If you collect NFTs like me, you've probably dealt with your fair share of scammers. I'm not talking about people creating and selling fake versions of NFTs. I'm talking about trade and buy offer scammers. You might be confused, so let's check it out.
Trade/Buy NFT Scammers
So you might be wondering what I mean. How can someone be scamming if they are offering to buy your NFT? Even if they lowball the offer, they are still making an offer, therefore not scamming. So how does this turn into scamming? I'll show you. It's honestly disgusting but it is literally happening all day every day. With transaction fees being non-existent on WAX, they can send these scam transactions nonstop (as long as they have WAX staked for CPU & RAM). This doesn't go to say it doesn't happen on other blockchains, though. I'm sure it's happening a lot low fee chains as well. So how does someone scam you by offering you money for your NFT?
First they load a very tiny amount of WAX into their wallet. Usually less than 1 WAX. Then they blast out offers of 0.000000001 WAX or something similar to different valuable NFTs. More than likely these are bots. But it could be some sad fuck in a basement doing this all day. The scam part comes in when you read the message attaches to the offers.
As you can see above, I received an offer for 0.000095 WAX for one of my pretty rare Alien Worlds NFTs. The attached message says " You have been offered 440.0 WAX. You will also receive and extra 0.000095 WAX fee paid by the buyer. Be careful, click Accept only from original account - marketplaces." Clearly if I accept the offer, they get my valuable NFT and I get 0.000095 WAX, or a whopping $0.003. Less than a penny. The scammer is trying to convince the offer receiver that they are going to get 440 WAX and that the tiny amount is just the fee.
The truly disgusting thing about it is the message also says to "Be careful". As if they are protecting you by including that in the message. It's a false sense of trust in hopes to get you to click that accept offer button. Even someone new to WAX or crypto in general could easily fall for this. Just pay attention to the offers you receive. The blockchain doesn't lie, so let's check out these accounts.
Right here - on chain you can see this account admitting they are a scammer. Maybe someone got control of the bot? I dunno. But it literally says "DO NOT ACCEPT ANY OFFERS I AM A FUCKING SCAMMER =)"
This even happens with Trade offers, which is even crazier. Less elaborate, but still disgusting. How does someone scam people with Trade offers? First - you need to understand what trade offers are. AtomicHub has a feature that allows users to trade NFTs. Basically I have NFT A and you have NFT B, we can create a trade offer and swap. The problem is that you can create empty trade offers. Check out the one I received.
The good thing is that AtomicHub recognizes this and warns you only to accept if you want to gift the NFTs to the person offering. YOU DO NOT RECEIVE ANYTHING FROM THIS OFFER!
And they do this all fucking day for different amounts of NFTs.
Again the message attached is "You have been offered 1220 WAX." This one even says you'll receive a gift from the market! Sweet, so you steal 3000 WAX worth of my NFTs and I get nothing. What a gift! So what should you do when you get an offer like this? Obviously don't accept it. But do this too.
First tell em to fuck off, politely of course. Then block the account.
This will prevent them from being able to send you another scam offer from this account. It won't stop all of them, but it will definitely help. So there you have it. Beware if you have any NFTs. This type of thing happens on OpenSea too with the addition of low fee and fee-less chains like Polygon. Don't lose your valuable assets to some sick fuck.
Thanks for reading! Much love.
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