New types of cryptocurrency scams and how to protect yourself from them
Seed-phrase scam
As of February 2025, this scheme is actively gaining momentum. The current head of the crypto exchange Binance, Richard Teng, even warned about it. The essence of this scam is as follows: attackers notify users that their cryptocurrency wallet has allegedly been compromised.
To secure funds, users are offered to transfer assets to a "safe wallet" controlled by scammers, and victims are provided with a seed phrase from it. If the cryptocurrency is transferred to such a wallet, the funds cannot be withdrawn from it, as it is protected by multi-signature. This means at least one more signature will be needed to send any transaction.
How to protect yourself?
If the wallet is compromised, you will only find out if someone other than the owner starts sending transactions. In such a case, the only thing that can be done is to try to save the remaining assets by sending them to another wallet.
To prevent this, you can use hardware wallets that prevent seed phrase leaks or clients that support advanced security features like multi-signature and two-factor authentication (2FA).
Fake memcoins
Hacking Twitter accounts to promote scam tokens is relatively common in the crypto industry and is nothing new. Attackers managed to hack accounts for well-known projects such as Aptos, Uniswap, and Near Protocol. Profiles of famous people, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, famous bitcoin skeptic Peter Schiff, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, were also hacked.
However, after US President Donald Trump's official meme token, TRUMP, a new danger has emerged: users now expect other prominent politicians to launch their meme tokens. For example, Donald Trump's wife, Melania, has also launched her meme token, MELANIA, and former BitMEX cryptocurrency exchange director Arthur Hayes said in his new essay that "in 5-10 years, every politician will have their own meme token."
Case in point: in February 2025, attackers hacked into the official X account of the Saudi Law Conference, through which hackers began promoting the fraudulent meme token FALCON, disguised as Saudi Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.
How to protect yourself?
The surest way is to wait until the token is posted on the website of a reputable monitoring service, such as CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, or Cryptorank. However, one should not rely on them 100%, as it happened that these services published fraudulent tokens. One of the brightest examples was the scam token SQUAD, which was created on the wave of popularity of the famous South Korean TV series "The Squid Game."
Fraudulent mini-apps in Telegram
After the resounding success of "tapaloks" Notcoin and Hamster Kombat, a real wave of such game applications began, which are available directly on Telegram. Their essence is quite simple: users must be active in the mini-application to get drops in the form of future tokens.
Expectedly, on the wave of popularity of "tapaloks," scammers also began to be active and launch scam applications. The Money DOGS project turned out to be one of them. After launching the MDOGS meme token, the fraudulent project's team simply took tokens from its own users.
How to protect yourself?
So, what is the danger if such applications do not require investment? In addition to wasted time, there is a real threat of losing money.
First, after introducing a new internal currency in Telegram called Stars, messenger mini-applications now offer the possibility of making in-app purchases. For example, developers provide various bonuses and boosts that can be purchased for Stars.
But that's far from the worst part: mini-apps require a TON wallet to be connected to receive future tokens. This action grants the app some permissions. And here lies the most significant danger: fraudsters can debit assets from your wallet. And if the wallet is not connected, the rewards may not be credited.
You can protect yourself from the theft of digital assets from your wallet in two ways:
- Connect an exchange account to withdraw tokens in the future. Such accounts will not be able to be hacked by fraudsters in the specified way;
- Do not use a wallet on which the user stores significant assets.
If information about a scam is available, it is also possible to cancel permissions in the wallet itself — this will help protect assets from theft.
Stealing anonymous numbers and usernames in Telegram
Tapalks like Notcoin and Hamster Combat have increased the popularity of cryptocurrencies and, in particular, memcoins and led to the growth of the user base of the Telegram messenger itself. However, scammers have also picked up the trend.
Not everyone knows that anonymous numbers and Telegram usernames can be transferred to other users with the help of NFT. Scammers try to fraudulently obtain these NFT tokens to sell or use them for other unscrupulous purposes.
Here's how the scheme works:
- The attacker sends a private message to a potential victim with an offer to buy an anonymous number/username. Most often, the cryptocurrency Toncoin is offered for purchase, and the amount usually varies from 1000 to 5000 TON ($3600 — $18,000 at the exchange rate at the time of writing). The transactions themselves take place on the real NFT-marketplace Fragment, so searching for information on the Internet will not raise suspicions;
- If the victim agrees to the transaction, the scammers will send the agreed amount to her wallet. The transaction details will show that the scammer has transferred cryptocurrency under TON, but these are not real tokens and will not appear on the wallet balance.
The scammer will try to convince the victim that the balance may not show up immediately and may ask to transfer the NFT token as soon as possible.
How to protect yourself?
In almost 100% of cases, those who write private messages with such offers are scammers. If you need to sell an anonymous number or username, it is better to do it directly through the Fragment platform, having created an offer of sale with the desired amount.
If another user offers such a transaction, it is necessary to ensure that he transfers real cryptocurrency (this can be checked by checking the contract address on CoinMarketCap or a similar site) or ask for help from an experienced crypto enthusiast.
By the way, this is far from the only way to cheat on Telegram: attackers also create fake Telegram web pages to steal accounts. In January 2025 alone, more than 1 million people faced this type of scam, and the number of victims remains unknown. This is the same way scammers try to steal accounts from users of another popular messenger, WhatsApp.