I participated in 10 Airdrops. See the devastating results.

cryptocrips.org

3 years ago

I participated in 10 Airdrops. See the devastating results

I know the crypto sphere is highly abstract, unregulated and overpopulated with scammers and fraudsters. This may seem obvious to some, but not to others. Let me point that out focused on Airdrops:

Over the last couple of months some of my friends developed an interest in cryptocurrencies, mostly influenced by me, which was completely unintentional.

Of course I told them about the many scam schemes I discovered so far. Told them about cloud mining services which never pay out, giveaway scams and so on. I told them to be cautious and never trust anything or anyone. Especially if it sounds to good to be true.

But as always in life you have to make your own experiences.

Meet Steve. Our fool of the day.

My buddy Steve for example told me about that awesome Airdrop Bot he discovered on Telegram. “In a couple of weeks”, he told me, “I will get 1 $ETH and didn’t invest a penny. Isn’t that awesome?”

So Steve waited a couple of weeks until the Airdrop was over, fantasizing about the things he could afford with one ETH. A new TV maybe? A small vacation? A pound of weed?

Steve kept waiting and waiting for the promised amount of one $ETH to arrive, checking his wallet on an hourly basis. But nothing happened. He kept waiting and waiting and died of anger while biting his nails.

Okay, okay, okay. Steve was fictional. Surprise, eh?

But despite that obviously made up friend this is a common scam scheme in the crypto world.

About these so called ‘projects’

These projects almost universally required the user to join the project’s Telegram group as well as like and retweet a post on the project’s Twitter account and follow them. Some would ask you to join their Facebook or Discord Server and some would require you to post about them and tag friends in.

Needless to say, I used throwaway accounts and didn’t take part in any that required to tag someone else. Well, to be honest I did not use throwaway accounts for two of the airdops I took part in. After my research I considered them as legit and, as I expected, they paid out.

Nearly all of them touted themselves as the next big thing in decentralized finance. Like Bitcoin. To the moon. Become a Billionaire and build your own spaceship or whatever. You get the point: FOMO.

“Ooh, a talking moose wants my credit card number. That’s only fair!”
Homer Simpson

10 Airdrops: An overview

Here is an overview of the airdops I took part in. In case you want to play around with these bots a bit I left the links active. Do not worry. As long as you do not invest any of your money on them you are ont he save side.

Telegram is abbreviated to ‘TG’, by the way.

Name	Base Amount	Value in US$	What happened?
Airdrop BNB	0.1 BNB	64.5	Airdrop never arrived, TG Bot not responding.
CryptoFranc	13.7 XCHF	14.8	Airdrop never arrived, TG Bot not responding.
RocketDoge	200,000,000.00 ROCKETDOGE	20.00	Airdrop arrived.
SirDoge	250,000,000,000.00 SirDoge	0.00025	Airdrop never arrived, TG Bot not responding.
IVOGEL	417.00 IVG	0.07	Airdrop never arrived, TG Bot not responding.
BNBPay	0.4 BNB	258.00	Airdrop never arrived, TG Bot was deleted.
FUGU Token	100.00 FUGU	200.00	Airdrop never arrived, TG Bot was deleted.
Lovecoin Token	1,000,000.00 Lovecoins	3.61	Airdrop arrived.
$ROCK Token	10.00 ROCK	100.00	Airdrop never arrived.
KoalaFinance	6,500.00 KOALA	65.00	Airdrop never arrived.

All combined these Airdrops have a value of USD 725.98 by the time this article was published.

I received USD 20.63. In other words: 2.84%. Considering the time I had to invest in participating this was, as expected, a loss-maker. Well, at least as long these cryptos won’t go to the moon.

However, I figured out some things:

Findings

These ‘airdrops’ were almost always a front to peddle a presale of their token. This appears to be the primary goal of most of them.
Based on the Telegram channels of these ‘projects’, most of the users were from South America and the Middle East. Presumably from impoverished countries trying to find themselves some income (but his is just a theory that came to my mind).
Some of the Telegram channels have been renamed and wiped of all information. Some have been labelled as a scam by Telegram itself. Another one has wiped all info and has renamed itself ‘Project for Sale’ and has made one post stating “We couldn’t raise enough from presale, so we abandon the project”. It’s impossible to find out which ‘project’ this channel belonged to.
Some ‘projects’ seem to work together and promote the other project to their users on Telegram and Twitter.
- They don’t always promote the same airdrops, indicating that they only advertise airdrops that they are paid to advertise by the ‘project’.

DYOR

I know this is no surprise, but I cannot stress this out enough: Please do your own research (DYOR) before taking part in any airdrops. Your time is worth more than most of these ‘projects’ combined.

If something seems too good to be true, it usually is.