Grant Blaisdell, co-founder of Coinfirm, on how blockchain technology can be leveraged for good.
Online and social media phishing scams are nothing new. Since the advent of Twitter and its progenitors, scammers have utilised the cover of anonymity to swindle fellow users for financial gain.
Often, scammers pose as trusted entities on social media, and extort cash from users by abusing this trust. Even worse, some use of ransomware: software that holds the victim’s device hostage until a sum of money is paid. The blockchain age has added another dimension. Scammers demand that large sums of cryptocurrencies be paid directly into online wallets, as this affords another level of (what they think is) anonymity.
Commonly, these types of scammers impersonate companies, ICOs, personalities, and entities operating on the cryptocurrency market. The scenario is often simple: offenders announce special ‘giveaways’, where users are promised ‘free’ cryptocurrency, or are at least given the chance to earn huge multiples on the cash they invest. It doesn’t sound hugely sophisticated, but it works. To provide just one example, last month, a spoof of a popular Ethereum wallet site (myetherwallet.com) scammed users to the tune of $12.5m. This isn’t a small problem....