Avoiding Scams
Scams can be tricky to spot. We at stopascammer.com have compiled a list of things to check if a website is real.
- How old is the website? Visit whois or eurodns to check and see when a website was registered. In most cases, the site has been registered within a year or even months before you stumbled across it.
- Cloned Websites. Fraud sites are usually clones of some of the legitimate websites such as Binance, Coinbase, etc. For example, https://www.wayfair.com is legitimate but https://www.wayfair.net is fake.
- URL Numbering. This is a common way that scammers use to name their websites. It is usually because the police have made them shut down the original site and they need a new one to use. It seems that common numbers in a website name are: 66, 68, 123. For example: http://h5.capital880.com, https://h5.capsmart.xyz. If a URL has a number in the website domain name (ie. http://h5.capital880.com) then it is almost certain the website is a fake.
- Customer Service. This is the big one! Only fake sites require you to communicate to some sort of customer service person via WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram to do withdrawals and make deposits. Legitimate crypto websites do not have such a requirement…. you are free to deposit and withdraw whenever you want. The phone numbers used are usually USA numbers. Pay close attention as the people using those numbers generally have broken or very poor English. In some cases a bot is being used to provide canned answers.
- Cryptotrading. Most scam companies ask victims to transfer funds to some sort of crypto platform. The most common crypto platforms used are Binance and Coinbase and ShakePay (used in Canada) before before leading victims to the fraud website to do their trading. In some cases they may ask you to create an account on the crypto platform and have the victim speak with customer service to arrange for the deposit. Deposits usually have some sort of sign-up or bonus incentive to make the deposit irresistible.
- Identity Verification. The scammer talking to the victim usually has spent time finding some common ground to establish trust and goodwill (ie. person looking for romance, individual looking for investment). Pay close attention to the details and whenever claims are made (ie. they have lots of money, they have expensive cars, etc.) always ask for proof and insist on a video chat. Scammers will never want to video chat and always have some good reason why they don’t want to (ie. past trauma, don’t let the girlfriend find out about her, camera is broken, etc.)