Hello everyone, I hope you're doing well. I recently encountered something interesting and thought it would be great to share it with the community here. If you have bought some ERC20 tokens by investing in some ICOs, this is a must-read if you are not already aware of it.

What happened?

I was going through my emails when I saw something weird and I panicked a little, after all - I was checking my inbox after a month. It was an email from the EncryptoTel Slack.

And the email read :

Attention! Urgent announcement from the Encryptotel Team:

Due to the recent attacks on the Ethereum Network by the blackhat hackers and due to the scalability issues during the
popular crowdsales, Ethereum Development Team decided to implement *security and scalability* protocol changes: *EIP101 - EIP190*.
During the next 24 hours, *Ethereum codebase will be upgraded* to the EIP190 and ERC20 (any token on ethereum network) codebase will be upgraded to ERC21.
Every person *has to swap* their ETH and any ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum network *(including ETT)* manually using the swap website. Any un-swapped ethers or tokens will be considered as "lost forever" and will not be supported on any exhanges.
*Learn More -*https://tokenswap.org/

When did it happen?

The email was sent 3 days before I opened my inbox; clearly more than 24 hours. So, I panicked - thinking all my tokens would have disappeared because I didn't check my email on time. I opened MEW in one tab and navigated to tokenswap.org in the other tab. It gets interesting from here:

The site is a rip-off of the Ethereum website. But all the links in it seem to be working perfectly fine, pointing to the correct endpoints within the same domain. There was not a single broken link. And on top of it all, you see this message.

If you were in a panic-stricken state like I was in and was not aware of the development protocols and standards, you wouldn't definitely think of just checking out the new protocols before ensuring the safety of your investments. So, you do what is asked of you to do.

All this time I was wondering why I never heard of this anywhere else? Something like that should have made it to the trending page of Steem or Reddit. It should have been on crypto-news and Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Something seemed fishy. So, I decided to read about the protocols at https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs. By this time, I had checked that the Tokens were present in MEW.

EIP190 and ERC21 do not exist.

https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/

There wasn't a broken link, but the Swap button was broken. Just click on it and it shows a new page:

The last part made me laugh.

What did we learn today?

Not all emails that seem to have come from the known addresses are legit.
No body asks for a private key. If they do, they're trying to scam you. Never give out your private key to anyone. It's called private for a reason.
"But it looks so convincing and looks exactly like the ethereum website" - that's called phishing; make sure you carefully check your url. Ethereum doesn't need a new website to put out any announcements.
Before you jump the gun, always take a few minutes to research on the internet. It can make you a lot wiser person.

Thank you for reading. If it helped, do spread the word and have a great day :D

Scam alert! | Ecency