CAUTION: Never share your recovery phrase (seed phrase, mnemonic words) with ANYONE!

Scammers generally try to exploit your fear (of losing your funds) or greed (offering massive gains) to steal your crypto. Fix My Crypto will never contact you out of the blue asking for your information.

General security tips:

  • Never store your recovery phrase on a digital device or service which could be hacked. Don’t take a picture of it on your phone, don’t save it in a text file on a cloud synced folder, don’t jot it down in an e-mail draft.
  • Any time you copy & paste a payment address, check it carefully. (There are known malware that replace addresses in your clipboard with the scammer’s address.)
  • Never use the same password for multiple exchanges or sites. If one site gets hacked, even if you have no crypto stored there, hackers will immediately try that password on other financial sites.
  • Enable two factor authentication (2FA) using an authenticator app (e.g. Google/Microsoft Authenticator) on your phone as opposed to SMS/text messages to your phone (which can be hacked).

Tips for avoiding scams:

  • Never respond to anyone who contacts you out of the blue on forums, social media sites, or chat apps like Telegram or Snapchat.
  • Beware of any service or scheme that guarantees a large return on your investment, e.g. 2x giveaway scams, investment sites.
  • Beware anyone claiming to be affiliated with a popular crypto site or app (Coinbase, Metamask, Ledger, etc.).
  • Any YouTube video showing a celebrity (e.g. Elon Musk) together with a crypto “giveaway” link is a scam.
  • Exercise extreme caution when any unknown party tells you that you need to take urgent action to avoid a loss.
  • Learn to recognize phishing techniques, such as:
    • Asking for your recovery phrase or passphrase (as if we haven’t said this enough already!)
    • Asking you to click a link or download a program to fix your account
    • Someone claiming they’ve found suspicious activity on your account
    • Asking you to confirm personal information
    • Fake invoices, receipts, or unexpected attachments
    • Asking you to click a link to address any of the above issues
    • Links to giveaways, bonuses, discounts, or coupons

What to do if you have fallen for a scam:

  • If you have revealed your recovery phrase to anyone, immediately transfer all holdings out of all wallets which used that recovery phrase (especially if you used the same phrase for other coins, e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum). Transfer them to new wallets with a new recovery phrase!
  • Reset your passwords on any exchange sites where you have crypto holdings, and enable 2FA.
  • If you used an exchange to transfer crypto assets to a scammer, contact them ASAP to see if they can cancel the transaction. (You may have only a few minutes or even seconds to do this, though.) At the very least, they may be able to block the scammer’s address from receiving funds from other victims.
  • Report the scammer’s accounts on social media or other sites.