TRUST ME, I AM FROM TRUST WALLET

Last night whilst on Trust Wallet GitHub repo I submitted newly listed token information. This step is for newly created tokens to apply to be whitelisted on the trust wallet application. The process is simple and well documented, but I still made a mistake and submitted my addition to a different location.

This morning I noticed my mistake and rushed to the Trust Wallet telegram channel to ask: If I should re-upload my changes or could the devs do something about it.

Amazingly as soon as I entered the room I got approached by the founder himself via private message:

Other accounts greeted me as well. It looked like they were all from Trust Wallet Support team. At this time I was impressed by the brilliance on customer support they have. All of the accounts had trust wallet logos on them and were very quick on answering questions.

I started typing my question in the main group. I pressed ‘’send’’ and immediately I was also approached by the main developer Mykola who was willing to help me personally. That felt great and I explained my issue to him where he suggested creating a ticket. To be honest that is the answer I was expected to get from the busy developer.

So far all goes well and I was trying to follow Mykola’s steps because he is the one who can help me. So I asked him a few more questions and something felt not quite right with his answers.

I use in-browser telegram version even knowing it is very limited and only works for those who want to use spellcheckers, so at that stage, I looked on my phone to double check his profile.

Username, name and picture looked all legit but I had no groups with him in common, strange but we were in the same group just a minute ago. At that point, I headed back to the main group and founded Mykola sitting there and helping others in the team chat.

His profile looked very similar, but now we had 1 group in common where he had admin rights, and also real Username and not just Bio description. I asked myself:

How did I miss that?

Who else is impersonating real people here?

Who can I trust on telegram chats?

I have to admit It is actually really hard to identify if you are talking to a real person or impersonator…

I looked again at other team supporter profiles and none of them were a member of the Trust Wallet group.

At that point I knew they must all be scammers so I started a few conversations and asked a question or two, to get the feel on what tactics they all use.

Below I share just a few screenshots with the short conversations I had with fake members who tried to scam and get access to my private details, they are all good actors and I have to say, they do know how to play this game.

In this example, the conversation goes as normal until scammer/ impersonators dropped phishing website pretending that this is the website for backing up your wallet. The website looks genuine at first glance, especially Wallet-maintenance subdomain part. I am just not man enough to click on it.

Another example where scammer asks for the private key, keystore file or even “12 phase word” that is your 12-word recovery phrase for them to access your wallet and steal your funds.
Those are just a few examples from what happened to me this morning, but it is an ongoing problem where users lose funds everyday.

Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or Wechat act as a playground for scammers. Even your personal email, letter or text message can be fraudulent. We are living in a “Wild West Crypto World”, so better be prepared.

So what should we do? How can we prevent this from happening to people we know and ourselves?

You can start by reporting fake users to telegram management!!

You can also block all suspicious users and delete their conversation:

But most important. In order to stay safe, you have to follow some safety measures.

1. Never EVER share your wallet key or 12 word passphrase (12 -seed words, mnemonic seed) with anyone, not even your wife, keep it printed on paper and not on your desktop or notepad with the file named passwords.txt

2. Do not store your passwords, passphrases, private keys copied to clipboard on your mobile or computer. Same can be said about print screens and images stored in your gallery with your passwords or keys on them.

3. When seeking for help in telegram chat always ask for help in the main channel and follow guidelines from moderators, admins or pinned messages. Remember Admins will never contact you first, they have a lot of work to do

4. Use the official help from the “Help Center’’ in the application menu on your wallet, most answers have been already answered and it is a good read in general.

5. If you sent your password by accident to someone, and you know it was a stupid move, it is best to create a new wallet ASAP and transfer all of your funds to it before it is too late.

6. And finally, remember if someone looks suspicious or acts in a strange way and you think it is not right — you probably are targeted so better start using your brain, or contact your best friend to help you.

P.S

My token listing problem has been sorted by admins. I also received all the answers in the main channel, thank you Trust Wallet team for a fast response and professional support. Exactly what I would expect from a team working in such an important area of blockchain.

Trust wallet is a cryptocurrency wallet that supports all major tokens including ERC20 and TRC10 tokens.

Later this year the team is planning to add TRON TRC20 token support.

by

Justinas Kairys

Icedium Group