Scams are everywhere, and social media platforms are a prime target for them. As part of the TempMail.lol scam articles, we will be focusing on online scams, signs of them, and how to avoid them.
Quick overview
In this scam, the scammer will attempt to:
- Try to get your interest as a ‘financial expert’
- Attempt to get you interested in buying cryptocurrency or NFTs
- Ask you to send money to them, then runaway with the money once paid, or ask for more money
The Scam
This particular scammer was inexperienced, he was quick to send me his details to try to scam me out of money, and made several mistakes about what he was trying to scam me out of. For the purposes of not making these scams better, I will not be pointing out these mistakes.
The scam starts with a user friending you on a platform such as Discord; though, this is just where it happened to me, it is possible for this to happen on any popular social media platform.
Introduction
The scammer starts by adding you as a friend, usually from a mutual server (if you are in public Discord servers). Since my username starts with an “a”, I am high up on the list of members. Afterwards, they usually do not initiate a conversation, they wait for you to start it.
Here is the beginning of the conversation I had with the scammer (note that my first message “yes” was due to his friend request). It is highly likely that the scammer’s name is faked; however, I cannot take such a risk.
Image transcription:
Me: yes?
Scammer: How are you doing, nice to meet you .
Me: good, what’s up?
Scammer: I’m Harrison and I’m from Texas United State, I deal on NFT and Crypto have you had of any before?
Me: i’ve heard of it but haven’t gotten into it
Scammer: Have you heard of NFT craft investment where You can purchase NFT craft from us today at the sum of $7,000 and sell it in one week time with the sum of $60,500.
Me: sounds sketchy
Me: sorry for my late responses, i’m away from my house right now
Scammer: NFTs are only profitable because they are one of a kind, if I were to show you, you could screen shot than be rich
Needless to say, this sounds sketchy from the get-go. I have never been one to invest in NFTs, so even NFTs through legitimate channels seem sketchy to me.
The scammer hopes to get your attention by throwing out big numbers, and promising that if you pay, you will get large rewards in return; however, as we will get into later, the scammer will up and run with your money, and you won’t be left with the JPEG you were promised.
Reeling in the victim
After getting a conversation going with the victim, the scammer will attempt to get the victim to send money to them. They will start with a price around $10,000, expecting the victim to back out, only to ‘concede’ to a lower price. You can see the same tactic used sometimes by salespeople, though legitimate salespeople and scammers are very different people.
In my case, the scammer asks how much I want to invest, basically saying that I have control over the entire transaction. The scammer will do this to attempt to gain trust with the potential victim.
Image transcription:
Scammer: NFTs are only profitable because they are one of a kind, if I were to show you, you could screen shot than be rich
Scammer: And I can’t let that happen unless we have a fare trade
Me: i don’t get it
Scammer: It is very easy to make money., and all you have to do is send as much and reliable way too money of your choice and you will get a custom NFT that you could wait 5-10 days to sell And you could make millions after the investment (shrugging arms emoji)
Me: do i give you the money? sounds kind of strange
Scammer: Are you interested, let me tell you the correct NFT that is in sell at the moment?
Me: sure! sounds interesting
Scammer: Currently on sales now a Gorilla that could go for about $98,683 after about 1 week
Scammer: That would be for $11,081 right now, But I can sell it for you in the sum of $9,500, Can you afford this?
Me: i mean i can but that sounds like way too much
Scammer: Alright how much would you like to start up with ?
Scammer: You say
Me: maybe $500?
The scammer intentionally goes overboard with the price, then lowers it to make it seem more of a deal, even though no matter how much you pay you’ll be scammed out of your money, whether it is $500, $9,500, or $11,081.
Collecting from the victim
After I said that I would pay $500 (which I would never do), the scammer’s eyes lit up like dollar signs in a cartoon, and he eagerly sent me options to pay. Etherium and Bitcoin would be hard to trace, especially if he was using a separate address per victim, so I decided to go with PayPal since I could report it to get his account shut down.
I claimed that I did not own cryptocurrency (it’s the truth!) so I could get his PayPal details, and he copy/pasted a response right to me, asking me to send $500 to that address.
Needless to say, I’m going to blur out the scammers details, even though it is likely a temporary email and a prepaid phone number (by the way, we run a temporary email service! Check it out here). The scammer also states that I must put the reason of payment as “gift”, this is likely to avoid any kind of anti-scam measures PayPal has put in place.
Image transcription:
Scammer: Alright
Scammer: How do you want to make your payment? Bitcoin wallet PayPal ETH…
Me: paypal would probably be the easiest
Me: i do not own cryptocurrency
Scammer: [redacted paypal information]
Me: [trollface emote]
Me: caught in 4k man
Me: hook line and sinker
Scammer: Once you made the payment please take a screenshot and sent it to me immediately
Scammer: Alright
Granted, I could have trolled him a bit more by saying things such as “PayPal blocked my payment” or “How do I know you are who you say you are?”, I decided it was time to end the scam.
Though it was immature of me to send a trollface emote and my other two comments after that, I wanted the scammer to feel like his time was wasted interacting with me, and maybe make him think about making an honest living in society, rather than trying to scam innocent people out of their hard earned money.
Bonus: after looking up the phone number, I discovered that it belongs to an actual carrier in the United States, and not a VoIP service as I initially thought. I will edit this page if I discover more on this.
Edit: after looking some more, the area code listed is in Texas, which leads me to believe this phone could be hijacked with malaware in order to receive verification codes.
Conclusion
Want to stop scams like this? Send this article to your friends and family to warn them about scammers, and what kinds of tactics they use to bring in victims.
If you want, join our Discord Server, and bookmark our blog so you can stay up to date with the kinds of scams flooding the Internet these days.
If you were contacted by a scammer, or want to report scams for me to investigate, feel free to contact me on the Discord server above, or email me at [email protected].
Stay safe out there!