A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To An ICO…
We’re advising a funded crypto startup on security (we can’t say who, because they’re building up to an ICO), but they had an interesting incident that in my head shows the importance of good PR and Social Media management.
In the buildup to their ICO , they created a Discord invite link to give interested parties access to an official channel to discuss their model and tokens and upcoming offering. Lots of folks were joining their channel for a week…
Then, unbeknownst to them, the link expired.
And was immediately cloned by a scammer.
As you can imagine, the scammer, impersonating an official company spokesperson, directed people to a “special offer” link. You know how this story goes. Fortunately, in terms of 1,000s of dollars stolen, the number was fairly small, and they were on it fast enough to damage control the situation.
But this is the sort of risk that might not immediately occur to you when you’re doing social media engagement, or even if you’re a security minded person contemplating your attack surface.
Just remember, if you have real value and engagement and there’s some kind of chink in your armor, there are LOTS of clever, unscrupulous people out there just waiting to take advantage of it.
Fortunately, this scammer was fairly incompetent (and left lots of clues and breadcrumbs) and also, brazenly, contacted the CEO of the startup and asked for a job!
