Lately I've been seeing more airdrop links flying everywhere, accounts popping out of nowhere and saying stuff like "Hive airdrop is finally here, claim it".
Now it's not just pissing me off, cuz as someone who has been a victim of almost $4000 drain from smart contract phishing links. I think scammers and criminals deserves no place on this earth, but away from that I think it's time everyone starts doing a different form of awareness for phishing scam on Hive.
The first thing anyone who is active, new, existing or old user should know is that Hive has no form of airdrop whatsoever.
The only airdrop happened when the Blockchain forked the only ways to own the platform's token is by buying and earn them through platform activities, there are no plans for airdrop today, not tomorrow, not ever.
This is because there's logically no reason to. However I understand that a lot of people in crypto knows best airdrops are regular routines of different platforms, so technically anyone who is new or probably has an account but haven't been on for a long while might think "oh the platform wants to do a drop" and they probably just go ahead to sign in with their keys.
I think while this method works is lack of information and probably greed. In smart contracts, the scammers are not even depending on greed, they're just counting on the fact that people will make mistakes and just careless click links without even signing in everything.
On Hive, people can't get scammed by clicking links, because the platform requires a KEY, and hivesigner doesn't automatically sign in your KEYS just like how smart contracts works which is technically why the security system on Hive is far more superior than the native smart contract designed by Vitalik.
So when you're signing a transaction on Hive, you're using a group of passwords which isn't your KEYS, so your transactions or signing one single transaction can actually not hurt you, and the reason is the security systems.
However, airdrop phishing links on Hive would go ahead to create similar transactions that looks real, but the bigger problem is that you'll definitely need to actually sign in with your key which should be a very big red flag.
Anything that warrants you to sign in your key from a third party that's unverified is mostly 100% scam and these guys will be banking on greed, hastiness and cluelessness of people to actually scam them.
Scam everywhere
Today I saw someone who still fell victim to that scam, even though we've countlessly hammered that there are no airdrops currently ongoing.
Also, another red flag is seeing an account with a -15 REP talking about an airdrop, another obviously sign are accounts with no history, they've not posted before, not interacted with anyone before, I mean history is how we differentiate between what is mostly real and what isn't and honestly.
I think a lot of people should already know this, but even though a person is a newbie or an existing user who has been off for a very long time, I still think the world is a scammy place and people should treat any offer for free things with caution.
This isn't to say there aren't free things, but this is the same crude method for theft. Someone showed me a screenshot saying someone sent them a link and that MRBEAST was doing a giveaway.
That each person could get 3000$ if they pay a one-time deposit of a 30$ I laughed really hard because even though we know that MR BEAST is known to do a lot of giveaways, they're most exclusive, people chosen by him.
There are no places for regular people to submit a Wallet or something like that.. so technically a scammer somewhere will be banking on the inability of people to do their own research to cheat people.
Be careful.... At least Hive is different
There are lots of scams, and the easiest scams to spot are in platforms like Hive where the system is built with Failsafes. Technically Hive wallet is a bank that's uncompromisable, except of course you give our your KEYS, and even if you do, a scammer cannot make away with your STAKE if they're powered up or maybe kept in savings.
Some of the reasons for the 13 weeks or 3 days timer is so that people can have the time to reverse whatever a scammer has set in motion. This is not possible with hot wallets that uses smart contracts. I hope we can market Hive more with this.
