The rapid growth of cryptocurrencies is creating a breeding ground for hacks, phishing and other malicious activities. While some people are earning from what they deserve, others just want to succeed by stealing.
There is a tool out there, called The Ethereum Scam Database (EtherscamDB). It collects crowdsourced information about online scams.
This is to create a for guide cryptocurrency enthusiasts, preventing them from falling to schemes that seek their precious coins and empty their digital wallets.
EtherscamDB was first launched in 2017 by the MyEtherWallet team when trying to find a solution to the ethereum scams.
Since then, it has registered thousands of potential fraudulent pages, linking them back to hundreds of different addresses that were used by scammers to store stolen funds.
Besides storing a growing database, EtherscamDB also displays the nature of the attack, including the original URL where the scam was first noticed, as well as some added information that describes the attack vector in details.
The website also has a field that shows which company/service the malicious link is targeting.
There is a search feature which should make things easier for users to filter down their queries, to exclusively see the services they use.
EtherscamDB has a growing database, collected by outsources. If the data were kept current and remained open for other systems to query, it can indeed become useful for cryptocurrency owners and enthusiasts.
The project and the full website is open-sourced at Github, including all datasets with documentation. Those that have interest may use them on their applications.
The website has an easy-to-use report function. Whoever wants to contribute, can help the project identify new scams so it can add them to the database.
"By combining all the information that's available, connections between scams can easily be found," the website says. "Of course grouping all the scams won't make them go away, but it will make identifying them and taking them down easier."
In order to protect themselves against scammers, EtherscamDB advises cryptocurrency owners to use cold storage, bookmark their crypto sites and only use those bookmarks and only those, only send funds to trusted addresses, double-check the addresses and see whether they have bad reviews, never trust any discord/slack/telegram/reddit message, and never fall for messages that say people can get free ETH or that a hack occured.