Give me your life raft and I'll give you a yacht

An article on the news giant BBC's website 5 days ago claimed that a German man by the name of Sebastian sent 10BTC to a scammer that was promising to double your investment. Apparently the victim was willing to believe it was legitimate because of 3 not so devious reasons. 


1. Elon Musk had recently been tweeting 'cryptic' tweets about cryptocurrencies like dogecoin.

2. The fake Elon twitter account that linked to the site had a verification logo next to his name.

3. The website itself did not claim Elon Musk himself was wasting his valuable time sending believers massive amounts of Bitcoin but rather his 'Tesla team'.

Many cryptocurrency scams are as rudimentary as this with the infamous twitter hack that targeted the actual accounts of many celebrities etc and used this method to implore victims to send them BTC etc. I have witnessed many other testimonies, for instance a few months ago I joined an official THETA telegram channel and found a user pouring their heart out because they had been scammed. The victim had joined the channel and was immediately called by a scammer posing as tech support. This caught him off guard and he was convinced to give up his private keys. 



According to Whale Alert scammers managed to scam at least 10k people in 2020 with 2021 looking to exceed that number drastically. If you're anything like me then you are absolutely dumbfounded by the scale of this criminal enterprise and how people are falling for such garbage. Surprisingly I think most of us have fallen for timewasting scams that are just as obvious but without sending strangers money.

Social Task Giveaways

This spam litters the entire internet from Twitter to airdrop sites. The crux of this puzzle is that you are performing a task in the hopes that your meagre action will be rewarded tenfold. In 2017, especially at the peak of the bull run when masses of new investors were flooding the space with no knowledge of the internet much less crypto, this method was being abused to build social media clout. Oblivious tweeps were liking, retweeting and following 10s of 'giveaways' a day believing they would have a chance at winning anything from 0.01BTC to 10BTC. After the tweet has served its intended purpose, which companies normally pay big bucks to achieve, the author is free to delete it/ pay himself/ pay a friend. Despite the fact that its an obvious scam which pollutes the space with spam, it is a phenomenon that continues to grow.



A similar method, which is even worse because it is done by actual projects like Tron etc, is promising a place in a lottery or a miniscule amount of crypto to perform a plethora of 'social tasks'. Normally these tasks are made pointless by an extra referral task which is impossible to win since there is no transparency in the process. 

What do you think? Are these scams obvious or not?