Cryptocurrencies are one of the biggest innovations in the 21st century and the interest in them keeps growing every day. We’re incredibly happy with the current situation that cryptocurrencies are in and we’re glad that they’re becoming more mainstream, but as with any valuable thing that becomes popular frauds and scammers tend to follow pretty quickly behind. It’s an almost unavoidable occurrence. There’s of course always been some amount of them in the crypto scene but their number keeps growing as more and more public interest is shifting to the crypto market. We’ll cover some of the best tips that you can do to shield yourself from charlatans and scammers who want nothing more than to rid you of your hard-earned coins.
Knowledge is power, be informed
Scammers generally prey on those who are new and who don’t yet have a massive amount of knowledge of cryptocurrencies. They know it’s difficult to scam someone who is experienced and informed of all the latest crypto news that’s going on. While you can’t speedrun the experience part you certainly can inform yourself and that will greatly help in avoiding most scams.
Simply reading up on the most popular scams and how they work is enough to shield yourself at least from the common scammers who use these basic and well-studied tricks that have kind of become old by this point. It may not protect you from newly found tricks but those are few and far between. As long as you’re not falling for the older tricks then you’ll be far safer than you were before and it will give you more peace of mind which can transfer to boldness in trading and lead to more profits too.
Never give your info to others
Unless you’re writing a will or something similar then there really is no reason to give your private keys and passwords to anyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s your best friend or mother or whoever else, keep those to yourself and keep them safe. We’re not saying that they may scam you, but they may get scammed themselves or if you’re communicating online then their account may be compromised and it would lead to you losing everything.
We’re not telling you to be wary that your friends and family may have malicious intentions. We’re telling you to keep your passwords and keys to yourself as you are the only person you can truly trust. You can never be sure that your friends will also be able to safeguard themselves against scams, hacks and other malicious things so why risk it? There are very few circumstances where giving others your private info for your crypto wallets is a good idea so it’s best to play it safe, and this of course goes for all of your accounts, not just the ones which are related to your cryptocurrencies.
Strong passwords
Speaking of passwords, it’s important to have ones that are difficult to guess, no matter if the guessing is done through brute forcing or social engineering. We’ll cover what you can do against both. The best protection against brute force attacks is to have a password that is as long and as complicated as possible or practical. You can either make one yourself or use one of the reputable password-generation programs that are available today to make an uncrackable one for you.
Social engineering on the other hand is where someone tries to figure out some private info about you and then uses it to figure the password out or possibly reset it. Avoiding this is done in two steps. The first is to never include obvious private info about yourself in the password such as date of birth or name. The second is making sure that you don’t give away any unnecessary private info online as you’d be surprised what can be used against you via social engineering.
Conclusion
Crypto frauds are an inevitability just as they are in any other segment of life where money is involved. It’s important to understand this, accept it, and do everything that you can to safeguard yourself against possible attacks. There are many more things that can be done to increase your safety but today we decided to cover the most basic and important ones. We hope that it will help you keep yourself safe.
