Here’s how scammers posing as journalists can steal your crypto

As the cryptocurrency sector grows larger, the methods of scammers trying to get their hands on others’ digital assets become more sophisticated, as seen in the recently exposed case of fraudsters pretending to be journalists to gain their victims’ trust.

Specifically, blockchain security firm SlowMist has recently revealed a scheme in which a swindler tried to hijack accounts on the crypto social network friend.tech posing as a journalist to trick users into downloading malicious files, as SlowMist’s team explained in a Medium post on November 13.

Fake journalist

According to the post, X user Masiwei reported on October 14 a scam attempt targeting friend.tech for account theft, saying he was talking to someone who said they were a journalist at Forbes for two hours, when they asked to verify his identity through a link in order to – prevent impersonation.

Just in case, Masiwei first sent the link to SlowMist, and its security team identified a malicious JavaScript code in it. According to the firm, “the attacker would trick users into adding it as a bookmark, laying the groundwork for future malicious activities,” and after this discovery, they issued a security alert on X.

Not long after this alert, friend.tech user Double Wan posted on X that someone stole their assets on the platform, and SlowMist jumped in, successfully intercepting the stolen funds working together with crypto exchange OKX, which caused the scammer to become salty and even ‘congratulate’ the victim.

Deepfakes

Elsewhere, another case of using someone else’s identity to steal crypto surfaced with the discovery of a scam video ad, which seemed to show the CEO of Ripple, the company that created XRP, asking XRP holders to send their tokens and receive twice as much back, as Finbold earlier reported.

Shockingly, the ad, which combines a video of Brad Garlinghouse giving a speech and artificial intelligence (AI) generated voice-over, ran for 45 seconds on the renowned video platform YouTube, showing how easily scammers can come up with new (and rather convincing) ways to steal cryptocurrency.