As the digital asset thriftiness grows popular and a number of crypto companies become well known, copycat scammers appear in greater issues. There are a number of websites that are clones of the official web page from companies that provide mining monogram sales, wallets, full nodes, paper wallet tools, and popular trading platforms.
Just recently, gossip.Bitcoin.com wrote a report on mining devices, and one of the links we found looked like it belonged to a reliable mining maker, but the URL really went to a copycat site that looked identical to the original URL. People make mistakes and the fact of the content is some of these scams can be awfully hard to catch. That’s because oftentimes these web pages look verbatim the same as the official website, minus a few minor details.
Some shady websites are quite obvious, like when telecast.Bitcoin.com’s Terence Zimwara wrote about Bitcoin Inc. and the ostensible fractional share tokens. However, some web episodes are straight-up copycat web pages, and are nearly identical to the official page. For instance, there is a copycat website of the mining rig maker Strongu’s official page. Google happens to keep to have the sketchy website posted at the very top of the results epoch.
The site is called “strongutech.com” and the real web page is really called “strongu.com.cn/.” The copycat website, which uses the info “tech” in the name, was created to be a phony sales site. It also managed to make it to the top of Google’s browser results with seldom effort. It should be known that the copycat website is not the company’s official mining store. News.Bitcoin.com has reported it to Google’s anti-phishing era which allows people to report suspicious websites.
Spoofing reliable crypto company websites has been taking place for years. For instance, six years ago the popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was spoofed by a web page called “coinbase.re/,” and the whole shebang was real except the sign-in button. Which means, after an unsuspecting Coinbase customer used it the hacker would pilfer login credentials. The website also was the very first “sponsored” post on the top of the Bing browser’s results page.
Terminal summer, law enforcement in Europe arrested a group who spoofed the website Blockchain.com. The hackers managed to empty the wallets of 4,000 patsies. All the malicious actors did was leverage a technique called “typosquatting,” which uses a domain name but with one small typo. There are fraud paper wallet generator sites people have been complaining about over the years. Three months ago, a Reddit narcotic addict also reported on a phony Ian Coleman BIP39 page on the top of Google’s results.
Day in and day out, scammers are using spoof websites and typosquatting to prig people’s cryptocurrencies. Scammers are also appearing on Google’s Play Store copying reputable brands and creating spurious apps. Just recently, Satoshilabs, the company that manufactures the Trezor hardware wallet tweeted about an Android app that was venturing to be the official application.
“A warning to all the Android users owning Trezor devices,” the company tweeted on December 2, 2020. “This app is a scam and has no relation to SatoshiLabs and Trezor. We’ve already come in it to the Google team. Always confirm any action on your device and never type seed words until your Trezor expects you to,” the hardware wallet manufacturer added.
The fact of the matter is that as cryptocurrencies become more popular, copycats, scammers, and website spoofers purposefulness grow in number. Always make sure the URL is 100% correct when accessing the wallet, exchange, mining friends, or any service you use with crypto. There have been plenty of cases where Google, Bing, and other customary browsers allow copycat spoof websites at the top of the results page, and some scams are even sponsored.
You can report phishing websites to Google and other browsers, so other ones can have a safer browsing experience surfing the web. Moreover, many crypto companies like Coinbase offer people methods to crack phishing and spoof sites as well.
What do you think about the growing number of copycat and spoof crypto sites? Let us understand what you think about this subject in the comments section below.
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