A short-lived scam that promised to improve emerged yesterday. ERC-20 Blue, which attempted to lure in , was announced on a that briefly posed as the Foundation. The fake account was quickly shut down, and ’s was not involved in any way. So, what did the scam involve — and is it dead, or just biding its time?
Because the fake account was deleted almost immediately, very little is known about the nature of the scam. However, the page’s (scaling--with-erc-20-blue) implies that the scam intended to capitalize on ’s upcoming plans for scalability. Those plans are scheduled to be implemented some time in the next few years — meaning that the scam could have hit a sweet spot in terms of believability if it had managed to survive.
Judging by the title of the post, the scam proposed a new called ERC-20 Blue. There is nothing technically wrong with this: a scalability project could in theory have a attached, but the fact that the author is posing as the Foundation is a red flag. Furthermore, has no known plans to release a new as part of its scalability efforts—actual scalability on the network will Casper and sharding.
Additionally, the ERC-20 Blue shares its name with an existing called . It is not clear whether the author deliberately intended to impersonate this or not. However, a similar incident occurred when , a legitimate project, spawned an unrelated coin with the same name. Dubious have also been known to skim from the popularity of major coins, making name-sharing a common tactic of scammers.
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In short, the ERC-20 Blue campaign seems to be an elaborate phishing campaign: a fake that could be easily be mistaken for a legitimate originating from the Foundation. Although data can be uniquely identified and verified, the same cannot be said of the discussion around it, making phishing a common line of attack in the world.
Phishing scams rely heavily on social media and content platforms, which take varying degrees of action against scammers. Twitter with scammers who impersonate prominent personalities. Medium, by contrast, a heavy stance against fraudulent projects.
This means that Medium probably took down the ERC-20 Blue page itself. Since the author of the scam presumably did not delete the page voluntarily, it is possible that the scam will re-emerge elsewhere on a more lenient platform.
The post appeared first on .
Published at Sun, 06 Jan 2019 03:41:29 +0000
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