How do crypto airdrop scams work?
Almost every airdrop scam wants one of three things: your recovery phrase, a signature that lets someone else move your tokens, or a payment sent in advance. A real airdrop never asks for your recovery phrase and never asks you to send crypto in order to receive crypto.
Scammers copy real projects because real airdrops exist and are worth money. The fake usually appears at the moment people are searching for a claim page.
Common types of fake airdrops
Fake claim sites
A copy of a project's website, on a slightly different address, asks you to connect your wallet and "claim". The transaction you sign doesn't claim anything. It approves the scammer's contract to take tokens out of your wallet.
Tokens that appear in your wallet
You find a token you never asked for, often with a website in its name. Visiting that site to "claim" or sell it leads to the same kind of approval. Leave unknown tokens alone.
Fake support and direct messages
Someone posing as a project's team messages you on X, Discord or Telegram about an allocation or a problem with your claim. Project teams don't open conversations in direct messages.
Pay first to unlock
You're told to send a fee, a "gas deposit" or a "verification payment" to release your tokens. Real claims charge network gas when you make the claim transaction. They don't ask you to send money to an address first.
Presales for tokens that don't exist
Before a real token launches, fakes sell it early. Projects often warn about this themselves. Push Chain's tokenomics page states that its token is not live and that no presale is running.
How to identify a fake airdrop
- Reach the claim page from the project's own website. Don't use search ads, replies under a post or links in messages.
- Check the web address letter by letter before you connect a wallet.
- Check that the X account is the one the official website links to. While researching our guides we found airdrop listings that gave the wrong X account for two projects.
- Confirm the token has been announced. If the project says it has no token, every "claim" for it is fake.
- Read what your wallet asks you to sign. Reject any request to approve all of a token, or all of your NFTs, that you didn't expect.
- Be suspicious of a deadline measured in minutes. Real claim windows run for weeks or months.
Red flags in the project itself
Some campaigns are real but still not worth your time or money. These are the reasons we turned projects down when building our airdrop guides:
- No named team, no named investors and no coverage outside airdrop listings.
- Rewards that depend on recruiting other people, with commissions several levels deep.
- Points that are mainly earned by depositing into the project's own fundraise.
- Documents with unfinished or placeholder text.
- A gambling site that doesn't name its operator or licence.
How to protect your wallet from airdrop scams
Use a separate wallet for airdrops and keep only what you need in it. Keep savings in a different wallet, ideally a hardware one, that never connects to new sites. Bookmark the official sites of the projects you use and open them from the bookmark.
Review your token approvals every so often with an approval checker such as Revoke.cash, and remove the ones you no longer use. Never type your recovery phrase into a website, a form or a chat, whatever the reason given.
What to do if you signed a scam transaction
- Move what's left to a new wallet with a new recovery phrase. If the phrase itself was exposed, the old wallet is no longer safe.
- Revoke the approvals you gave from the old wallet.
- Ignore anyone who contacts you offering to recover the funds for a fee. That is a second scam aimed at people who were just robbed.
- Report it. In the US you can report to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov and to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov. Tell the real project too, so it can warn others.
For the legitimate route, see how to get crypto airdrops.
Sources
- Push Chain tokenomics Push Chain
- Report fraud US Federal Trade Commission
- Internet Crime Complaint Center FBI
This article is general information, not financial or tax advice. No airdrop is guaranteed.