How to pick a safe crypto airdrop

It’s possible to do due diligence on a crypto giveaway

A safe crypto airdrop is actually something real. Over the past 12 months, at Airdrop Alert we’ve evaluated over 3500 crypto giveaways and rejected nearly 40% of them. The good news is that 60% was a good deal.

The fraudsters love swindling you out of your e-mail addresses, socials and especially private keys. E-mail addresses they might sell as a database, socials is a good way to contact a lot of people for marketing purposes and private keys…  never reveal your private keys to anyone as long as you have a stake in crypto investment.

A year ago we were thriving to find just any airdrop out there. We were scrolling Reddit all the time and even built our own web scraper to search on social media’s on the #airdrop. Today we have approximately 20 listing requests per day and our focus has dramatically shifted. It’s our responsibility now to make sure you take part in the safe crypto airdrop only. That’s why we’ve sharpened our due diligence process.

On our team, we have several experts, including a student of law, an engineer and a psychologist. In this piece, they will share with you a few secrets on how to detect trustworthy airdrops… as well as filter the ridiculous ones.

Psychologist: “Safe crypto airdrops need to know where to send the coins”

Several times, we have come across crypto airdrops that invited people to join their communities but never asked for their wallet’s public address. That’s a bad sign. To send you coins they actually need to know where to send it. But in the heat of the moment, we, humans, tend to ignore little things important.

On the other side, be very much prepared to say “no” to any airdrop that wants you to submit your wallet’s private key. And why is it? The person who has obtained your private key would be in control over your money. The string you actually do want to submit is called a public address and is something completely different. Crooks often use this misconception to try and trick you into sharing personal data.

Engineer: “Safe crypto airdrops don’t need you to download an unknown wallet”

The airdrop is not safe if, say, its Telegram bots ask you to download a new unknown wallet. As simple as that you can get new coins for free! Well, no rush, please. There is always a risk the unknown software is a malicious software to target your existing funds. So don’t download smaller projects’ wallets to your computer if the airdrop demands you to.

We know, we are talking to airdrop fans here. And you will probably download a lot of wallets whatsoever. In this case, preinstall a virtual machine to your computer which will isolate a virus if anything.

Student of Law: “Safe crypto airdrops don’t copypaste their whitepaper”

Analyzing a whitepaper might be a wise move if you’ve got time and, most importantly, tech skills. Here, at Airdrop Alert, we’ve seen dozens of whitepapers and now we manage to quickly recognize the same templates ICOs use time and again. So if you notice a copy-paste pattern, maybe the ICO’s crypto airdrop is not safe, too.

Don’t be afraid to check ICO’s team on LinkedIn and their socials, to make sure they can perform a safe crypto airdrop. You can even contact a team member to make sure if they work on the project. Sometimes companies indicate their registration data and you can also use that for your fact-check procedure. Certainly, Lichtenstein is a good place to start a crypto business.

Last but not least. What looks like an airdrop might simply be a phishing campaign. If an airdrop page redirects you right to your online wallet to “get those coins immediately”, try not to click on the links. So long as you do it, watch out for little details, such as URLs, names of the wallets and a slight change in the looks of a familiar brand. According to Kaspersky Lab’s somewhat rough estimates, criminals, over the past year, managed to earn more than $10mln at the current exchange rate using the “giveaway” and “fake ICO” schemes.

Airdrop Alert Team: “Every giveaway we list is a safe crypto airdrop”

A safe crypto airdrop is something you can take part in if you follow our socials. We don’t mean to brag but being gatekeepers of the crypto giveaways ecosystem we spend a good amount of time vetting the project. Over the past year, we grew our team of researchers, sharpened our due diligence process and improved our tools of verifying airdrops.

Now it takes us an average of 4 hours per a project to get it listed on our platform. We rather be safe than fast when it comes to your security.

If you have any doubts about an airdrop listed on our platform please contact the support team through our ticket system. We appreciate any feedback from our loyal community.

A few additional safety tips

  • Use 2 Factor Authentication on your wallets
  • Create an email address to apply for airdrops only
  • Don’t re-use your passwords when you register on a website
  • Never send small amounts of crypto to take part in an airdrop
  • Consider hardware wallets for higher security

Resto ICO

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Blockchain wallet   ← P R E V I O U S

N E X T → Ripple wallet 

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