While crypto is a perfectly legitimate form of investment - after all that is why we are all here - it is also a well-known playground from scammers who are just waiting to pounce on the naive. Banks try to block funds to even those crypto-platforms that have a secure reputation such as Coinbase (this is not a comment on their service or costs, rather on the security Coinbase offers). I have commented on this frequently in the past.

I have been constant with my warnings about not trusting crypto-ads on faucet / free crypto platforms and you may recall I got caught out a few weeks ago when I trusted an "Add Slice" extension that seemed legitimate but had come though a PTC advert. I can't recall the specific name of the malware but whenever I tried to Cut / Copy a Token address it was changing it to another one when pasted, from which the malicious person could then receive my funds. Fortunately, I noticed immediately through my own due-diligence and thanks to Igor's recommendation I soon had it removed. I nearly got caught out because I broke my own rules!

Now, this is where I want to pick up on things

I am regularly using three "free" platforms (in addition to P0x - which has a different operating model and no problem :) ), namely Cointiply, CoinPayU and DutchyFaucet. Cointiply is generally ok, but there is the occasional "Make a deposit up to $200 and we will double it in Coins" offer that comes up. It is immediately fishy but one thing I have been tempted to do - please don't, I haven't - is to send a small test amount (eg $10), because for the first relatively micro-amounts they do often pay out in a trust-building process that they call "fattening the pig" designed solely to make the user more gullible and more likely to send more which will then be taken. DutchyFaucet, when applying the same tests aren't too bad so long as you are prepared to ignore the porn / explicit dating sites (I think one is called f**kfinder) when they appear.

But for today my focus is on CoinPayU which seems to be the highest paying of the three. They do post a warning on their PTC ads home page that a user should do their own due diligence and not trust or consider them being on the platform as being an endorsement. However, with CoinPayU specifically there is a lot of ads that are illegitimate clones of their own site and it does beg the question as to how they got on the platform. Users will naturally assume that it is a reward, based on their own on-platform experiences and just an extension of what they are already doing. It looks like CoinPayU, it behaves like CoinPayU, but one look at the extension will tell you that something is very off eg something like coinpayu.congratulations.com or coinpayu.coinly.com - they were something like this. Neither of these are on CoinPayU's home domain; the former's home domain is congratulations.com and the latter's is coinly.com. This is exactly what I am talking about, although in this case CoinPayU's name does not appear in the URL.

The end result of users getting scammed by this, is not only the loss of currency for the user but the reputational damage that CoinPayU will suffer as a consequence. I am not suggesting that CoinPayU will be able to root out all such scam sites (eg Add Slice!), but they should, even to serve their own interests, filter out those clone sites which are usually easily identifiable by the inclusion of "coinpayu" somewhere within the URL. Even if a bot has automated the process some kind of filters should be added so that it just cannot happen.

It makes sense for CoinPayU to be pro-active in protecting its own reputation.

Incidentally, as a final comment, I have never had any problems with payouts from any of these three sites - although DutchyFaucet did lose $2 once which may have been my error anyway.

As always stay safe and well my friends