These kinds of details fetch a decent price on the dark web – so it's likely that the scammers were putting together a database of information to sell off. Sound fishy? It should, seeing as the scammers were after the victims' personal information as well as their cryptocurrency. The scammers were after the victims' personal information, as well as their cryptocurrency.
There were even report notes, technical support and two-factor authentication!įolks would then need to go through the registration process, which meant making a crypto deposit at some point, or completing a Know Your Customer identity check and handing over identification in the form of a photo document, proof of address, and signature.
It looked good, it looked real, with nice graphics and professional presentation. The cryptocurrency scam messages contained a link that led to an incredibly authentic-looking site. This is social engineering, and pretty common in phishing scams from elsewhere on the net – subtle techniques scammers employ to keep you from getting suspicious.Īfter all, if you're suspicious, you're not going to click the link in the message, and that's exactly what the scammer wants. The wording was smooth, there was a smattering of emojis, and the Discord messages were all formatted thoughtfully. The reasons for this oh-so-generous giveaway varied, but the scammers typically claimed to want to help new users get their slice of the Bitcoin pie, or said that they had to drop out of the market themselves and would rather their investments not go to waste.Įssentially, all of the scammers' victims were promised a Bitcoin payout.Īnd those promises seemed fairly legitimate.
The crypto scammers plainly took advantage of the high-intensity situation, and targeted members of cryptocurrency servers, pretending to represent legitimate trading platforms and offering free currency. It was plain to insiders and outsiders alike that there was, potentially, a lot of money to be made by investing in Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum – and so enter the scammers, hoping to make a quick buck by targeting these exchanges.
This is all illustrated pretty clearly by the recent trouble in cryptocurrency servers.Ī lot of us got really interested in stocks and cryptocurrencies in the last few months, and a lot of those conversations were happening on Discord in dedicated servers. One such change has already been implemented, in fact, and now you can click a bot's profile picture to see which servers you have in common – and therefore figure out which server the bot is messaging you from.īut bot scams haven't stopped, and they're arguably getting more sophisticated as Discord's communities continue to grow. Why? Well, because it was a scam… oh, and because Discord Nitro had been shut down the year before.ĭiscord itself was aware of the issue and claimed that it was 'working on long-term mitigations' to address the rising tide of bot spammers. If someone invited the bot into their digital home-away-from-home, it'd run riot, DM'ing all the members of that server before deleting the channels. A bot, claiming to be an official Twitch bot, went out of its way to DM users and offer them a bunch of free Discord Nitro games if they invited it to the server. To see these patterns in action, you only have to turn back time to 2020 when a brace of scams hit the platform particularly rapidly. Now you can click a bot's profile picture to see which servers you have in common.
You won't actually receive that Fortnite skin or FFXIV mount, and the server you invite the bot into could be irrevocably damaged. Obviously, it's a bad idea to take the bot up on any of its offers or requests. All the user has to do in return is add the bot to a server. These cybercriminals prey on a user's curiosity they'll get their bot to offer you something seriously tempting, like a free in-game item or even real-world currency. Shady characters have been rigging Discord bots to spam malicious links and beg for server invites for a long time.
Like I said, Discord scams aren't a new thing for 2022 by any means. That's what I'll dig into in this post, and later on I'll dish out some Discord server security tips for members and owners alike! What do Discord scams look like? Discord is no stranger to scams, however, and a recent spate of incidents has us wondering what we can do to deter these incidents – and prevent future ones.
Unfortunately, when large groups of people with a common interest gather on any platform, it piques the interest of cybercriminals. So, now Discord is home to gamers, streamers, artists, fan clubs, and even cryptocurrency enthusiasts.