Red Flags and Alarm Bells: Hive Airdrop - Reason to be Concerned
This morning I noticed a very unusual kind of comment on a post I published two months ago. It seemed curious, intriguing, exciting ... and ultimately highly suspicious. It reads like this:
Aha, some kind of reward for holders, stakers (folks who have HIVE staked, that is powered-up into HP), curators, and delegators. Since I fall into all of these categories, I went ahead to check it out.
The claim page led me to this URL: https://claim.loyalty-hive.blog/ .
I can't say it looks weird in any sense of the term. There is a claim window that is supposed to close in a few days, but with almost six days does not raise a feeling of eminent urgency.
Double My Hive?
You can type in your account name and it will give you your current HIVE balance, your staked HP, and based on that and the 35% reward multiplier it comes up with reward amount that can be claimed. In my case that's slightly more than the amount of HIVE I currently hold. There is even a conversion into USD, just in case I forgot...
Clicking on the redeem rewards button opens up something that looks like hivesigner. I have not used hivesigner for several years, simply because I found it clunky, unreliable, and quite often non-functioning, especially just before I abandoned it.
What raised my suspicion most, however, was the field under my account name, where it even says: "Operation requires your Active or Owner key or Master password." Sure, I'll just hand over my whole account, while I'm at it...
Really?
Can this be real? Can I double the amount of my liquid HIVE, just like that? Where would that money come from? Who would organize such a thing anyway, and for what purpose?
To be honest, I have not been up-to-date on all the developments on the blockchain, so who knows, I may be missing out on a great opportunity. On the other hand, I may have just caught myself from giving away the results of close to a decade of blockckain activity, in an obvious scam!
I Want to Know!
So please, if you who are reading this, happen to know something - anything! - about this, please let me know!
If it is not a scam, my questions about the who, why, and how are becoming even more valid. On the other hand, if it IS a scam, we should let everyone know!
Just out of curiosity, I opened the account that published the comment where I saw this notice, @airdrop.notice and as you could probably guess, it was as empty as could be:
It looks very much like a scam to me, I've heard nothing about this.
Yep I received this comment too... SPAM... I didn't go that far as you, just downvoted the comment (I think my first downvote).
Have a great weekend
That's right! Why did I not think of this? Got this great tool at my disposal. But guess what... Now the comment is gone!
Active or master password? Lmao.
Yeah, some of them are way too obvious.
Total scam - I stupidly fell for this and they started emptying my account. I've got control back, but they have transferred out a few hundred HIVE. However, I've started collecting the names of the accounts the HIVE has been sent to. I accept the loss as it was my silly mistake, but do you know who I can report the accounts to in order to get them blocked ?
Thanks @hoosie