Giveaway scams in the crypto world are not new, and we’ve even seen fraudsters impersonating famous people like Elon Musk or Vitalik Buterin, trying to con clueless victims. Just a few days after Bakkt launched, some scammers have launched a fake website called bakktlaunch[dot]com. The cons are impersonating Bakkt, the Bitcoin $BTC futures platform. What is their strategy?
“Bakkt official BTC and ETH Giveaway” Is a Scam!
The fake website tries to impersonate the official Bakkt Medium page, claiming to offer BTC and ETH in a giveaway to celebrate the launch. Here’s the message on the fake website:
“We wanted to commemorate such an achievement by holding a giveaway of 5000 BTC and 10000 ETH! A special promotion for BTC and ETH users!”
The cons urge users to click a link to receive BTC or ETH. After clicking the link, users are redirected to a page which asks you to deposit cryptocurrency so that your address can be verified. It claims that afterward, the user will receive a much larger amount of BTC or ETH:
“If you participate for 5 BTC or 100 ETH, you will get an additional 100% bonus.”
However, you can imagine that it’s never going to happen, and all those deposits made by the victims are lost!
According to TheNextWeb, neither of the links redirecting users to the free BTC or ETH have received cryptocurrency at the moment. However, scams like this one are known to generate new addresses for each user so that the con artists can easily hide the illicit operations.
Such scams have appeared ever since Bitcoin was launched, and in Bakkt’s case, the smart thing these fraudsters did was wait for the platform to officially launch. Facebook’s Libra token, for instance, experienced many fake sales even before the official token was launched!
Although scammers have their eyes on Bakkt, the demand for Bitcoin futures through Bakkt was very slow in the first week, with only 57 units of BTC futures being sold in two days of trading! Nonetheless, analysts point out that this will be a slow but successful development.
