Cypherium, an enterprise-ready blockchain designed to tackle the problem of interoperability among cryptocurrencies, including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), joins the growing list of blockchain projects to partially bungle its token sale.
What Went Wrong
As with many hotly anticipated initial coin offerings (ICOs) and general token sales, Cypherium announced its public sale using a variety of social media platforms, as well as external blog platforms like Medium. However, the project failed to adequately secure its official Telegram community at the crux of the token sale, allowing scammers to overrun its Telegram group.
At the moment the public sale went live, a number of scammers, posing as Cypherium admins bombarded the Cypherium Telegram with links to a fake token sale page. At the time, Cypherium had left its group completely unattended by administrators, giving scammers essentially free run of the place.
As a result, a number of individuals were scammed, before Cypherium was able to restore order in the group.
Staying Safe
As the DeFi hype continues to skyrocket, scammers are coming up with ever more inventive ways to dupe investors out of their hard-earned money—usually by impersonating a figure of authority to do so.
These methods include directly spamming fake token sale information into the main Telegram community, DMing users on social media, Discord and Telegram while posing as team members, and duplicating entire communities in some cases.
Because of this, it’s important to only trust information that is delivered by a reputable source. This includes official team social media pages that are linked on the project website, as well as from the official email address of the project. It is highly unlikely that scammers will have access to your email or other personally identifiable information, but it’s still wise to check for email spoofing.
Crooks often look to leverage the urgency of some token sales to part investors from their funds. By keeping a clear head, and doing your own research ahead of time, you can thwart even the most sophisticated scammers.