OpenSea is the most popular platform for trading NFTs. In September, they announced that sales worth more than a 3 billion US dollars had been carried out on their platform in just one month. This should serve as an indicator to all that NFTs should be taken seriously. It isn’t all roses.. Some devious people try to take advantage of amateurs to swindle them of their money. Some of the methods they use are explained here. Remember, 2nd and 3rd world countries worked their asses off learning coding and are ready to take some of that European and American wealth. They’re working their asses off and trying to make a buck the sleezy way, its your job to make sure you don’t become one of their victims
ALTERED SMART CONTRACTS
OpenSea had a critical exploit within a few NFTs that scammed new investors. The vulnerability was found by security firm Check Point Research, they were noticing a ton of scammed tweets from victims on Twitter.
HOW DID IT HAPPEN?
Scammers find wallets of wealthy or semi wealthy NFT holders that posses expensive NFT in their wallets. HOW ? You can use a website called ETHERSCAN and find the holders of expensive NFTs that you would target for this scam.
Next…
The scammers fine the wealthy wallets and DROP them a FREE NFT in their wallet. Anyone can send you a gifted NFT. You login and see that a beautiful NFT is in your wallets FREE OF CHARGE. However, when you interact with this NFT, it has MALICIOUS CODE.
Just viewing the NFT won’t hack your wallet, you must interact with the NFT, just viewing it will not hack your wallet. The dangerous situation occurs when you “RIGHT CLICK & open it in new tab”. At this point, the exploit communicates with the users METAMASK Dapp browser extension. Messages come in to verify the smart contract and as the victim clicks “YES”, say bye bye to your funds in most cases. Very sophisticated but it seems that OpenSea has fixed the loop hole.
BE ALERT, DO NOT INTERACT WITH GIFTED NFT 😊
GIVING AWAY YOUR PASSPHRASE ON DISCORD, SILLY RIGHT ?
So you’ve bought your Crypto Punk or BAYC and are super excited to enter the discord community. When you purchase a NFT, you’ll be granted access to your new community. One of the greatest assets in owing a Crypto Punk is that you gain access to discord channel that unlocks to you and you can start networking with other Crypto Punk holders. Imagine having that network, other NFT flippers that have access to millions of dollars to attack projects together to make a buck or two. Once your CryptoPunk is sold, BOOTED. You’ll be booted out of the private discord and no longer have the networking capability of being inside of the private discord.
VERIFYING YOUR NFT with COLLABLAND DISCORD BOT
Step 1: Buy your CRYPTOPUNK
Step 2 : Join private discord
Step 3: write !verify and collabland bot will message you to link your wallet and sign a message that you OWN a CRYPTOPUNK. Here is how the scam takes place from this point on, a scammer see’s your !verify message and instantly messages you . You’ll be taken to a fake page and they’ll try to make you sign a fake message that will try to steal your wallet.
Others are not so sophisticated, they simply just Impersonate a moderator and fool the victim into believing that they are from that discord and they care about their interest. As the trust is gained, they plead that they need their passphrase to successfully connect their NFT. ”.
Sounds crazy right? THEY ARE GIVING THEIR SEED PHRASE AWAY; we must spread the word and make sure these new NFT entrants don’t get scammed.
BIDDING IN USDC / DAI and NOT ETH
What all this teaches us is that we must be very careful in our dealings online. Never reveal your password to someone you meet online. You should also never trust anyone. In another case of an NFT scam, an artist was offered $2.73 DAI for a piece worth 2.73 ETH. He didn’t examine the offer properly and went on to confirm the transaction. Believe it or not, this scam is extremely common with offers coming in as USDC or DAI bids, however, the seller is not reviewing and assuming the bid is in eth. Imagine, 20 eth is quite a bit of fiat in the real world, but 20 USDC is NOT. You must take the time to review your bids and make sure you don’t end up in someone’s medium article, JUST KIDDING 😊
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FUD / BOT TRADING, CREATING HYPE
Which NFT to buy? This is a question that every n00b asks when entering the space. Most times, your first few buys are just tuition fees to learning the business of NFT trading.
Twitter Shilling
You’ll first hear of many projects on twitter, but most times its bots tweeting and retweeting the same NFT project that sounds like it’s a real traction, however, bots are writing and getting ready to scam you.
Next step, you’ll go into discord to see how the chatter and sentiment is.
DISCORD CHATTER
Discord is phenomenal resource to hear chatter about an NFT project. Every single serious project will have discord channel, but the question will be for you, is it an authentic conversation or is it bot. The game is to sell at all costs, no different in NFT space and the sharks are out looking for their prey. You must separate the bullshit from facts, don’t get scammed by falling for fake conversations in discords through intelligent bot coders.
FUD / LYING ABOUT PROJECTS:
Don’t assume that what you read online is REAL, many teams try to destroy the creditability of another team / NFT project. There are a lot of teams trying to sell their drops. Due to this intense competition, some users try to manipulate. Their goal is to make it so that buyers lose faith in an opposing team’s NFTs. One sinister thing about these users is that they often bear names that make them seem to be affiliated with the NFT team they are trying to deface. Some of these users will camp in an NFT team’s social channel and try to spread FUD to the other members.
NFT project teams have a duty to prevent the spread of FUD. The team must be active and proactive on their social media channel. This includes banning spreaders of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They should also be completely transparent. All the details of the contract should be posted. Frequently asked questions should also be attended to and posted. Teams should ensure that they monitor the whole process of the sale. This is from the launch to the sell-out.
BELIEVE NOTHING YOU READ, VERIFY IT.
Rugs and Pumps and Dumps
A rug is one of the worst words in NFT trading. This term is used when an NFT team drops a project and runs away with the ETH. This is one of the things FUD spreaders use to scare people. Pumping and dumping is another NFT term. This is when a lot of marketing hype is created around an NFT drop without any real value. The marketing hype is used to distract people from the actual content of the NFT team.
To avoid falling victim to pumps and dumps, you should avoid impulse buying. You should not buy NFTs just because they are crowd favorites. Scammers can be very clever and a team that looks good may end up rugging. Approval of a project by a celebrity isn’t proof that it is authentic. Actually, its a sign of outer trash most time. Jake Paul or Floyd Mayweather are paid prostitutes' to shill and get paid, they don’t care how much you lose.
TRUST
To round this up, remember the following. Be careful who you trust. Never reveal your passwords. Be careful in your dealings. Do a lot of research. Listen to your gut. If you have a bad feeling about it, it may be a scam. All these will help you stay safe in your NFT dealings.
My process for finding winning NFT projects,
1- Twitter fallowers and if they’re REAL
2- Discord chatter is authentic or bots? How many users are in the discord channel (anything south of 40,000 members is a good project)
3- Team behind the project, TEAM is always one of the highest factors to considers because WINNERS know how to WIN.
4- HOLDERS of the NFT, make sure a 10,000 project has min 1800 owners (data set found on OpenSea project page)
5- NOTABLE HOLDERS, how many whales are holding the project. Make sure the project doesn’t have many paper hands and you want DIAMOND HAND holders.
6- Is there a bot trading? Is their great trading volume authentic?
7- BELIEVE NOTHING YOU HEAR / READ, VERIFY THE INFO and TRUST YOUR GUT. NEVER EVER GIVE OUT PASSPHRASE TO YOUR WALLET
You can fallow me on Twitter @borkiewrld 😇
