Christmas is here and while you may be feeling generous this year, not everyone is out to give; some are trying to steal from you through crypto giveaway scams. These scams are quite common around the holiday season. The result is that some influential personalities in the crypto sector are forced to change their handles on social media to make it clear they are not giving away crypto. One person who has been a constant target of giveaway scams in Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum.
Active Scam Online
The latest scam this year is once targeting Buterin via a YouTube live video session. There is a channel labeled “Ethereum” which had 1027 views at the creation of this article. The video is promising to give away ETH for some generic reason about Ethereum.
In the video, Vitalik Buterin and other experts in the crypto experts are seen discussing issues surrounding crypto and the blockchain. This video was in fact taken during the DappCon 2019 Panel discussion. It was taken back on August 27, 2019.
Dubious Conditions
Dubious conditions are imposed on those who wish to receive the ETH. For instance, they need to have a minimum amount of ETH to be eligible. Apparently, you will also need to send ETH to a crypto address in order to receive the ETH giveaway, the more you send them, the more they promise to give you. Of course, they do no plan to give you any ETH. If you think about this, it makes no sense whatsoever. When is the last time outside of cryptocurrency, that a giveaway has been structured around the fact of you needing to send them something first?
A quick look at Etherscan suggests that some already fell for the scam. Besides that, there are comments below the video, which appear to affirm that there is indeed a giveaway. These people could be part of the scam or they may have been paid to convince others it was real.
In the past, Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin have been the main target of these scammers. However, they are going after other personalities too. This time, the Binance CEO CZ is also a target. In a video on a channel labeled “Binance,” there is a video of the Binance CEO discussing the future plans of the exchange.
The description claims that they plan to give away BTC soon. They claim that you only need to send 0.1 BTC to 25 BTC to receive a huge amount of BTC. However, this video is clearly a past event and it has no relationship to the Binance CEO. The video currently has 2509 views. Whether or not people fall for these scams remains to be seen.
If you come across any of these videos, please be aware that there is no crypto give away during the holiday season. Do not send any of your BTC since you will not receive anything in return. You could try to report these videos and have YouTube taken them down for being actual scams. Recently, YouTube has been going after crypto videos on renowned YouTube channels. Theres little clarity on this subject so far. It’s not known whether Youtube has been recently cracking down on the platform due to the scams that exist.
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