Fake negativity: how scammers make money by blackmailing cryptocurrency exchanges
Cryptocurrency trading is becoming more and more popular every day. Cryptocurrency exchanges offer great opportunities to make money. However, along with traders who strive to earn honestly, there are unscrupulous Internet users who prefer to “earn” in a fraudulent way.
Thus, there are a lot of examples on the web when unscrupulous traders tried to gain access to other people’s accounts and funds by selling their “trading signals and strategies”. Of course, such signals and strategies did not exist at all. Fortunately, information about such “entrepreneurs” spreads fast enough on the web.
Recently, however, fraudsters are increasingly trying to make money not on trusting traders, but on blackmailing companies that provide cryptocurrency trading and exchange services.
For example, in order to gain commercial profit from a cryptocurrency exchange, scammers can create pseudo-ratings of brokers. In such ratings, they basically post negative reviews of companies with negative feedback from supposedly real customers.
It is worth noting that often such reviews are not just intentionally exaggerated, but also the information about the conditions of this or that exchanger does not comply with reality.
Then the owners of such fake ratings contact the representatives of the exchanges they write about and offer to remove the negative material for money. Of course, the company representative, investigating the written material, points out the inconsistency of the information in the text.
In addition, the posted reviews are studied in detail, a request is submitted to the customer support service in order to identify customers. And, as practice shows, it is not possible to identify them. As a rule, all reviews on such websites are of the same content and are not supported by any situational specifics.
What do representatives of crypto exchanges do in such situations? First of all, information about the fake rating domain is being checked. If information about the domain owner is publicly available, the company’s lawyers can file a lawsuit and notify the rating owner. It is quite noteworthy that often at this stage the owner simply removes his rating from the network.
If the information about the owner is hidden, you can contact the hosting company. The hosting company needs to provide evidence that the website is fraudulent. And after reviewing these materials, the website can be blocked, although this, too, may take a lot of time.
Due to the increasing occurrence of such fake ratings, it is important to remember how to correctly assess the level of a particular cryptocurrency. Therefore, it is recommended to use verified resources. If we talk about independent ratings, pay attention to the lifetime of the rating, the content of the posted reviews and the presence of representatives of certain companies in the official branches.