You may come across a shiba INU giveaway if you’re active on Telegram. This particular giveaway is hosted at shibaprizes.com and targets those that are interested in quick gains by holding the shib token which has performed remarkably well since the beginning of 2021. How reliable is this giveaway? Are there people that are falling for it?
When a coin or token becomes popular, fraudsters routinely follow such assets with the hope to deceive many users and steal their coins.
Why Shiba INU?
In the past few months, meme coins such as Dogecoin and Shiba INU have shown impressive market performance. This is why there are several phishing and giveaway sites that are targeting holders of these tokens, the way they have targeted cryptocurrency users in the past.
In this post, we are looking at some sites that are targeting holders of Shib tokens. This is not surprising, considering that Shiba INU is presently ranking as the 13th most capitalized coin while Dogecoin, the premier meme coin is ranked 11th.
Shibaprizes.com is a giveaway site that demands that the participants make deposits first before they receive Shiba INU tokens, with the minimum amount required to qualify being 0.5 ETH. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t have bothered concerning this type of site since experienced cryptocurrency holders are aware that giveaways do not work that way.
Nevertheless, it is important to be aware that the target of fake giveaway scams are actually new and inexperienced users. As expected, what we can see with this site is the assertion that the Shiba INU project has made a lot of progress towards its roadmap and has decided to reward the users because of the several successes that have been recorded by the project having been listed in several exchanges.
According to the fake giveaway site:
To celebrate all of our current exchanges listing, MarketCap and Achievements, we have committed a total of 1,000,000,000,000 SHIB to give away to our fans worldwide.
Why This Giveaway is A Scam
There is Currently No Shib Giveaway On Official Channels
There is no indication from the Shiba INU team that it has scheduled a giveaway at this time. The project website of Shiba Token is aware that the community is the target of phishing and giveaway scams and have made efforts to stem the tide through several announcements that can be seen on the website. One of such highlights states:
Shytoshi, our Project Manager is in the process of verification. This is to let Twitter know that his official account is found at www.twitter.com/.ShytoshiKusama. Verification will help us stop scammers of our million person community in our other verified account @Shibtoken.
This Giveaway is Shilled On Telegram
The standard channel that crypto projects use while promoting their tokens is their official channels. They mostly wouldn’t even shill their giveaway. But when you observe the shib giveaway, you’ll notice that the entity behind it is working hard to convince people to participate in it.
What could be laughable is the fact that the system was set up to appeal to the greed of the participants. This is the standard approach that fraudsters adopt in their bid to steal the assets of people.
On the Telegram channel of the fake giveaway, there are many shills who pretend that they have been rewarded after sending some ETH to the giveaway address. The Telegram channel has nearly 900 members with a good number of them who are promoting the scam under the pretext that they have received shib tokens after sending ETH.
Leveraging Covid19
As you may be aware, fraudsters are sometimes creative, in that they take advantage of every disaster to steal from uninformed people. According to the fake giveaway site:
To help reverse the devastating spread of Covid-19 in India, VB has since utilized SHIB in the largest crypto donation in history, and then actually burned 40% of its total supply to a dead wallet, ensuring our long-term success and stability. In the words of Ryoshi, “Thank you to the woofmeister for enabling true decentralization. Now we truly begin.”
A Similar Scam
As we already have stated, popular and growing tokens such as DOGE, Shib and even SOL have performed remarkably well. These coins have been targets of elaborate scams.
A similar scam that cloned the Shib website is found at https://shiba-bonuses.com/. This particular scam could be phishing for private keys as the users are instructed to connect their Metamask wallets to the website.
