Crypto scammers have started a new trick of stealing money from user wallets. This time they managed to create fake crypto exchanges, luring users & crypto investors into a trap of getting free tokens in exchange for a small fee.
The aim of this article is to make you aware of this fraud by using a checklist. This checklist is a bullet proof strategy for the users to detect and identify the authenticity of the crypto exchange before depositing fiat money or cryptocurrency.
Before I begin, let me share some of the names of crypto exchanges involved in this fraud –
- Mollars.com
- Ramutex.com
- Zetlax.com
- Hayderbit.com
- larydex.com
- forsdex.com
- Nesdex.com
- Veadex.com
- Youmibit.com
- Rexbycoin.com
- Pesdex.com
- Superex.com
- Veaget.com
- Rexdaotrade.com
- Haederbit.com
- Bezwex.com
- Xswapex.com
- Pegotex.com
- Bewonex.com
What is the Crypto Exchange Scam fraud?
Using the social media handles like TikTok & Instagram, the scammer is marketing crypto exchange promising of giving away free tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum by just creating an account on the exchange.
Once the user creates the account. He will be shown BTC or ETH balance in the dashboard, open for withdrawal. That’s where the trap begins.
The Trap:
Once the user enter his wallet address to withdraw the tokens, he will be asked to pay a small fee in BTC or ETH or sometimes fiat. Doing so the user will unlock the next steps and on each step he has to pay the fees to withdraw tokens.
By the time user gets frustrated, the scammer has already made a lot of money by charging withdrawal fees in the name of commission, taxes etc. The user is left with empty wallet and just a fictional number of tokens in the dashboard.
How to detect and avoid the crypto exchange scam?
There are checks to perform before creating the account & going ahead with the fee payment. Let’s get started –
1. Check the welcome Email of Youmibit, Seyget, Veaget, Nesdex, Ramutex, Mollars, Solanaday, Zetlax, Larydex, Hayderbit or similar Crypto exchange –
A legally registered crypto exchange will send you a welcome email, urging to creare a two factor authentication before proceeding ahead with the deposit or withdrawal on the platform.
On the contrary, these scam crypto exchanges will not send you the welcome email and will never ask you to register with a strong password or enable two factor authentication.
2. The User interface and Content –
Most of these scam websites have similar user interface (UI) and content which makes them easily identifiable among the legitimate ones.
Take for example, Dropexer and Unibet have similar UI and if you navigate to the ‘About us’ section of these sites, the content and presentation is also same.
3. Technical Check on SimilarWeb –
Similarweb is a website tool that helps you identify the traffic, ranking and health of the website. The data is publicly available to every user.
Since the scam exchanges are created to steal money from crypto investors they do not reflect any data on the Similarweb page. The tool will likely fail to fetch any data from these exchanges.
Which in turn is a signal that the website is a fraud because a healthy crypto exchange must receive a healthy traffic on daily basis which can be easily recorded by any online tool.
4. MOZ Domain Authority Check –
Domain Authority helps identifies the authenticity of the website. A website with high domain authority ranks higher on Google and is trusted by the Google & other search engines.
A good domain has a domain authority of close to 100, a bad domain has a domain authority of close to 0. Binance.com has a domain authority of 89.
The scam exchanges do not have any domain authority or rankings. MOZ system will not reflect any number of the ranking. Hence it becomes easier to identify these scam exchanges.
This completes my post on scam crypto exchange fraud. In the next post, I will talk about Yotoshi YOTO crypto & Pulsechain PLS mainnet. Remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel for more informative content, released every week.
Paras is a blockchain writer & video creator at Katoch Tubes. In his free time, he loves watching space exploration documentaries & Hollywood movies.
