detail so people don't realize they're on the wrong website
the second thing they change is the smart contracts and this is the scammy part the
scammers could change the smart contracts code so that if you were to interact with it they could
get access to your funds in your wallet leading you to losing all your money in fact they can
make this contract do literally anything which is why it's really important to only connect to
applications that you trust personally something i do to make sure i always click on the right links
is to go to trusted websites like coin gecko or coin market cap you can also check the official
project's twitter account to find the right links and then bookmark those links so you always use
the correct one scam number seven is fake icos so you know how kickstarter projects or really
any crowdfunding projects get the money they show their product that's yet to be manufactured and
then people fund the project in exchange for a great deal maybe they'll get two products for
the price of one or maybe a special edition version in crypto we have something similar
and it's called an ico or initial coin offering and it works as a way to gather a lot of money
from investors so that they can start the project well fake icos are a really easy way for scammers
to present a project to investors with absolutely no intention of actually creating it and then just
run away with their investors money how it usually works is that scammers present a really nice
innovative revolutionary project to the investors they then ask for money to kick off their project
and lure inexperienced investors in with a juicy roi like a hundred percent or
a thousand percent and this leads to the investors giving their money but then the
scammers just run away with it and because many projects in the crypto space are not regulated
unfortunately the scammers pretty much get away with it a good thing to do before investing in a
crypto project is to look for legit white papers a project's timeline or good tokenomics to back
your investment don't just look at the great user interface or the juicy roi we actually
have a video coming up on how to specifically do research on a coin or a token so hit that
subscribe button and turn on notifications for that absolute monster of a helpful video
scam number eight is called hidden whales you know how i always say to be careful with projects
with low liquidity or a low market cap because they can easily be manipulated by a whale well
a whale is anyone holding a high percentage of the tokens out there and because of this they have the
ability to sell all their tokens at once causing a crash anyways since this is kind of obvious and
since scammers are aware that people will actually look at it before investing money into a project
scammy projects have now found other ways to hide the fact that they hold most of the token
instead of having one wallet with all the money they simply split it between multiple wallets
for example if the total liquidity of a project was half a million dollars and maybe the team
was holding fifty thousand dollars which would be ten percent of the entire project they would then
split the money into ten different wallets each wallet holding five thousand dollars this way
they make it look like a safer and legit project now i do wanna say here you can easily check the
early transactions of a project's initial tokens but it is a lot more work required by you and
i've noticed that a lot of projects have started doing this because people won't do any more work
other than just look at the token holders page on etherscan they'll simply look at it and say that
there's no single whale wallets and then they'll invest here's a tip you can check the blockchain
you can actually spend an hour just looking around and seeing where the early money is going
it's very easy it's very simple it just takes some time maybe i'll make a video on how to do
it later but i just want you guys to be aware that this stuff actually happens again the simplest way
to make sure devs do not hold most of the token is to simply look at the first transactions and where
the money originally got distributed if the first transaction is sent to a lot of multiple addresses
this is not a good sign scam number 9 is psychologically making you think that a
smaller price is easier to be able to hit a higher price now this one is technically not a scam but
it's kind of tricky when a project launches the tokenomics are established by the project's team
developers get to answer the questions what is the max supply of the token what's the initial
price of the token and yes they can set that and who gets the early tokens all of this stuff
is decided in advance now something quite a few scammy projects do is simply print a very large
amount of tokens that way the price stays low even if there's a lot of money behind the entire
project between you and me owning 100 tokens at one dollar each is the same as owning a hundred
thousand tokens worth a tenth of a penny right well in people's mind having more tokens with a
low price is way more tempting psychologically because it makes them think with a price this
low it'll easily double or triple or 10x or maybe even 100x in value along with this they also get
to feel like they're owning a ton of tokens for these investors it's cool for them to say that
they own a billion tokens but in reality going from a tenth of a penny to a dollar is just as
difficult as another token going from one dollar to a thousand dollars so this trick is really
about making people think their gain opportunity is higher than it is which makes people invest
more in the token so make sure you don't invest in a project only because the price of the token
is low because if you do it might be a game of limbo and you're gonna see how low it can go
lastly number 10 gambling with your trust the last scam is something we saw with the latest hottest
scam the squid games token these developers capitalized on the fact that a show called squid
games became very popular and they rode the hype train using the same name so that that way they
could get a lot of attention but this is not the trick i'm wanting to talk about to create a false
sense of safety they actually created a fake team yeah you heard me right they created around 10
fake profiles with fake bios to make it seem like the project had a great and solid team behind it
they went so far as to add computer generated pictures of people in fact people that did
not even exist just to make the project seem more legit the only thing i want to say about this one
is that crypto scams are getting more and more persuasive so you'll have to work a lot harder
when making a decision on a project wrapping this video up if you're wanting to invest in a project
there are really only two things that i suggest you to do the first is to go to a website called
rugdock.io and what this website does is analyze projects and if there's any obvious possibilities
of exploits or scams in the contract code they'll let you know how high of a risk it is to invest
in it i'll put the link to this website in the description it's very helpful the other thing
i can suggest is that you join our discord and our team will actually look at the project for
you and point out any obvious risks obviously we can't tell you if it's a good bet or not but we
can tell you if it hits anything on this list or if we find any new bugs you'll have to sign up to
our newsletter to get access to that discord and you can find that easily at whiteboardcrypto.com
one more thing i do is research the project a ton before investing i suggest reading the
white papers and the tokenomics you know the basics but there's a few more advanced things
i do i actually created this really cool ultimate research pdf which is a step-by-step guide that
shows you exactly how to look into a token and technically it's only available to whiteboard
crypto club members but i'll be sharing some ideas from it in a future video so definitely make sure
you're subscribed anyways thank you guys so much for watching we hope you enjoyed this video we
really hope that you learned something and most of all we hope to see you in our next video
you